Last week the shadow housing minister Matthew Pennycook tabled an opportunistic amendment to the government’s Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill. This would require the government to closely regulate all estate agents selling leasehold properties or properties carrying management or service charges (in essence flats, or houses on managed estates).
There is a lot that is wrong with this idea. It derives from a 2019 report by a committee chaired by the crossbench peer and social housing campaigner Lord Richard Best. Featuring among its demands were a proposed licensing regime of enormous complexity more appropriate to lawyers or doctors and a dedicated governmental regulator. The committee also recommended multi-tier rules and codes, the considerable expense of which would be borne by, and hence added indirectly to the fees of, estate agents everywhere – with doubtful benefits to their customers.
How the quality of estate agents can possibly be improved by a government diktat is anyone’s guess
But one element particularly stands out in this bureaucrat’s blueprint. Following Lord Best, Pennycook wants to prohibit anyone from working as an estate agent without at least one A-level, or managing an agency unless qualified to degree level. Even existing practitioners would not escape: unless qualified, back to night school or university they need to go, or leave the profession. This needs to set us thinking seriously.
We can start with the obvious. This idea is so eye-poppingly silly, and the arguments against it so obvious, that it is hard to understand anyone putting it forward with a straight face.
Left school without A-levels, interested in property and want to learn on the job? Sorry, not allowed: you’re unqualified. But if you scraped an E in Art or Physical Education on the retake? That makes all the difference: welcome aboard the real estate gravy train. Two people apply for promotion to management: one has market savvy and long experience but no degree; the other is younger and less talented but some years ago unwillingly sat, supremely bored, through a degree in Fashion Studies because their school told them they should. You have to take the latter. How the quality of estate agents can possibly be improved by a government diktat limiting its practice to those holding a technical but often entirely irrelevant diploma is anyone’s guess.
Indeed, the proposed rule is not only senseless but positively harmful. We already have way too many people at university – not because of a burning desire to study but because they have been told to go there, or because they see a degree as necessary to getting a job. Do we really want to worsen this trend by telling those interested in the real estate market that they are forbidden from rising to the top unless they get a degree they do not want to read for and that is irrelevant anyway?
The UK has long suffered from grotesquely overvaluing academic qualifications and underappreciating on-the-job learning. As any employer will confirm, the result is a grievous lack of practical skill coupled with a surfeit of graduates combining high expectations with doubtful employability.
Recently, to our credit, we have at least tried to redress the balance in favour of those with natural talent but no serious liking for academic work. Estate agency should be a classic beneficiary, being a business that, unlike for example law or accountancy, largely depends on people skills rather than a dry technical competence. But not, apparently, for Pennycook and the Labour party. They seem determined, for no appreciable reason apart from a blind faith in promoting paper diplomas for their own sake, to take away a golden opportunity for non-academic school leavers.
How have we got here? The reasons Lord Best gave for imposing paper qualifications on property professionals – that they demonstrated skills and commitment and reassured consumers – are laughable. The idea that one bad A-level (or, in the case of a manager, a pass degree) in a subject entirely unrelated to bricks and mortar guarantees some necessary realtor’s skill, or confirms motivation, is preposterous. The notion that it reassures consumers is even more so, not to mention seriously insulting the intelligence of the average consumer.
What one really suspects lies behind this proposed amendment is two other factors. One is a politician’s desire to massage professional vanity. Professional bigwigs naturally tend to respond positively to proposals whose effect is to inflate their own self-importance and keep out the riff-raff. Not surprisingly, enthusiastic support for Pennycook came from trade body Propertymark, which gushed: ‘We want a properly regulated industry where our professional knowledge and skills are trusted and respected.’ Quite.
The second is, quite simply, intellectual snobbery. Labour, remember, is increasingly the party, not of the traditional worker, but of the credentialled classes. Those with diplomas, including almost all the opposition front bench, tend naturally to look down on those without them. It is their natural instinct to assume that any profession would be improved by limiting entry just to those like themselves.
This is an opportunity for the Tories. They must resist Pennycook’s blandishments and loudly reiterate what the rest of us regard as obvious: estate agents should be competent at reckoning what a property is worth and getting the best price for it. If someone is good at this, even if they left school at 16, good luck to them. If the Labour party won’t champion the rights of the ambitious but unacademic, another party must step up and do just that.
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