The Earl of Kinnoull (CB)

My Lords, I am deeply grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, for introducing the amendments of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton, so well. I spoke to the noble and learned Lord about these amendments before his illness, and I was going to pass on only two or three comments that I recall he made to me. The £40,000 is a life-changing amount of money—I think that was the way he put it. The reason I have my iPad here is that he referred to the civil penalties under the Housing and Planning Act 2016, on which the MHCLG has issued a very helpful note. It is so complex that local authorities needed a 20-page note to tell them how to implement this. The maximum under that Act is £30,000, and I do not see why we have suddenly gone to a £40,000 world. The £30,000 was reserved for a relatively small number of offences, and each involved knowingly doing something truly evil and wrong. I feel that that, as a principle, is conceded, as it were, even though £30,000 is a bit rich. Therefore, I agree on the £40,000; I do not understand why we have had to go up from £30,000. With the next group, we will come to the issue of knowing and recklessness, which is deeply serious as well. I will pause briefly on some of the amendments. Amendment 153 refers to a schedule. This is one of the ones where it is up to £40,000 currently. It refers to a very complex schedule—yet there is a recklessness trigger for a fine of up to £40,000. It seemed to me that that was not as serious as some of the things that are a £30,000 offence under the Housing and Planning Act 2016. So I was dubious about whether that was truly worthy of a £30,000 lump. I therefore agree very much with the £7,000, which is where the noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton, had come to. On Amendment 241, there are a couple of things here that trigger the £40,000. Again, recklessness is for mistakes made in giving data to the new database. When people give data to databases, it is inevitably quite boring, and things can go wrong. Recklessness is an incredibly difficult thing to cope with, as we will discuss next, no doubt. So I felt, again, that this was very different from the £30,000 triggers under the Housing and Planning Act 2016. I felt that there was a strong case for moving the maximum down to £7,000. I am going to stop there in the analysis, because it was better done by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, but that line of thinking—bringing it down to £7,000 from £40,000—was intended to improve standards of justice because, if people have been truly evil and truly wrong, the courts are there for that. They are made for that, and they can be a lot heavier with people. But, for local authorities, roughly £7,000 per offence—it could be multiple offences, of course—or 50% of an average year’s rental income, would be proportionate.