Leasehold valuation tribunals, or LVTs, were originally introduced to provide a quick, affordable and effective means of resolving disputes between landlords and leaseholders. Introduced first to hear valuation disputes in cases of leasehold enfranchisement, their remit was extended in 1986 to hear cases involving service charges and management. A knowledgable panel to hear the case, and no power to award costs but a fixed fee of up to £500, gave leaseholders the hope that justice would come swiftly and cheaply, without the need to go through the courts, with all the attendant costs and delays.

Sadly, that hope has since turned very sour. Joan South—one dedicated and determined campaigner—recently said: The Leasehold Enfranchisement Association toiled for years in an attempt to make the LVTs a success. I personally attended virtually every single tribunal hearing for the first three years after the 1993 Act had become law and helped dozens of tenants prepare their cases. She goes on: We … no longer believe that what is happening is capable of delivering justice. Those who know Joan South, as I know my hon. Friend the Minister does, know very well that she is not a woman who gives up lightly. Why, then, has she given up on the LVT system?

It is said that justice delayed is justice denied. In just such a way, justice is being denied to literally hundreds of leaseholders. In London alone, for the 12 months from 1 September 1997 to 31 August 1998, there were 331 applications for service charge LVTs. As at 23 September 1998, the total number of cases heard was only 29. The number of decisions handed down was 11. Yesterday, I was told by an applicant that he had been advised that his case would not be heard until 2000, as there was an 18-month backlog. The LVT is not quick, but is it affordable? Mr. Rimba does not think so.

In a service charge case in which the LVT found that the landlords had overcharged approximately £3,000, Mr. Rimba ended up paying £5,000 towards the landlords' costs. Even though the landlords had previously been found guilty in the courts for not supplying section 20 details to support the service charge accounts, and, indeed, were fined for that failure, and even though that failure had rendered it impossible for Mr. Rimba to ascertain the exact instances of overcharging in the service charge accounts, the LVT, chaired by Mrs. Goulden JP, determined that, because it had found in favour of the Applicant in respect of certain matters of contention between the parties, the Applicant was entitled to expect the service charge account to be limited to reflect this". The LVTs were introduced with no powers to award costs; they can set only a fixed fee of up to £500.

The decision that I have just cited caused disbelief and bewilderment among professionals and leaseholders alike.

Peter Haler, the chief executive of LEASE, a leasehold advisory service, said: What we don't understand at all is why the Tribunal allowed the £5,000 at all. Normally a 20C order will delete recharges completely. Allowing the costs to be added to the service charge not only sets a dangerous precedent, but means that many leaseholders who might have sought redress from an LVT will have been discouraged from doing so because it is too expensive. It is not worth while for a leaseholder to fight a landlord who rips him off to the tune of £1,000 if it is going to cost him £2,000 to get justice.

Earlier this month, at a tribunal at which a tenant represented himself and 177 of his fellow leaseholders, he found ranged against him an eminent Queen's counsel, an assistant barrister and a solicitor. Such representation at an LVT, which is supposed to be a quick, efficient and cheap way of getting justice, is an abuse of its raison d'etre. It is often the wealthy landowner who can afford to employ the legal battalions; the leaseholder more often cannot.

The LVT is not affordable, but is it effective? During a previous late-night encounter on this topic in the House last December, for which my hon. Friend the Minister and I can claim anorak status, my hon. Friend informed me: a leasehold valuation tribunal is not an arbitral tribunal. That means that its decisions must be confirmed by a court before they can be enforced."—[Official Report, 19 December 1997; Vol. 303, c.636.] Indeed, Lady Wilson, one of the chairs of the panels, has complained of the pre-trial reviews in the Maples Bury road case in August this year: We do not have the teeth to enforce adherence to the prescribed timetable.

The pre-trial review should be one of the most important and helpful parts of the whole process. It is supposed to enable one of the panel to establish the outlines of the dispute and to bring about disclosure of the relevant documentation by a particular date before the hearing. In fact, it is now rare for both parties even to attend. Frequently, critical papers are not provided, yet the tribunal has no sanction that it can apply.

The frustration that can result can be illustrated well by reporting what happened in the Rubypoint case. A notice was sent to the managers at Rubypoint that an application to appoint a new manager had been lodged with an LVT. That notice was ignored. A further notice informing Rubypoint of the pre-trial review date was also ignored. Mr. Hyam, Rubypoint's director, failed to attend. The notice for the tribunal was similarly ignored. The hearing was delayed, waiting for Mr. Hyam, who eventually turned up half an hour late, with none of the relevant papers.

The LVT was held in contempt, and it could not do a thing about it. The decision was one of the most astounding that have yet been heard in all LVTs. It was one in which a Miss Stella Evans was heard in the South South-Eastern LVT. She had applied to the LVT for a change of manager because her current manager, Mr. Hyam of Rubypoint, had been gaoled for four years for forgery and fraud for matters relating to the management, or should I say mismanagement, of Miss Evans's block. Miss Evans went to the LVT to ask for residents to be appointed as managers of their own block instead of Mr. Hyam's company, Rubypoint.

There was amazement at the decision. The chairman, a lawyer, Mr. Robert Long, ruled that the residents could manage, but would have to enter into a contract with Rubypoint to do so. In arriving at that verdict, the chairman clearly demonstrated that he had no idea of the difference between a manager and a managing agent. He had demanded that the tenants had to contract with Rubypoint, which had defrauded them as its agent, if they were to be allowed to manage their own block. Of course, he could not compel Rubypoint to contract with the manager, because it would be only the agent. In such a case, the judgment was entirely unenforceable.

Commenting on the decision, the Leasehold Advisory Service said: when a tribunal appoints a new manager, the landlord's management powers are removed and a contract with him therefore is inappropriate. Other leading commentators were less diplomatic. The barrister, Mr. Michael Daiches, wrote in a letter to Peter Hayler, the chief executive of the Leasehold Advisory Service: the LVT appears to have gone completely haywire.

The LVT system, as it stands, came in with the hopes of literally thousands of oppressed leaseholders bearing down upon it. It came in with the expectation that it would be quick, affordable and effective. It is none of those things. It is not quick, it is not affordable and it is not effective as it stands. I urge the Government to do all they can to ensure that this deficiency is remedied as swiftly as possible, so that justice can be brought back to the people for whom it was originally intended.