IPC chairman queries BII role

http://www.morningadvertiser.co.uk/forum.ma/thread-for-post/99345

It's a tragedy that this industry is not run by people with as much integrity and experience as Bill Sharp. Because Bill, quite simply as usual, is spot on.

Why on earth would anyone give a moment's consideration to the musings of Brigid Dimmonds and Dimon Townsend on this when they obviously are going to say "ooh teacher, it's much much more wigorwous than we thought it would be, we feel like we are getting our botties spanked by the nasty wasty BII wots gone well over the odds on testing us on the Codes, innit".

No matter how well meaning BII might want to be it has no teeth whatever. Without wigorwous wegulation this industry will remain the joke it is, dominated by fat bullies in an unpoliced payground.

This industry is totally morally bankrupt at the top and that is why it has descended to the state of disarray that it's in. The people responsible for these events turn a blind eye because it suits them, their pay packets, their bonuses and their pension schemes.

The behaviour of landlords who work this way is quite simply completely unacceptable in contemporary society. These Rachmanesque tales are the practices of early Capitalism unbridled. Elsewhere this could be described as entrapment into bonded labour through deception and misrepresentation. We hear news of people being brought into the UK illegally on the promise of getting respectable work cleaning homes or as nannies and being tricked into work in conditions of slavery. It makes headline news. In our industry it's accepted as pedestrian routine.

Bringing up caveat emptor to put distance between the legally weak position of the victims against the absolute wrongness of the behaviour directed toward them is splitting hairs. Unemotionally and objectively, this type of professional behaviour is just very bad business practice. By no measure of contemporary expectations of professional standards in any area of commercial activity can this behaviour be condoned.

When property companies overstate income and understate overheads when marketing their buildings it is misrepresentation pure and simple. They've been completely free to do this for decades because there is no industry arbiter, no scrutiny, no objective overview no one to pull them up and make them pay for their essentially illegal activities.