6840. MR MOULD: No, I do not think he becomes excluded. The position is that if he could put together a bid which had as part of the consortium that degree of expertise, then that may well work to his advantage. It would need to be considered on the basis of all the circumstances that pertained in relation to that proposal, but I do not think that would block him per se from further participation in the possible redevelopment of the sites.

  6841. LORD JAMES OF BLACKHEATH: Presumably of course the property company in question would considerably strengthen its position if Mr Pritchett was able to persuade a number of the other occupants of the other 20 flats to come in on their consortium party?

  6842. MR MOULD: Yes, there is a risk of oversimplifying what will be, no doubt, a largely commercial initiative but, all things being equal, the ideal for Mr Pritchett in those circumstances would be all 20, if it is 20, of those who have an existing proprietary interest in the block in question should participate as one mind in the bid that you have in mind.

  6843. LORD JAMES OF BLACKHEATH: We had the analogy of the wedding earlier, it sounds to me as though, Mr Pritchett, you have a massive dowry to take with you when looking for a bride in this case.

  6844. MR MOULD: I think Mr Smith's point was that the Secretary of State does not see any advantage in trying to procure a marriage. I think his view is that marriages are best when they occur spontaneously between the marital parties rather than being arranged, as it were. I have to be to be careful what I say! I will not pursue that line!

  6845. CHAIRMAN: Mr Pritchett, I hope some of that has clarified matters for you, but the last word is yours.

  6846. MR PRITCHETT: I think that has clarified a number of matters. I think my point that my Lord brought out, that if in a hypothetical case, say, 18 of the former owners were coming together in a sensible consortium, one genuine concern that I might have now is that another totally commercial organisation that would like to get in to this site, which has no genuine local support, could perfectly legally go and offer a sum of £100,000 or £200,000 to some resident who had no genuine interest in the thing and say simply, "We will pay you this money in order to join our company", because then that scuppers this very sensible local consortium bid. It is thrown out of the policy and then it goes into the open market thing and we get to outbid them, so there is a way the policy as a current thing could be effectively worked by somebody who is not involved with anybody locally really for a very small and, as far as I can see it, legal inducement to scupper the entire local process. I think that is a real concern and one of the things I have been trying to address.

  6847. I do need to pick up on the emotive phrase "month on month, year on year" because I had the words "period of four weeks" in my proposal and, furthermore, if you had a situation where there were two credible, sensible, satisfactory bids, picking one of them by lot would be an immediate process and if the Secretary of State really wants to hurry things along that would be a fair way of doing it. I am not sure that is what has been gone for but I do not think that anything in my suggestion has suggested this should be allowed to drag on for years. I think by and large it is a sensible thing that what I am looking for is really possibly some small modification of undertakings that should a sensible, local proposal properly backed emerge it cannot be scuppered by manipulating that one rule of the throwout if there is more than one.

  6848. I suppose by appearing here I am effectively putting the other 20 on notice that I plan to do this and they better come around for a cup of coffee if they would like to talk. Incidentally, it is very harmonious and everyone round there gets on extremely well and knows each other, which is why it is sad if they are all excluded.

  6849. I appear to have taken the final point third. Moving therefore backwards to the blight business, I do not know what the way forward is if any sympathy was had for my potential difficulty here. The potential difficulty being if I were to kick off such a process, it could in fact perfectly properly take well over a year to get to a valuation date which does not give me the same protection as being able to try the market at a point of my choosing now. I have noticed in some of the other undertakings there are some loose words like, "we will in a timely manner offer to move things on", in a hardship case and things like that and it is possible this is an area in which if your Lordships felt there was a genuine concern here things could be moved on without taking what you might see as drastic and inappropriate changes. It seems that maybe some people in the area are not aware of what is going to happen but I think no-one knows where the market is going to go. The point is if you are losing the choice you might want to get a valuation date this year rather than next year and that option is not available, so the concern I am petitioning about is, in fact, some sort of compensation for that.

  6850. Going back to my first point last, I feel that the other side here have conceded that I am at risk of suffering a genuine injustice. We had a witness who conceded that the valuation margin of ten per cent is realistic. That means that there is a possibility that at the end of the process the open market value of my property could—none of us will ever know this because it is not an exact science—only be 90 per cent of what it is worth. I might only find this when I go to buy another one but that is specifically excluded. At that point I have 90 per cent of what it is worth but as a result of the cap on the home loss payment—if the home loss payment was pretty much uncapped as it originally was then that ten per cent could take me to 100 per cent so your Lordships could be confident that in virtually no case would any householder be left out of pocket. In this case where the home loss payment would be about three per cent, there is a very real risk I could end up with 93 per cent of the value of my property and I would have suffered a serious injustice. Not only I am thrown out, not only is the home that I have put a lot of work into, et cetera, lost to me but I am out on the street having lost seven per cent of the value of my property. That is a very, very real injustice.

  6851. With the greatest of respect to statutory instruments I am up against experts here and lawyers and there is a way of, I think, possibly rebutting any proposal, but it is clear to me that when the law was first enacted the maximum compensation was considerably more than a typical property, i.e. you could have a property many times the size of that as typical and it simply has not moved anything like in line. I am not sure that because we have not had any proposals like this in the very centre of London it is possible nobody has ever been clipped like this before, so I am not sure that if the statutory instrument was debated in detail that anyone gave serious thought to this. It is also very difficult for an individual member of the public to influence something like the contents of a statutory instrument, that is being realistic, whereas it is open for them to come and petition something like this. If in the case where a serious injustice cannot be rectified by this Committee, I am at a slight loss to wonder what one is supposed to do.

  6852. I am not going to be able to win on legal argument at all in any way on any of these points. However, I think I have a difficulty here in that anything that a Petitioner asks for had been rebutted in one of three ways. One we can say, "If we give it just to you, that's unfair to everybody else"; "If we give it to everybody on the Crossrail scheme, it is going to create mayhem along the entire route and cause delays and cost overruns and can't do it for that reason"; "Even if we accept the rule is wrong, et cetera, then actually we don't want to change general rules at all". It seems to me even if there was someone coming along and saying, "I am going to be put to death by these provisions", they could still rebut that on one of those three grounds, so I am not sure how in summing up I am supposed to suggest a way round the very comprehensive set of rebuttals of almost any Petition. In summary, as a non-willing seller, I feel one should be comfortable one is getting an absolute minimum of the open market value of your property. We have admitted there is a valuation margin of ten per cent so I might get substantially less or, if not me, somebody else in a similar position will so I think this is an appropriate thing. The fact that the notes to the statutory instrument implied this payment had moved in line with the Department of Communities index of prices, and it clearly has not, as in the compensation used to be bigger than the size of a property and it is now a mere fraction of it suggests that in fact, dare I say it, those guide notes were not fully informative to the people who might have looked at them and this is a very real point, indeed, for me.

  6853. That, in essence, is my case unless anybody wants to ask me further questions or be helpful in ways I might be more helpful in achieving what I want to achieve.

  6854. CHAIRMAN: None of us has, thank you very much, Mr Pritchett. We are very much obliged to you.

  6855. MR PRITCHETT: Thank you, your Lordships.

  6856. CHAIRMAN: I am going to ask if we can have the room to ourselves for a little while while we think about this.

  6857. MS LIEVEN: My Lords, do you want a quick update for tomorrow before we clear the room?

  6858. CHAIRMAN: Yes, please.

  6859. MS LIEVEN: My Lords, there is only one Petitioner who is still outstanding and that is FirstGroup. We may reach agreement with them in the course of the afternoon, so I think what is arranged is that Mr Walker will communicate with your Clerk in the course of the afternoon if they are not coming. They are one of the rail companies which operates out of Paddington and their issues are about mitigating the effects of the works on them during the construction phase at Paddington Station. We have been in detailed negotiations with them and we stay in detailed negotiations. It may well be that in the course of the afternoon they go, in which case we have no business for tomorrow.