Clause 9 - Enforcement
Homes Bill
6:15 pm
Mr Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham, Conservative)
To use the phrase used by the Minister for Housing and Planning, if the Under-Secretary gets out into the real world and talks to trading standards officers, he will find that they are frustrated, although not because they have mitigated criminal proceedings to the lesser course of action that they are allowed to take. They are frustrated about the impossibility of making convictions stick so that cases never get near a court in the first place. I was making the point that that is the real weakness with the Act.