Thursday 16th November 2023
(5 months, 2 weeks ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRenters (Reform) Bill 2022-23 View all Renters (Reform) Bill 2022-23 Debates Read Hansard Text Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 16 November 2023 - (16 Nov 2023)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (Jacob Young)
Q
You further mentioned the CLA’s opinion on section 21. In terms of reforming the court system, what changes would you want to see before the CLA would be happy to see the abolition of section 21?
Judicaelle Hammond: If you do not mind, I will take your last question first. I think there is a need to reduce the time between making a court application and getting a property back. It can be a very lengthy process, particularly if you have to resort to bailiffs. There should be a success trigger on the face of the Bill, if at all possible, so that it is measurable. If you are going to abolish section 21, it should not be on any arbitrary date; you need to have a number of weeks. At the moment, the Ministry of Justice measures the average time it takes as 28 weeks, which is quite long. We need something much shorter, at which point you could say, “Yes, the court system, as reformed, is working.”
On the reforms themselves, digitisation will no doubt help. The question in our mind—given what analysis by the National Residential Landlords Association suggests as the cause of the delay—is whether that will be enough. There is a tremendous problem with the resourcing of the court system. To go back to my rural brief, we have lost 74 county courts since 2010, which has meant that the rest of the work has had to go elsewhere. It has also meant that landlords, and indeed tenants, in rural areas have to go further to go to a hearing. There is a question about resourcing as well as about making the process and system easier. Of course, there is the question of what happens after the court order has been given, so there is more to it than what is in the Bill at the moment.
The Chair
I am afraid that this will have to be the last question to this witness, so could we please have a short question and answer?
Matthew Pennycook
Q
Helen Gordon: I think that that is absolutely the intent, and it is the business model. I want to talk about the fact that there is a lot of bad practice. If you go now to Rightmove’s website, or wherever, you will pay significantly more for a short-term tenancy than you would for a six-month or 12-month tenancy. People will abuse that. Searches of Rightmove’s data will give you only a certain amount of data, but we have data showing that in London up to 10% of the people wishing to rent only want to rent for a couple of months. Not having a minimum term greater than a couple of months will lead to a lot of Airbnb and transient renting. That is why, in planning, Westminster City Council and many other councils insist on a minimum term for rental property. The two months approach in the Bill seems to fly in the face of that.
Jacob Young
Q
Helen Gordon: Just to clarify, I think a minimum term of six months would work. That could be four months with two months’ notice. There is a balance between the two. Most landlords will work with a tenant if they make that decision. What I am trying to stop is the abuse of sub-letting and the unintended consequences of financing. Obviously, there is all the protection, so if it does not meet the minimum home standard, it is in breach or it was misrepresented to the tenant, they have all of those grounds, in any event, to leave. But if their circumstances change, I think most landlords would work with the tenant on that.
Jacob Young
Q
Helen Gordon: Absolutely. We have real live examples that I am happy to share with the Committee. We do differ. A minimum build to rent is usually at least 50 homes. The majority of Grainger’s properties are around 250 in a cluster. If you get antisocial behaviour, that can have a very detrimental effect on the whole of the community—we build communities.
Evidencing antisocial behaviour often requires you to get neighbours to make complaints and witness statements, at times when they have been personally intimidated. I have a very live example where we literally had to empty the six properties adjacent to the property causing a problem, and it took something like 15 months to get the ground for possession through the courts.
So we would really welcome lowering the bar on antisocial behaviour. I would particularly like it to reference sub-letting and party flats. There is quite an industry, which, fortunately, Grainger does protect itself from, where people take a property and then sub-let it as a party flat at weekends, causing disruption to the whole block.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle
Q
Helen Gordon: Can I take your first question first? There is a difference in terms of what we would generally say is a party flat. Grainger forbids these things in its lease, and the prospect of anybody who is already in contravention of the lease—probably not paying rent and making a profit rent out of the party flat—going through a registration scheme is pretty unlikely. I am talking about illegal sub-letting as far as the lease is concerned, and illegal party flats.
Matthew Pennycook
Q
Nimrod Ben-Cnaan: Our opinion is that, as I think Polly Neate said on Tuesday, the Government should hold its nerve and not wait at all. We can do this without that. There will be a surge; there are other ways to address that surge. That is our opinion.
Jacob Young
Q
Then, on Nimrod’s point about resolving cases before they even get to court, which I think is really relevant, I would be keen to know how you think the ombudsman could be used in such dispute resolution.
Richard Miller: In response to the issue of digitisation, our view is that digitisation is one part of the picture only, and it is a part of the picture that will take a long time and involve quite a bit of investment. Fundamentally, the issue is that we do not know exactly what functionality will be required of the system until we have implemented the process.
Let us suppose that the digitisation programme did not exist. We would be saying, “As long as the courts have the resources to handle the cases, that is fine.” That is what we are saying should happen here: digitisation should be on the cards—it should be something that we intend to do over the coming years—but the starting point is to make sure that the courts are resourced to handle the cases as they are conducted at the moment. That does mean more judges, more court staff to process applications and more investment in legal aid, but the digitisation is not a necessary prerequisite to get the courts into a state where they can handle this workload.
Jacob Young
Q
Richard Miller: That’s right, yes. Digitisation is absolutely necessary. It is disappointing, but we understand the reasons why it has not happened already. It is a major project and we need to have the system that will be in place for the foreseeable future before we start building the digital systems to cope with that system.
Nimrod Ben-Cnaan: On your point about the ombudsman, Minister, there is little to comment on in the Bill. The shape outlined in the Bill is just that: an outline of an idea that has been suggested by various parties. You have heard some of them in previous sessions, and that might be useful in their own terms. Our concern has always been that the ombudsman would be used to displace, specifically, tenants’ access to the courts when they need it, and through that to displace the provision of legal advice that would otherwise be available for them. We would like to ensure that tenants have a good, reliable source of information and advice about their rights, what they can act on, how they can act on it and the support to do so. On the ombudsman, well, let us see that idea get fleshed out in detail.
I was heartened to hear from the Department’s officials that the intention is not to have the ombudsman somehow displace access to courts, for example, with disrepair claims, which would be so important to us. The court still does, and can do very well, the kinds of things that the ombudsman cannot do at all—be that through things such as establishing fact, applying the law, interpreting the law and sometimes being able to issue injunctions when there is, for example, an unlawful eviction. A law centre would normally be able to step in and stop that right there and then, in a way that the ombudsman would not even have the power to do so. Actually, we have a lot going on with the courts at present, and we should resource them and resource the allied measures to make the most of them.
Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)
Q
Richard Miller: The Law Society has published a number of maps showing the availability of legally aided housing advice across the country. Those have shown, over time, that the picture is getting worse. The number of law firms and law centres delivering these services is reducing. We now have something like 42% of the population without a housing provider on legal aid in their local authority area. By definition, the sort of people we are talking about—those who are financially eligible for legal aid, where very often the issue is that they are unable to pay their rent—cannot afford public transport to travel significant distances to get the advice they need. Local provision of advice is vital.
The problem we have—there may well be many people around the table who are not experts in the legal aid system—is that the last time the remuneration rates for legal aid were increased in cash terms was in the 1990s. That is what the profession is up against, and that is why more and more firms have decided that it is not economically possible to carry on delivering these services. We are seeing an absolute crisis in the state of legal aid provision across the country, and that needs to be addressed. I will pass over to Nimrod to deal with the consequences of people not being represented.
Nimrod Ben-Cnaan: Things have got so bad that even delivering the duty desk at court—the scheme that we are so reliant on to make possession work well for all parties—is difficult. In the last procurement round, the Legal Aid Agency had such problems sourcing providers in the greater Liverpool area—Merseyside, if you like—that there was a reliance on transitional arrangements. If you have a large urban centre where a legal aid firm should be able to make a sustainable business but is not able to do so, we have a real problem.
In terms of the kind of impact that legal aid services could offer us, I would say that the current scope of legal aid needs to be addressed, not just the remuneration. Ten years ago, in the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, the scope cut to legal aid was such that a lot of early intervention to help people was taken out of scope, so you are basically incentivised to let problems escalate. It is the wrong way round, and even the Government are realising that in their current review of civil legal aid. If you get in early, you are able to divert people from the court wherever possible. You get to represent tenants wherever possible, lightening the load of the court, and you get to give assistance for as long as it is needed, rather than by adhering to whatever original parcels you were apportioned by legal aid. There is an opportunity here to make a secondary provision to legal aid that would help to prop up the system through this transition.
Richard Miller: To build on that, some unrepresented tenants do not bring cases that they could and should bring and do not enforce their rights; others bring cases that are misconceived, and that has an impact on the landlord, who has to defend the misconceived case, and on the courts, which have to put in resources to hear it. When these cases go to court, whether they are validly brought or misconceived, unrepresented tenants very often do not understand the processes and what is required of them, so they do things wrong and have to have things explained to them. That means that the courts have to put a lot more resources into managing the case than they would if the tenant was represented, so there is a whole range of ways that landlords and courts—and therefore the taxpayer—are adversely impacted by tenants being unrepresented.
The Chair
Can I move on to the Minister?
Jacky Peacock: Well, that outlines it; I can give more detail about how it works if you like.
Jacob Young
Q
Jacky Peacock: I think it will in a number of cases, yes, but neither section 21 nor the Bill as a whole will make a dramatic difference to the landlord-tenant balance or relationship. I know the most robust, feisty tenants, but the idea of going to court and defending themselves is terrifying. In the vast majority of cases, if a landlord tells a tenant to go, they will go; they are not going to question whether they have a right to remain or what process has been followed—they will go. We still refer to the land “lord”—a direct descendant from a feudal stage—and we have not changed that relationship very much. We need to protect tenants by making sure that, without the tenant’s having to exercise the rights, even if they have them, the property is safe and competently managed.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle
Q
Jacky Peacock: We think that all the grounds should be discretionary. There is no more draconian decision that a civil court could make than to deprive someone of their home. The thought that they will be prevented from looking at all the circumstances before making a decision seems, in principle, unfair. Judges are not soft. If they have discretion, they will still grant possession in the majority of cases where the evidence is there and it is the fairest thing to do. But to deprive them of being able to look at every single circumstance in any of those cases before taking someone’s home away is not justice. It does not deliver justice. I have seen many cases of possession orders being issued against the tenant that have been grossly unfair for all sorts of reasons but, technically, the decision was mandatory.
Matthew Pennycook
Q
Jen Berezai: Research that we have done, along with research undertaken by the likes of Battersea Dogs & Cats Home and Cats Protection, seems to indicate that a large number of landlords would be willing to consider pets provided that they are able to protect their own interests. That is why we proposed an amendment to the Tenant Fees Bill to add pet damage insurance to the list of permitted payments. Having said that, the rental market is very hot at the moment. I believe that there are something like 20 to 25 applications per property in London. In the east midlands, I think there are about 11 applications per property, and viewings are usually closed off at about 30. That means that landlords are able to cherry-pick tenants. A lot will take the course of least resistance and choose what they perceive to be the lowest risk.
Jacob Young
Q
Jen Berezai: My concern is that it is an excellent step in the right direction, but it is probably going to benefit those who rent houses more than those who rent flats. That is because of the head lease issue. I know that leasehold reform is going through; it would be nice if the two things could work hand in hand. Giving landlords the ability to say either “You must hold pet damage insurance” or “I am going to charge you for pet damage insurance” will make a difference to a lot of landlords who are currently on the fence about allowing pets.
Helen Morgan
Q
Jen Berezai: It is there now. There are only a handful of companies, to be fair, but it is there now. We at AdvoCATS tend to deal with one company called One Broker, which has been providing a product for quite a few years. Premiums start from about £15 per month, which gets a landlord £4,000-worth of cover. We are aware of people developing other products, because when the Bill goes through we foresee a lot more of them coming to market. In the course of preparing the “Heads for Tails!” report, we spoke to insurance companies, including the Alan Boswell Group. It developed and launched a pet damage policy for tenants, backed by SAGIC—the Salvation Army General Insurance Corporation—specifically as a result of our campaign and what we were calling for.