Greed is bad

The work-life balance can be difficult at the best of times but the last few days have been tricky.
Managing a full caseload and an organisation is always a challenge but try being the only bloke at ante-natal classes (I can now master the pelvic-floor exercise though). Then there’s a very long list of drafting projects and campaigns to deliver on time. So the blog has fallen behind and I might as well talk about what I’ve been up to.

Have you ever tried to park at a hospital recently? It was impossible to park anywhere close to Glasgow’s Yorkhill today and with a heavily pregnant lady, let just say we got a ticket. This experience has given me extra impetus in drafting Paul Martin’s NHS Parking (Scotland) Bill.

The Scottish Government have made good progress but they haven’t actually abolished hospital parking charges and it’s clear there needs to be a statutory duty on health boards to make adequate provision for managed car parking. You cannot access the health service unless you can get to a NHS facility. So I see parking as essential to accessing health services: it’s an important part of the NHS.

Section 11 of the Homelessness Act comes into force next month and I’ve been drafting the advice packs to be sent to homeowners and tenants by councils when folk are being taken to court for eviction or repossession. Section 11 should help to prevent needless homelessness and writing something in accessible (sorry that should be ‘easy’) language is a lot harder than I’d thought.

Of course there is a lot more we need to be doing to prevent homelessness and you may have noticed I’ve been banging on about this. While the former Housing Minister wouldn’t give me the steam off his stovies I was delighted to get a call from the new Housing Minister, Alex Neil MSP asking to meet to see what more could be done to help people facing repossession in Scotland.

It’s a breath of fresh air to have a Minister prepared to listen and I am grateful to Alex Neil for that opportunity. We had a constructive meeting this week and I’ll be meeting with him again in a few weeks along with the Community Safety Minister, Fergus Ewing MSP. We’ll see what happens but there’s no doubt we all need to work together to make sure vulnerable households in Scotland get through the recession in one piece.

And that means the pendulum needs to swing a little closer to the citizen and a little further from lenders and their legal teams. I have a few ideas on how we can do that.
I drafted a ten-minute rule bill for Mohammad Sarwar MP which will be debated in the Commons next month. It proposes a statutory maximum on all default or administrative fees imposed in consumer contracts. That would cover insidious bank charges and mortgage arrears fees. Basically, money for old rope.

The banks recently lost their appeal in the OFT bank charges test case and to their great shame are trying to appeal to the House of Lords, even although the Court of Appeal told them not to bother. Big business can be dirty business. Next week the top bananas of the Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds will give evidence before the Scottish Affairs Committee.
I wonder if the chairman, Mohammad Sarwar and his parliamentary colleagues will manage to squeeze an apology from RBS?

I reckon it’s time to change company law. UK company law can be summarised by a line from the movie, Wall Street. Greed is good. To be fair, the law perpetuates this. Companies owe a legal duty soley to their shareholders. It’s time to temper that duty.

It’s time to reform company law so that banks owe a legal duty to their shareholders subject to doing nothing which harms the public interest. If we did this we could give our multinationals not only a conscience but a heart too.