I suppose for the seminal moment in the development of this third edition of the Lease Code, you have to look back to about March 2005 and a written statement by Yvette Cooper, who was then the Parliamentary Secretary of State, in what was then the ODPM. This was really summarising a consultation by the previous Government, on upward only rent reviews. The result of that was that the Government decided not to ban upward only rent reviews. By all accounts, this was a very close-run thing and the Minister stressed that this was a postponement rather than a cancellation and asked, as conditions for that postponement, for four things:

In my summary and introductory remarks, all I would like to do is to perhaps touch on these four points and offer some observations.

As the BPF's representative on the negotiations for the revised Lease Code, I was extremely pleased with the end product. I think we have got an excellent product. We've tried to very much separate out the different users of the Lease Code, and for those that are familiar with it, you will have seen that it is really separated now into three different documents:

I think, and I hope you can agree (and contribute at the end otherwise), that we have ended up with something that is clearer and simpler and far more specific. Out went the "mights" and in came the "musts" in terms of the Lease Code terminology, and this is something that does encourage a great deal more transparency than perhaps was the case with the previous two editions.

I hope we have ended up with something that is relatively realistic and we have not set the bar too high, and that it is something that the vast majority of the industry can sign up to. The Lease Code does allow for some departures. If you look at the wording of the Lease Code, we realised that sometimes there are some necessary departures and we should allow for that sort of flexibility.

Looking at the political context. With the second edition of the Lease Code, there was a great deal of emphasis on choice. You may recall that it called for menus of priced options. We did away with that, and I think that, in part, this reflected the political imperatives, which for the third edition of the Lease Code, were more on flexibility and providing some sort of, for lack of a better word, "escape route" for occupiers who find themselves in troublesome times. As a result, there is a great deal more emphasis in this Lease Code on things like subletting, assignments and break clauses.

I would stress (and Nick Darby, who was on the group as well, can concur or disagree) that the negotiations were generally very amicable, very consensual. It was not always Russians and Americans across a table. In some respects, the landlords' side was leading the inclusion of things that we wanted in the Lease Code. If you look back to 2005, we had what was called our "subletting declaration", allowing subletting at the lesser of the market and the passing rents. We very much wanted to incorporate that into the Lease Code. [PLC: For information on this subletting declaration, see PLC Property, Legal update, Landlords declare intention for future subletting restrictions.]

There were other items that we wanted in the Lease Code, for example, a great deal more transparency on things like insurance commissions and that was something that was as much led by ourselves as by the occupier community.

At the end of the day, any code is only as good as its use and we have, perhaps, the reverse of an iceberg. What is important about the Lease Code is the nine-tenths and the visibility of the Lease Code and not the hard work that has gone into actually drafting it.

If you look back to the previous edition of the Lease Code, it achieved a 22% awareness as measured by Reading University and the challenge is to get beyond that figure.

Whilst marketing of the Lease Code in the mass media is always welcome, I think the emphasis that I would place on trying to disseminate the Lease Code is at the point of transaction. Obviously, for small businesses in particular, obtaining a copy of the Lease Code that you may not need to use for two or three years is not something that you are going to instantly store and refer back to. If you look at the word, "industry" that the Minister used, that was very much meant to be all-embracing and to include intermediaries, both property professionals and legal professionals, and for them also being helpful in disseminating the Lease Code through the transaction process.

My third point, as I mentioned, was to try and reach out to the SME community. Even if we achieved good dissemination through the legal and surveying professions, the figures that Reading University produced, illustrate that, in itself, that would not be sufficient.

According to the figures from Reading University with respect to the second edition of the Lease Code, only 65% of legal professionals are used by an SME in a commercial lease transaction and only 25% of SMEs use a surveyor or property professional.

These figures led me to the conclusion that, with respect to disseminating the Lease Code through the professions, we need to ensure that it is not only the occupier's professionals that are informing the Lease Code and disseminating it, but also the landlords' professionals. We have very much encouraged members of the BPF to instruct the professionals that they use to allow them to disseminate the Lease Code to the other parties in the transaction.

The other huge thing that would help with respect to reaching out to the SME community, is a standard lease. There is one that is being produced, which is specifically aimed at the SME community. That is work in progress by the Law Society at this moment.

Finally, I wanted to say a word about policing the Lease Code, the fourth of the Minister's requirements and perhaps the most challenging of all.

We, as a Federation, are not a regulatory body. However, we wanted to rise to the Minister's challenge and we wanted to develop "CLAS" – the Commercial Landlords Accreditation Scheme. Nick Darby and many other stakeholders have been involved in developing that. It is based on the Lease Code and has five simple rules, which I hope are in your packs. If not they can be accessed through the Scheme's website, Commercial Landlords Accreditation Scheme (CLAS).

Like any good accreditation scheme, there is a set of processes to go through in terms of making a complaint. The two parties are first encouraged to settle their differences. If this is not possible, there is a staged process to go through, ultimately ending up at what we call a "Standards Board", made up of a mixture of different stakeholders: occupiers, landlords and independent board members, and chaired by former permanent secretary at the Cabinet Office, a lady called Dame Mavis McDonald, DCB.

It is early days, and thus far, the Standards Board has not had to meet and decide on a complaint .

Obviously we would be delighted to promote CLAS as much as possible and we have a good variety of landlords that have already signed up to it and that has, I think, been beneficial in terms of making them look at their complaints procedures and to ensure their adherence to the Lease Code.

I have hopefully left my contact details in the pack and shall be on the panel to take questions about the Lease Code, and look forward to hearing comments from the other panellists on the specifics of the Lease Code. If there is anything we haven't covered here today, I look forward very much to hearing from both members and non-members of the BPF and obviously my contact details are very easy to obtain.