Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe (Lab)

My Lords, I will speak briefly in support of the noble Lord, Lord Best. I declare an interest, which I recently gave up, as the chair of the Property Ombudsman board. Perhaps I can provide some of the evidence that the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, wanted because, in 30 years of dealing with complaints about property agents, the Property Ombudsman has seen many disputes that probably would not have occurred had those agents undertaken formal training and qualifications. In 2023—the latest statistics we have—the ombudsman resolved over 2,200 letting disputes. Of these, over half concerned the management of tenancies where the main issues were the agents’ performance in organising and communicating repair and maintenance issues. For the majority, dissatisfaction in these disputes concerned simple and consistent communication around timescales and, in general, managing expectations. Training for agents on how to manage tenant and landlord expectations would have stopped many disputes arising in the first instance. In addition, there were more than 500 disputes that related to complaint handling. Again, agents currently do not take a consistent approach to complaint handling, which often leaves both tenants and landlords frustrated. It became very clear to me in my time at the Property Ombudsman that to provide a professional and consistent level of service to tenants and landlords, many letting agents would benefit from formal training. It would not only help agents to provide a better service but set consistent expectations for consumers, meaning that relationships between agents, tenants and landlords would improve. In my brief intervention, I reinforce the RoPA report recommendations of the noble Lord, Lord Best, indeed reinforced by the work of my noble friend Lady Hayter, that the elements required to implement a training and qualifications regime are already in place. I hope it would not be too significant a leap for the Government to make training and qualifications a mandatory requirement for all letting agents.