On her retirement as president of the Property Litigation Association, Liz Peace shares her thoughts on five years in the role with Jess Harrold.
When Liz Peace was a young girl at Birmingham’s King Edward VI Camp Hill Grammar School for Girls, she was always struck by a particular line in its “extraordinary” school song. “It was in the second verse, so we didn’t often get to it,” she says. “The line was, ‘die of service, not of rust’.”
It’s fair to say that it struck a chord – one that has lasted throughout Peace’s distinguished and varied career. On her LinkedIn, she describes her “hectic but hugely rewarding portfolio”, and, if anything, that’s an understatement. The former British Property Federation chief executive is oft-quoted in these pages in her roles as chair of the Old Oak and Park Royal Development Corporation and gender diversity group Real Estate Balance, among others. Peace, who earlier in her career worked for the Ministry of Defence, enjoys wearing many professional hats. “I was a civil servant,” she says. “You have to be organised. And I like to be busy.”
On this occasion, though, we are discussing her stepping away from one of her myriad responsibilities, following the conclusion of her five-year term as president of the Property Litigation Association. One of the hardest working people in property is, as she puts it, “reducing the portfolio a little” in order to spend a bit more time indulging her passions for the opera, gardening and “granny duties”, as well as travelling with her husband, who is a horse-racing enthusiast and butterfly photographer. But she takes her leave of the PLA having learned a lot from the experience.
Working with litigators
Peace confesses that when she received a letter asking her to be president of the PLA, she was “absolutely gobsmacked” and thought it must be a mistake. After all, she had no legal background to speak of and would be succeeding one of the country’s pre-eminent judges, Lord Neuberger. But the association wanted to appoint a fresh voice from the wider world of property, to help it connect with the sector and foster a better understanding of its work.
In the five years since she said “yes”, she has found it rewarding getting to know an entirely new area of the industry. “I’ve learned a huge amount about how the whole judicial process around real estate works and what the big issues are,” Peace says. “I saw quite a lot of it from the BPF angle, but coming in at it from the other side has been really interesting.”
She believes misconceptions abound in wider society, both about the nature of property litigation and about the sector in general. “I think real estate is still a very misunderstood industry – it’s a huge issue,” she says. “I’d like to think in my 13 years with the BPF I achieved some degree of improvement, but I’m sad to say it still is not properly understood. And, therefore, the role of property litigation within it is not properly understood.
“People tend to think that anything to do with real estate is pretty litigious – that there seems to be a lot of dispute. In practice, of course, we have a very well-defined legal system for dealing with real estate. That is one of the things that makes our real estate industry such a great, investable place. The lawyers I met through the PLA aren’t the gung-ho, ‘sue ’em’ types – they’re all incredibly thoughtful about how to actually achieve the best outcome for their client.”
That includes considering options for dispute resolution besides litigation. “In my discussions with the PLA, I never got the feeling that there was a problem with encouraging more mediation or arbitration,” she says. “I used to jokingly say, ‘If you have too much of that, it will put you all out of a job.’ But I think society requires that you should look for alternatives to going into court. You’ve got to try and resolve it by other means first.”
If an advocacy group like the PLA can actually get in early enough and help the people who are framing the draft legislation, then you’ll get a better outcome
Lobbying for change
Peace is hugely proud of the work carried out by the PLA’s law reform committee through its participation in consultation over important changes to the law, which she sees as a vital part of the legislative process. “If an advocacy group like the PLA can actually get in early enough and help the people who are framing the draft legislation, then you’ll get a better outcome,” she says.
As part of her remit, Peace shared her expertise on how to voice concerns in a way that will encourage government engagement. “The real problem in getting through to government is to get them to see why something you want is relevant to a large number of people,” she says. “It’s no good being seen to be the preserve of a group of very clever lawyers, who think it would be really nice to tie this little loose end up. Why is it relevant to the people in government? And that means, ultimately, why is it relevant to the person in the street?”
Peace hopes to see more change. She has concerns about the management of a judicial system that has, for some years, been “creaking” – a problem “exacerbated by the pandemic”. “We’ve got to be very careful,” she adds. “We pride ourselves on having this brilliant judicial system. But not enough money has gone into it in a lot of areas, and we’ve now got backlogs of cases. It just gives me this feeling that we’re neglecting this, as a nation, at our peril.”
Peace has also long been an advocate for an overhaul of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954 – “a piece of legislation that has had its day” – and believes much could be gained by removing many of the “archaic practices” inherent in real estate.
“The whole landlord and tenant set-up is needlessly complicated and littered with extraordinary terminology,” Peace says. “I used to have wonderful discussions with members of the PLA arguing about how to make the whole lease structure simpler. Some would say that if you try and do everything too briefly then you leave too much to doubt. The other side would say, well, if you have a 45-page lease, that just gives more clauses for people to dispute. I think, in the interests of making business people more conscious of the liabilities of leases, trying to make them simpler and understandable would be really good.”
Inevitably, discussion about landlord and tenant relations turns to the consequences of the pandemic, the various moratoria on commercial rent recovery measures, the £8bn in arrears that built up and the arbitration scheme introduced by the Commercial Rent (Coronavirus) Act 2022.
“This was an unfortunate episode for the property industry,” Peace says. “I think people like the BPF and the PLA tried very hard to explain the ramifications of what the government was doing, but the problem was that the government [and] the press tended to focus on the impact on the occupiers: ‘We must save their businesses.’ But this is part of this fundamental misunderstanding. Owning and managing real estate is also a business. If you mess it up, an awful lot of people will suffer, including investors, pension funds and the like, on which we all depend.”
She feels the compromise reached is “probably about as good as you could get”, but fears there will still be “quite a lot of hangover in terms of people who simply will not pay”.
Peace believes many good landlords have made a “big effort” to understand which of their tenants were suffering. But, she adds, there are tenants that have “taken advantage of the system”.
“I think landlords are quite right to be wound up by that,” she adds. “So I’ve no doubt there will be more litigation coming downstream.”
Twenty-odd years ago, gender diversity in the real estate industry was appalling. It is much, much better, but still nowhere near where it should be
Leading the way on D&I
As chair of Real Estate Balance, Peace says the PLA membership is ahead of the curve on diversity and inclusion when compared with the wider property sector.
“I think the real estate industry is better than it was, but that’s not saying a huge amount,” she says. “Twenty-odd years ago, gender diversity was appalling. It is much, much better, but still nowhere near where it should be. Real Estate Balance has only been going for six years, but I think we have made a big impact. Our objective is to try and see gender balance, and indeed wider D&I, at the executive level.”
Boards are one issue, Peace says, and some companies will opt to hire female or BAME non-execs to increase diversity. “But getting that mix at the executive level – the C-suite and the like – that’s the challenge,” she adds. “You can’t do that overnight, because if you haven’t got this balanced pool from which you can recruit your executive committee, you can’t magic them up out of thin air.
“No woman or BAME candidate would want to be put there as a token without having earned it by dint of their expertise and suitability. So it’s going to take time to get the pool of people from which you can promote – and I think we’re starting to see that.”
Fittingly, Peace hands over to another female president of the PLA: Elizabeth Cooke, former law commissioner and current judge of the Upper Tribunal, Lands Chamber. “I think she’ll be a fabulous president,” Peace says. “And I think the succession has worked really well. I replaced David Neuberger, who was wonderful, and the PLA did something unusual by getting a non-lawyer because they wanted to get that outside perspective. Now I think it’s a natural progression to go back to somebody like Lizzie, who has had such a big role in law reform and clearly being something of a trailblazer.”
The PLA is once again in safe hands, while Peace’s are a little less, though still impressively, full.
To send feedback, e-mail jess.harrold@eg.co.uk or tweet @EGPropertyNews
