Lord Cromwell (CB)

My Lords, I am entirely supportive of pretty well every amendment that has been put down on this—this blizzard of amendments about a database across four groups. I agree that there should be penalties for not participating in it. It has to be something that is not a nice-to-have add-on: it has to be core to everything. However, I will just give two notes of caution, the first of which goes back to the point made by the noble Earl, Lord Lytton. If you are going to start recording disputes on the system, there could be many, many reasons why a dispute runs for a long time. It would not necessarily be the fault of evil landlords. It could be illness on the part of the tenant; it could be a multitude of things. You have to be very careful there. The second point is to be careful what you wish for. No one has suggested this so far, but is this database going to be searchable by tenant? Because a landlord looking at a tenant might search the database and find that every previous tenancy has ended in a dispute. Is that going to be a fair use of this database? Because it is a logical suggestion, looking at this from a landlord’s point of view, to look out for rogue tenants as well as rogue landlords.