Clause 8 - Home condition reports
Homes Bill
4:45 pm
Mr Nigel Waterson (Eastbourne, Conservative)
I am even happier that the birth is nothing to do with me either, but we wish all participants well, of course.
The rest of my speech to amendment No. 11 will be brief, for reasons that I shall explain, and then my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Mr. Loughton) will deploy some of the heavy artillery that I originally intended to bring to bear. I apologise in advance to you, Mr. Gale, and to the Minister and the rest of the Committee, as I shall have to go to the Chamber, where there will shortly be some other business on which I am required.
I had more or less finished speaking to amendment No. 11, and had referred to points made by organisations such as the Council of Mortgage Lenders. I hope that the Minister is in a better frame of mind this afternoon because, to judge from some of the phone calls that my office has had since this morning, he managed to upset just about everybody involved in the property and conveyancing business. I suspect that his punishment, fittingly, will be many extra briefings for us to take him through in the rest of our debates.
Our point was simple. Those who draw up the home condition reports, whatever one's views about their qualifications, should have full indemnity cover if they get it wrong. Such provision should be in the Bill, but we are open to persuasion on whether a specific amount should be mentioned, although it should certainly be covered in regulations.
Amendments Nos. 12 and 13 focus on what lawyers call the privity point. The Minister referred to the Contract (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999, which may indeed have the answer to my points. We want to ensure absolutely that sellers, buyers and lenders will all have rights to bring proceedings when they have relied on a home condition report that turns out to be in some way defective, and when some actionable negligence has caused that. People should be able to rely on the report, knowing that they will have redress if there is a problem.
According to the Law Society, as the law stands it is not clear who, other than the seller, could be certain of being able to secure compensation if the report were defective. A lender and a buyer could be reluctant to rely on a report if they had no redress in the event of it being defective. The Law Society says that it is essential to make it clear to whom the producer of a report on a property could be liable.
The issue is fairly straightforward. The Minister may feel that he has a complete answer to it, and I look forward not to hearing it, but to reading it.