The Board met on Monday 6 November for our penultimate meeting of 2023. This virtual meeting came hot on the heels of our last in person meeting in October. Nevertheless, there was plenty of activity to discuss, starting with reflecting on the excellent response from industry to the launch of our accreditation scheme.
Accreditation
We believe that firms we have accredited account for at least 95% of the overall market for Taking Control of Goods enforcement work. This result provides a strong platform for us as we build our oversight model. The next step is to get in house enforcement teams in Local Authorities into our accreditation scheme and we discussed our strategic approach to this. For example, we know that some Local Authorities are concerned about the potential for financial sanctions and we agreed that we could not envisage circumstances in which we would seek to deploy financial sanctions on a public body. The team will be leading some workshops with inhouse teams over the next couple of months to discuss the detail of how accreditation might apply to this group of providers.
Consultation responses
The Board also discussed the current Ministry of Justice Taking Control of Goods regulations consultation and agreed that the ECB should respond. Our response will focus on the proposals around the compliance stage and information sheets, which have links to the work we will be doing over the coming months to develop our standards.
Creditor engagement
We talked about the ongoing progress the team has been making to secure creditor support for ECB accreditation. We hope to make a significant announcement in this space in the next week or so, so look out for that. We also identified opportunities to use Board level engagement with some very large creditors to convert overall support for the ECB’s mission into tangible public commitments to only work with ECB accredited providers.
Statutory underpinning
Finally, the Board returned to our discussion in October on statutory underpinning. We clarified our position; that the ECB is in favour of seeking statutory underpinning, in a way that maintains its independence and avoids the downsides of becoming embedded within the machinery of government. We next meet in early December when we plan to discuss proposals for quarterly data returns and the scope of our standards development as well as hearing from Martin Coppack of Fair By Design on inclusive design principles.