As usual, I have forgotten where I was in my perorations, so the Committee might get a few words that it has heard already, which can be ignored. I think I was talking about the requirement in the 1882 legislation that all bills of sale have to be completed on a particularly complex standard form, and then registered with the High Court, which, of course, uses a paper-based record system. The sanctions for failing to comply with any of its documental requirements would be out of scope if current consumer protections applied, and lenders are understandably loath to amend them.
It costs about £45 to register a bill of sale with the High Court, and another £50 to search it. That does not happen very often, because you cannot search by vehicle registration number or any other useful form; it is just a simple list of all the registered cases.
I think most people would agree that the Law Commission makes the case very well for the repeal of the Victorian bills of sale legislation. What is so
disappointing about all this is that, originally, the Treasury seemed to share that view. In a Ministerial Statement in February 2017, the Government accepted
“the overarching thrust of the recommendations”,—[Official Report, Commons, 7/2/17; col. 6WS.]
albeit warning that they would not proceed until they had further reflected on some of them. The reflection took the form of a limited consultation with stakeholders, which received 25 responses, after which the Treasury decided not to take forward the draft Law Commission Bill. The principal reason given was that several of the 25 respondents felt that some of the consumer protection proposals in the draft Bill prepared by the Law Commission did not go far enough. It is almost difficult to believe that.
That remains the position. I have tried to keep the pressure on: I took over the Law Commission Bill as a Private Member’s Bill. I got 10th place in the ballot one year, but then lost the Bill because of a snap election called by, I think, Mrs May—I forget now who was Prime Minister. However, I have had meetings; in 2019 I was kindly joined by the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, and the then Economic Secretary to the Treasury, John Glen, but to no avail. In his last letter to me, he accepted that there was consumer detriment taking place but, as numbers of logbook loans were falling, he said he believed
“that the rationale of the Government’s decision not to proceed with legislative reform in this area still stands”.
John Glen is now promoted and in the Cabinet, and I am where I am. However, I respectfully disagreed with him then and still do today. Only a few months ago, I was written to out of the blue—they must have got my name from the news about the Bill when it was first introduced—by people who had been scammed, aided by logbook loan legislation. An elderly couple had put all their hard-earned savings into a motor home, which they wanted to use for their retirement. Just when they had completed the purchase and the renovations, spending almost as much again as they had on buying the vehicle, they discovered that it had mysteriously acquired an outstanding logbook loan, and they lost the vehicle and their capital. This is the sort of thing that happens.
I look forward to the Minister’s response today, and I remain willing to attend further meetings if she thinks that might help move this issue forward. I know from discussions with StepChange that consumer detriment is still happening in this area. I agree with the FCA, which I spoke to earlier in the week, that the credit squeeze, inflation and the energy cost crisis is going to make the return of logbook loans—and, indeed, many other forms of high-cost credit—as inevitable as it is undesirable. If accepted, my amendment would give the FCA the tools it needs to assist the many people affected by this egregious legislation—albeit I still believe that the right solution is for the Government to commit now to repeal the Victorian legislation as soon as reasonably practicable.