July 2007

OEA Scheme ‘one of the best things in our industry’

Sir,

I REFER to the recent — and completely unwarranted — attack on the Ombudsman Scheme by David Perkins, who up until now I always considered a pretty sensible, level-headed commentator.

In my view, the Ombudsman Scheme is one of the best things that has happened to our industry in recent years.

Indeed, as I have often said before, I bitterly regret that when I served on the NAEA Council all those years ago I did not bite the bullet and push for compulsory membership.

I disagreed with the then chief executive Hugh Dunsmore-Hardy over many issues, but I was — and remain — at one with him over the importance of an independent complaints procedure.

Ours is a service industry and we live and die by our own service standards. It is also a people business — and even with the best will in the world, people make mistakes.

No one is perfect, and the Ombudsman’s Scheme plays a vital role in determining the validity of the consumer’s complaint, for the benefit of all.

It is a great pity that the RICS have opted to create their own adjudication scheme, which will only further confuse the public.

Why in this day and age the RICS does not support the perfectly adequate scheme that is already up and running and is endorsed by the vast majority of people in our industry is a complete mystery.

Or rather, it isn’t a mystery at all. It smacks, I’m afraid to say, of the ridiculously outmoded sense of superiority that some members of the surveying fraternity still appear to feel, compared to ‘mere’ estate agents.

This absurd and totally unjustifiable attitude of elitism — not to mention the rather foam-flecked Luddism exemplified by David Perkins on this issue — should have died out in the last century.

JOHN PRING FNAEA (Hon),
Chairman
Fisks plc, Essex.