Clause 1 - Meaning of ``residential property'' and other expressions
Homes Bill
4:30 pm
Mr Don Foster (Bath, Liberal Democrat)
I welcome you to the Chair, Mr. Stevenson. You may already be in some confusion about what is going on in Committee, with talk of secret deals. Conservative Members alleged earlier that the Liberal Democrats had done a secret deal with Labour Members on the timetable motion. It is now being alleged that there is a secret deal on the removal of jackets. No such deal was made, Mr. Stevenson, so I apologise for failing to seek your permission to remove my jacket, notwithstanding the fact that you had already given it to Conservative Members.
In responding to some of my amendments in our earlier deliberations, the Minister said that he would use argument A in his defence as to why he would not persuade his hon. Friends to support them. He was good enough to explain that argument A is the now infamous list argument: it is bad to have a list of items in the Bill, because some people would argue that anything not in that list would not be considered a significant issue. When the Minister raised that argument, I am afraid that I rose to my feet rather rapidly and said that I intended to use argument B to refute it. Perhaps I will have the opportunity to unveil argument B later. However, I want to apologise to the Committee, because I was a little hasty in my earlier reflections and now wish, perhaps strangely, to use argument A to persuade the Minister that he has misused argument A rather badly. I hope that, on reflection, he will see that argument A is, in fact, a good reason why he should accept our amendment.
The Committee will be aware that the Minister said—I repeat what I said a minute ago—that argument A was simple and that, if a list was provided, an item not on that list would be deemed insignificant and not something that the Government had thought it important to include. I draw the attention of the Minister and all Committee Members to clause 7(5), which we seek to amend. Rather surprisingly, it already contains a list of a number of items that the seller's pack must contain, including details of the interest for sale, title, the items kept on a register or records kept by certain classes of people, warranties, guarantees and details of taxes or service charges. There is already a list of seven items. According to the Minister's own argument A, if we do not include energy efficiency among the items on the list, it will be deemed insignificant. I hope that he will accept that a large number of people may deem some of the items on the list to be less significant than energy efficiency.