Clause 14
Consumers, Estate Agents and Redress Bill
9:00 am
Jim Fitzpatrick (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department of Trade and Industry; Poplar and Canning Town, Labour)
In our Tuesday sitting, there were quite a few references to double acts—I myself was subject to some of the knockabout. The hon. Members for Richmond Park and for Solihull were not referred to then as Thelma and Louise, but I can assure them that if they ever were, it would be in a complimentary sense. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Rochford and Southend, East (Mr. Duddridge) clearly does not have a problem with which Minister will respond to him today.
The arrangements about whose uncertainty the hon. Member for Hertford and Stortford asked will to a certain extent have to be worked out in the implementation and work programme stage in the months ahead to identify the lines of responsibility. The new council will clearly have a keen interest in ensuring that it knows when it will have responsibility and when it can and cannot pass matters on. There will need to be co-operative arrangements and understandings between the regulators and the NCC on how to handle complaints, who should do so and how to resolve issues that could be handled by either or both. They will have to identify in due course how the arrangements are working and I am sure that that will be of direct interest to the consumer, who needs to be confident that it is seamless. The consumer will need to understand that a complaint that they register will be dealt with. Whether it is handled by one or by the other will be a matter for the organisations, but they will need to communicate that to the consumer so that the consumer knows that their complaint is being handled and who they can contact.
On the point made by the hon. Member for Richmond Park, flows of information will be established between the regulators, the redress schemes and Consumer Direct under the redress provisions. I know that she has informally raised matters about complaints handling procedures, and we shall deal with those in detail later—probably under clauses 47 to 52. We are happy also to talk to her informally to give her as full an answer as possible before the matters are raised in more detail in due course.