Renters’ Rights Bill

Tuesday 14th January 2025 Commons Chamber

Consideration of Bill, as amended in the Public Bill Committee

New Clause 13

Prohibition of rent in advance after lease entered into (except initial rent)

“In the 1988 Act, after section 4A (inserted by section 1 of this Act) insert—

‘4B Assured tenancy: prohibition of rent in advance (except initial rent)

(1) Terms of an assured tenancy which provide for when rent is due are of no effect so far as they provide for rent to be due in advance.

(2) But subsection (1) does not apply—

(a) to an excepted tenancy, or

(b) to terms of any other assured tenancy so far as they provide for initial rent to be due during the permitted pre-tenancy period.

(3) Where terms of an assured tenancy providing for when the rent for a rent period is due are of no effect by virtue of this section, the tenancy has effect as if it provided for the rent for that rent period to be due on the substitute rent day for that rent period.

(4) In a case where the terms of the tenancy (after taking account of section 4A) are such that—

(a) one or more of the periods of the tenancy will be compliant rent periods, and

(b) the compliant rent periods have a regular pattern, the regular rent day which falls during a rent period is the “substitute rent day” for the rent period.

(5) In any other case, the first day of a rent period is the “substitute rent day” for the rent period.

(6) The compliant rent periods of a tenancy “have a regular pattern” if those periods meet the following two conditions—

(a) all of the compliant rent periods will be the same length (and, for this purpose, all periods of one month are the same length);

(b) the rent for all of the compliant periods will be due—

(i) on the same day during each of the periods (such as the same day of the week in a weekly period or the same date in the month in a monthly period), or

(ii) on the same description of day during each of the periods (such as the last day, or first weekday, of a period);

and that day, or day of that description, is the “regular rent day”.

(7) The condition in subsection (6)(a) is met even if the first period of the tenancy is of a different length from all the other compliant periods; and, in such a case, the condition in subsection (6)(b) is met even if the rent for the first period of the tenancy is due on a different day, or description of day, from all the other compliant periods.

(8) For provision enabling a holding deposit to be used to pay initial rent due during the permitted pre-tenancy period, see Schedule 2 to the Tenant Fees Act 2019.

(9) The Secretary of State may, by regulations, amend this section for the purpose of making provision about the descriptions of rent due in advance to which subsection (1) does not apply.

(10) Regulations under subsection (9)—

(a) may make different provision for different purposes;

(b) are to be made by statutory instrument.

(11) A statutory instrument containing regulations under subsection (9) may not be made unless a draft of the instrument has been laid before and approved by a resolution of each House of Parliament.

(12) In this paragraph—

“compliant rent period” : a rent period is a compliant rent period if the rent for the period is due during the period — and, in determining this, the effect of this section on when rent is due must be disregarded;

“due in advance” , in relation to rent, means due before the rent period for which it is payable;

“excepted tenancy” means—

(a) an assured tenancy of social housing (within the meaning of Part 2 of the Housing and Regeneration Act 2008) if the landlord is a private registered provider of social housing;

(b) an assured tenancy granted pursuant to Part 7 of the Housing Act 1996 (homelessness);

“initial rent” means rent that is payable for—

(a) the first rent period, or

(b) any later rent period which ends during the initial 28 day period;

and here “initial 28 day period” means the period of 28 days beginning with the first day of the first rent period;

“permitted pre-tenancy period” means the period that—

(a) begins when the tenancy is entered into, and

(b) ends with the day before the first day of the tenancy;

“regular rent day” has the meaning given in subsection (6)(b);

“rent period” means a period for which rent is payable under the assured tenancy;

“substitute rent day” means the day determined in accordance with subsection (4) or (5).”’—(Matthew Pennycook.)

This modifies the terms of an assured tenancy to disapply terms which provide for rent to be due in advance, unless it is rent for the first rent period, or a subsequent rent period ending within the first 28 days of the tenancy, and is due between the tenancy being entered into and the term of the tenancy beginning.

Brought up, and read the First time.

14:13

[The Minister for Housing and Planning (Matthew Pennycook)]

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:

Government new clause 14—Prohibition of rent in advance before lease entered into.

Government new clause 15—Guarantor not liable for rent payable after tenant’s death.

Government new clause 16—Limitation on obligation to pay removal expenses.

New clause 1—Limit on rent to be requested in advance of tenancy—

“In the 1988 Act, after section 14ZB (inserted by section 8 of this Act) insert—

“14ZBA Maximum rent to be paid in advance

No rent may be requested or received in advance of any period of the tenancy which exceeds the rent for two months of the tenancy.””

This new clause would prohibit landlords from requesting or accepting more than two month's rent in advance.

New clause 2—Impact of Act on provision of short-term lets—

“The Secretary of State must, within two years of the passing of this Act, publish a review of the impact of sections 1 to 3 on the number of landlords offering properties on short-term lets rather than in the private rented sector.”

New clause 3—Limit on rent in advance of tenancy—

“In Schedule 1 to the Tenant Fees Act 2019, after paragraph (1) insert—

“(1A) But if the amount of rent payable in advance of any period of the tenancy exceeds the equivalent of one month’s rent, the amount of the excess is a prohibited payment.””

This new clause would make it unlawful for a landlord to demand or accept more than one month’s rent in advance in respect of a tenancy or licence of residential accommodation.

New clause 4—Signature of lease for student accommodation—

“Where a tenant meets the student test set out in paragraph 10 of Schedule 1, the relevant tenancy agreement may not be signed before 1 March in the year in which the tenancy is intended to take effect.”

This new clause would prevent student leases being signed before March in the year in which they are intended to commence.

New clause 5—Review of tenancy deposit schemes and requirements—

“(1) The Secretary of State must, within 12 months of the passing of this Act, conduct a review of tenancy deposit schemes and tenancy deposit requirements.

(2) The review must include, but not be limited to—

(a) consideration of options for tenancy “passporting”; and

(b) measures to improve trust in the deposit dispute process.

(3) As part of the review the Secretary of State must consult with such parties as they see fit, which must include representatives of tenants’ and landlords’ interests.”

This new clause would require the Secretary of State, within 12 months of the Act passing, to review and consult on tenancy deposit schemes and requirements.

New clause 6—Duties of local authorities: care leavers—

“(1) Where it is requested of a local housing authority by, or on behalf of—

(a) a relevant child as defined by section 23A of the Children Act 1989, or

(b) a former relevant child as defined by section 23C of the Children Act 1989,

the local housing authority shall provide assistance to the individual making the request, or the individual on whose behalf the request is made, in paying or guaranteeing any deposit required to agree a tenancy.

(2) The assistance to be provided under subsection (1) may include, but not be limited to, the payment of a deposit on behalf of an individual listed in subsection (1), or acting as a guarantor for any deposit paid by or on behalf of an individual listed in subsection (1).”

This new clause would place a duty on local authorities to help care leavers pay or guarantee any required deposit to enable them to agree a tenancy in the private rented sector.

New clause 7—Rules for proposed rent levels—

“(1) The Secretary of State must establish a body to be known as the Independent Living Rent Body.

(2) The “proposed rent” referred to in section 55(2) must be calculated with reference to rules set by the Independent Living Rent Body.

(3) In setting rules to be applied to the calculation of a proposed rent under section 55(2) the Independent Living Rent Body will have regard to property type, size and condition, location, local incomes, and such other criteria as it sees fit.”

This new clause would require the Secretary of State to establish an independent body that would set rules to be used when calculating the proposed rent payable in relation to an advertised tenancy.

New clause 8—Mediated rent pauses (housing conditions)—

“(1) This section applies where–

(a) there is a tenancy to which section 9A of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 applies;

(b) it appears to the tenant that the landlord has breached the covenant implied by that section; and

(c) it appears to the tenant that the landlord has failed to carry out works necessary to remedy any such breaches within the timeframes set out in regulations made by the Secretary of State under section 10A(3) of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985.

(2) A tenant is entitled to make arrangements to pay rent to an independent individual, rather than to the relevant landlord.

(3) The independent individual shall not pass any rent paid under subsection (2) to the landlord until there has been a determination or agreement between the landlord and tenant as to the landlord’s liability for any breach of the covenant implied by section 9A of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985.

(4) Where a determination or agreement under subsection (3) sets a time by which works are to be completed, the independent individual will –

(a) release any rent paid under subsection (2) to the landlord if the works are completed by that time;

(b) release any rent paid under subsection (2) back to the tenant if the works have not been completed by that time.

(5) In this section an “independent individual” means the independent individual responsible for investigating complaints made against members of a landlord redress scheme under section 62.”

New clause 9—Home adaptations—

“(1) The Housing Act 1988 is amended as follows.

(2) After section 16 insert—

“16A Home adaptations

(1) It is an implied term of every assured tenancy to which this section applies that a landlord shall give permission for adaptations where a local council has carried out a Home Assessment and recommends adaptations which constitute reasonable adjustments under the Equality Act 2010. Tenants have the right to appeal a landlord’s refusal to adapt a property.

(2) This section applies to every assured tenancy other than a tenancy of social housing, within the meaning of Part 2 of the Housing and Regeneration Act 2008.””

This new clause would ensure that landlords give permission for home adaptations for people who have disabilities where a Home Assessment has been carried out.

New clause 10—Guarantor to have no further liability following death of tenant—

“(1) Subject to subsection (3), a guarantee agreement relating to a relevant tenancy ceases to have effect upon the death of a relevant tenant.

(2) Upon the death of a relevant tenant the guarantor in respect of a relevant tenancy shall incur no further liability in relation to matters arising under the tenancy.

(3) Nothing in this section shall affect the liability of a guarantor in relation to matters which arose before the date of the death of the relevant tenant.

(4) In assessing any liability under subsection (3), account shall be taken of any tenancy deposit paid in respect of the tenancy.

(5) Where there is more than one relevant tenant, this section shall apply only upon the death of both or all of the tenants.

(6) In this section—

“guarantor” is a person who enters into a guarantee agreement in relation to a relevant tenancy;

“guarantee agreement” is a contractual promise (whether incorporated in or separate from the tenancy agreement) to indemnify or compensate a relevant person in respect of an obligation under the tenancy if the tenant fails to perform or comply with the obligation;

“relevant tenancy” has the same meaning as in section 41, and “relevant tenant” is to be interpreted accordingly; and

“tenancy deposit” has the same meaning as in section 212(8) of the Housing Act 2004.”

New clause 11—Restrictions on the requirement for tenants to provide a guarantor—

“(1) A relevant person must not, in any of the circumstances set out in subsection (3), require a person, as a condition of the grant of a relevant tenancy, to provide a guarantor in relation to the observance or performance of the tenant’s obligations under the tenancy.

(2) For the purposes of this Act, requiring a person to provide a guarantor includes accepting an offer by that person to provide a guarantor.

(3) The circumstances are –

(a) that the person has paid a tenancy deposit or has been assisted under a deposit scheme;

(b) that the person is required to pay rent in advance equivalent to one month’s rent or more;

(c) that on a reasonable assessment of their means the person’s income (including state benefits received and any other lawful source of income) is sufficient to enable them to pay the full rent due under the tenancy;

(d) that arrangements will be made for housing benefit or the housing element of universal credit to be paid directly in respect of rent to the relevant person;

(e) that the relevant person has entered into a contract of insurance under which they are insured against non-payment of rent; or

(f) such other circumstances as may be prescribed in regulations made by the Secretary of State.

(4) In any other case where a relevant person lawfully requires a person, as a condition of the grant of a relevant tenancy, to provide a guarantor, the sum for which the guarantor may become liable under the relevant guarantee shall not exceed a sum equal to six months’ rent.

(5) In any case where a relevant person requires a tenant, as a condition of the grant of a relevant joint tenancy, to provide a guarantor, the sum claimed under the guarantee shall not exceed such proportion of the loss as is attributable to the act or default of the individual tenant on whose behalf the guarantee was given and, if such proportion cannot be proved, shall not exceed the sum obtained by dividing the total loss by the number of tenants.

(6) In this section–

a “guarantor” is a person who enters into a guarantee in relation to a relevant tenancy;

a “guarantee” is a contractual promise to be responsible for the performance of an obligation owed by the tenant to a relevant person under the tenancy if the tenant fails to perform the obligation;

a “deposit scheme” includes a scheme whereby a sum payable by way of deposit or a bond or guarantee is provided by a local authority, registered charity or voluntary organisation for the purpose of providing security to a landlord for the performance of a tenant’s obligations under a tenancy;

“tenancy deposit” has the same meaning as in section 212(8) of the Housing Act 2004.”

This new clause would restrict the circumstances in which a landlord can request a guarantor.

New clause 17—Use of licence conditions to improve housing conditions—

“In section 90 of the Housing Act 2004, for subsection (1) substitute—

“(1) A licence may include such conditions as the local housing authority consider appropriate for regulating all or any of the following—

(a) the management, use and occupation of the house concerned, and

(b) its condition and contents.””

This new clause would enable local authorities operating selective licensing schemes to use licence conditions to improve housing conditions.

New clause 18—Increases to duration of discretionary licensing schemes—

“(1) The Housing Act 2004 is amended as follows.

(2) In section 60(2), omit “five” and insert “ten”.

(3) In section 84(2), omit “five” and insert “ten”.”

This new clause would increase the maximum duration of additional HMO licensing schemes and selective licensing schemes from five to ten years.

New clause 19—Assessment of operation of possession process—

“(1) The Lord Chancellor must prepare an assessment of the operation of the process by which—

(a) on applications made by landlords, the county court is able to make orders for the possession of dwellings in England that are let under assured and regulated tenancies, and

(b) such orders are enforced.

(2) The Lord Chancellor must publish the assessment at such time, and in such manner, as the Lord Chancellor thinks appropriate.

(3) In this section—

“assured tenancy” means an assured tenancy within the meaning of the 1988 Act;

“dwelling” means a building or part of a building which is occupied or intended to be occupied as a separate dwelling;

“regulated tenancy” means a regulated tenancy within the meaning of the Rent Act 1977.”

New clause 20—Review of the impact of the Act on the housing market—

“(1) The Secretary of State must publish an annual report outlining the impact of the provisions of this Act on the housing market in the UK.

(2) A report under this section must include the impact of this Act on—

(a) the availability of homes in the private rental sector;

(b) rents charged under tenancies;

(c) house prices; and

(d) requests for social housing.

(3) A report under this section must be laid before Parliament.”

New clause 21—Appropriate insurance products to be available to landlords—

“The Secretary of State must, within six months of the passing of this Act, consult with representatives of the insurance sector to ensure that—

(1) sufficient and appropriate insurance products will be available for landlords wishing to let a property to a tenant who—

(a) is in receipt of benefits; or

(b) will be keeping a pet in the property during their tenancy; and

(2) such insurance products will not disadvantage landlords wishing to let a property to a such tenant or dissuade them from doing so.”

New clause 22—Requirement on landlords to pay for alternative accommodation—

“In section 9A of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 (fitness for human habitation of dwellings in England), after subsection(1) insert—

(1A) Where a dwelling—

(a)is found to be at any point in a tenancy; or

(b)becomes during the period of the tenancy unfit for human habitation, the landlord must pay any costs incurred by the tenant in obtaining alternative accommodation.

(1B) A landlord must hold appropriate insurance for the purposes of paying any costs under subsection (1A).

(1C) For the purposes of this section—

“costs” include—

(a) moving costs;

(b) deposits;

(c) rent, up to the amount of the rent for the original property;

“fitness for human habitation” is to be understood with reference to section 10 of this Act, but excludes any conditions caused by any damage or neglect on the part of the tenant.””

New clause 23—Permission for home adaptations—

“(1) The Housing Act 1988 is amended as follows.

(2) After section 16 insert—

“16A Home adaptations

(1) It is an implied term of every assured tenancy that a landlord shall give permission for adaptations where a local council has carried out a Home Assessment and recommends adaptations which constitute reasonable adjustments under the Equality Act 2010.

(2) A tenant may appeal a landlord’s refusal to give permission for such adaptations.””

This new clause would ensure that landlords of private and social tenancies provide permission for home adaptations for people who have disabilities where a Home Assessment has been carried out.

New clause 24—Discrimination relating to requirement for home adaptations—

“A relevant person must not, in relation to a dwelling that is to be let on an agreement which may give rise to a relevant tenancy—

(a) on the basis that a person does or may require home adaptations, prevent the person from—

(i) enquiring whether the dwelling is available for let,

(ii) accessing information about the dwelling,

(iii) viewing the dwelling in order to consider whether to seek to rent it, or

(iv) entering into a tenancy of the dwelling, or

(b) apply a provision, criterion or practice in order to make people requiring home adaptations less likely to enter into a tenancy of the dwelling than people who do not require home adaptations.”

Amendment 57, in clause 1, page 1, line 13, at end insert—

“unless the tenant meets the student test where the tenancy is entered into.

(1A) For the purposes of this section, a tenant who meets the student test when a tenancy is entered into has the same meaning as in Ground 4A.”

Amendment 58, page 1, line 13, at end insert—

“unless the landlord and the tenant mutually agree to have a fixed term during which period the landlord agrees to suspend the ability to seek possession under Ground 1 (Occupation by landlord or family), Ground 1A (Sale of dwelling-house) or Ground 6 (Redevelopment) of Schedule 2.

(1A) During a fixed term tenancy agreed under subsection (1) the landlord shall not be entitled to increase the rent as provided for by section 13.”

Amendment 60, page 1, line 13, at end insert

“unless the landlord acts as landlord for fewer than five properties.”

Government amendments 12 to 17.

Amendment 1, in clause 7, page 9, line 6, leave out from “determination” to end of line 11 and insert—

“(4AA) Where the rent for a particular period of the tenancy is to be greater than the rent for the previous period by virtue of a notice, determination or agreement mentioned in subsection (4A), the rent may not be greater than the rent for the previous period increased by the Bank of England Base Rate.

(4AB) Any provision relating to an assured tenancy to which this section applies is of no effect so far as it provides—

(a) that the rent for a particular period of the tenancy must or may be greater than the rent for the previous period otherwise than by virtue of a notice, determination or agreement mentioned in subsection (4A), or

(b) that the rent for a particular period of the tenancy, where greater than the rent for the previous period by virtue of a notice, determination or agreement mentioned in subsection (4A), must or may be greater than the rent for the previous period increased by the Bank of England Base Rate.”

This amendment would cap in-tenancy rent increases to the Bank of England base rate.

Amendment 9, page 9, line 6, leave out from “determination” to the end of line 11 and insert—

“(4AA) Where the rent for a particular period of the tenancy is to be greater than the rent for the previous period by virtue of a notice, determination or agreement mentioned in subsection (4A), the rent may not be greater than whichever is the lesser of—

(a) the rent for the previous period plus an increase equal to the rent multiplied by CPI; or

(b) the rent for the previous period plus an increase equal to the rent multiplied by the percentage increase in median national earnings.

(4AB) Any provision relating to an assured tenancy to which this section applies is of no effect so far as it provides—

(a) that the rent for a particular period of the tenancy must or may be greater than the rent for the previous period otherwise than by virtue of a notice, determination or agreement mentioned in subsection (4A), or

(b) that the rent for a particular period of the tenancy, where greater than the rent for the previous period by virtue of a notice, determination or agreement mentioned in subsection (4A), must or may be greater than the lesser of—

(i) the rent for the previous period plus an increase equal to the rent multiplied by CPI; or

(ii) the rent for the previous period plus an increase equal to the rent multiplied by the percentage increase in median national earnings.

(4AC) In this section—

“CPI” means the Consumer Prices Index 12-month rate published by the Office for National Statistics for 1 April preceding the date the notice is served.

“the percentage increase in median national earnings” means that calculated by the UK Statistics Authority over a three-year period ending on the date on which the notice was served.”

This amendment would introduce limits on the increases which could be made to rents by landlords. The limits would be calculated by reference to increases in CPI or median national earnings.

Amendment 5, in clause 8, page 11, line 16, at end insert—

“(aa) after “subject to” insert “section 13(4AA) and”;

(ab) omit from “concerned” to the end of the subsection and insert “should be let”;”.

This amendment would amend the Housing Act 1988 so that when determining rents tribunals must take into account the limits on rent increases introduced by Amendment 9 and need not consider existing market rates.

Amendment 6, page 11, line 17, leave out subsections (b), (c) and (d).

This amendment is consequential on Amendment 5.

Amendment 55, page 11, line 27, at end insert—

“(4A) In subsection (2), after paragraph (b) insert—

“(ba) any change in the value of the dwelling-house resulting from improvement works to the property facilitated by any means-tested energy efficiency grant scheme””.

This amendment would ensure that improvements to a property facilitated by means-tested energy efficiency grant schemes can be disregarded by a tribunal determining a new rent for the property, and can therefore not be used as grounds for increasing rent levels.

Government amendment 27.

Amendment 61, in clause 11, page 16, line 26, at end insert—

“(4) The Secretary of State must consult with representatives of the insurance sector before this section comes into effect to ensure that appropriate insurance products are available for tenants whose landlords have required insurance as a condition for consenting to the keeping of a pet.”

Government amendments 28 and 29.

Amendment 2, in clause 19, page 32, line 16, at end insert—

“(aa) where it is given by a tenant in relation to a premises in which they are the first tenants since its construction, not less than twenty-four months before the date on which the notice is to take effect;”.

This amendment would allow an assured short-term tenancy for the first two years after a premises is constructed.

Government amendments 30 and 34 to 39.

Amendment 7, in clause 75, page 101, line 6, at end insert—

“(2A) Information or documents to be provided under regulations under subsection (2) must include—

(a) in respect of a landlord entry—

(i) the address and contact details of the landlord;

(ii) the address and contact details of the managing agent;

(iii) details of each rented property owned by the landlord;

(iv) details of any enforcement action that any local authority has taken against the landlord;

(v) details of any enforcement action that any local authority has taken against the managing agent;

(vi) details of any banning orders or rent repayment orders that have been made against the landlord;

(vii) details of any reports that the landlord has failed to carry out works necessary to remedy any breaches of any applicable housing regulations within the timeframes set out by regulations made by the Secretary of State under

section 10A(3) of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985.

(b) in respect of a dwelling entry—

(i) the address and contact details of the landlord;

(ii) the address and contact details of the managing agent;

(iii) details of any notices given to the previous tenant under

section 8 of the Housing Act 1988, including the grounds relied upon;

(iv) details of the rent that was payable at the commencement of the existing tenancy or, where there is no existing tenancy, the most recent tenancy;

(v) details of any increases in the rent imposed during the existing tenancy and the previous tenancy;

(vi) details of energy performance certificates required by

regulation 6(5) of the Energy Performance of Buildings (England and Wales) Regulations 2012;

(vii) details of gas safety certificates required by regulation 36 of the Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998;

(viii) details of electrical safety reports required by the Electrical Safety Standards in the Private Rented Sector (England) Regulations 2010;

(ix) details of checks required under

regulation 4(1)(b) of the Smoke and Carbon Monoxide Alarm (England) Regulations 2015; and

(x) details of any features of the dwelling relevant to people with disabilities.”

This amendment would introduce specific requirements for landlord and dwelling entries on the Private Rented Sector Database.

Government amendments 40 and 41.

Amendment 11, in clause 96, page 114, line 22, at end insert—

“(1A) In section 40 (introduction and key definitions), in subsection (1) after “has” insert—

“breached a requirement imposed by sections 62(1) or 80(3) of the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 or””.

This amendment would enable a tribunal to make a rent repayment order where a landlord has failed to join a landlord redress scheme or have active entries in the private rented sector database.

Amendment 3, in clause 98, page 117, line 33, after “(homelessness),” insert—

“or that is provided by the Ministry of Defence for use as service family accommodation,”.

This amendment would extend the Decent Homes Standard to Ministry of Defence service family accommodation.

Amendment 8, page 117, line 33, leave out from “(homelessness)” to the end of line 3 on page 118.

This amendment would make the Decent Homes Standard apply to all homeless temporary accommodation provided under the Housing Act 1996 by adapting the definition of “residential premises” in the Housing Act 2004 to remove a requirement for such temporary accommodation to meet certain Government regulations.

Government amendments 42 to 52.

Amendment 56, in clause 142, page 151, line 9, leave out from “subject to” to the end of line 27 and insert—

“the publication of an assessment under section [Assessment of operation of possession process].

Amendment 10, in schedule 1, page 160, line 13, leave out subsection (a).

This amendment would extend the special provisions for purpose-built student housing to HMO student properties.

Government amendments 18 to 22.

Amendment 59, page 168, line 25, at end insert—

“20A After Ground 6 insert—

“Ground 6ZA

The landlord or superior landlord who is seeking possession intends to undertake such works as are necessary to ensure that the property meets the standards set out by regulations under

section 2A of the Housing Act 2004

and the intended work cannot reasonably be carried out without the tenant giving up possession of the dwelling-house because—

(a) the tenant is not willing to agree to such a variation of the terms of the tenancy as would give such access and other facilities as would permit the intended work to be carried out, or

(b) the nature of the intended work is such that no such variation is practicable, or

(c) the tenant is not willing to accept an assured tenancy of such part only of the dwelling-house (in this sub-paragraph referred to as “the reduced part”) as would leave in the possession of his landlord so much of the dwelling-house as would be reasonable to enable the intended work to be carried out and, where appropriate, as would give such access and other facilities over the reduced part as would permit the intended work to be carried out, or

(d) the nature of the intended work is such that such a tenancy is not practicable.””

Government amendments 23 to 26, 31 to 33, 53 and 54.

[Matthew Pennycook]

It is a pleasure to bring this important Bill back to the House this afternoon. Let me begin by thanking hon. Members on both sides of the Chamber for their engagement with it over recent months. In particular, I thank the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (David Simmonds), and other members of the Committee for the diligent and thoughtful line-by-line scrutiny of the Bill that they undertook over the course of many sittings late last year.

This Labour Government promised to succeed where their predecessor had failed, by quickly and decisively acting to transform the experience of private renting in England. Today, we make further tangible progress towards delivering on that commitment. Our Renters’ Rights Bill will modernise the regulation of our country’s insecure and unjust private rented sector, levelling decisively the playing field between landlord and tenant. It will empower renters by providing them with greater security, rights and protections so that they can stay in their homes for longer, build lives in their communities and avoid the risk of homelessness.

It will ensure that we can drive up the quality of privately rented housing so that renters have access to good-quality and safe homes as a matter of course. It will also allow us to crack down on the minority of unscrupulous landlords who exploit, mistreat or discriminate against renters. The Bill will also provide tangible benefits for responsible landlords who provide high-quality homes and a good service to their tenants. Not only will its provisions see the reputation of the sector as a whole improve, as we clamp down on those landlords whose behaviour currently tarnishes it, but the Bill will also ensure that good landlords enjoy simpler regulation and clear and expanded possession grounds, so that they can regain their properties quickly when necessary.

Although we have eschewed the previous Government’s habit of shoehorning swathes of new clauses into legislation following Second Reading, we needed to make a modest number of improvements to the Bill in Committee. Many of the amendments in question were minor and technical or consequential in nature, but I shall briefly explain to the House some of the more substantive changes.

To increase fairness for tenants being evicted because their landlord is at fault, we chose to make an amendment connected to ground 6A. As hon. Members will be aware this mandatory ground allows landlords to remove their tenants when eviction is necessary for them to comply not only with enforcement action, but as a result of separate changes that we made to the Bill with planning enforcement action as well. The amendment allows the court to require landlords to pay compensation to the tenant when they are forced to vacate their homes under such circumstances.

To provide greater flexibility for social landlords in meeting the demands of local housing markets, we widened ground 1B for rent-to-buy tenancies, ensuring that registered providers can take possession in all necessary circumstances. We also exempted assured tenancies from the 90-day rule, which protects housing supply in London and benefits permanent residents by preventing the conversion of family homes into short-term lets. Should a tenant give notice early in their tenancy, meaning that they leave before 90 consecutive nights have passed, these changes mean that the landlord will not automatically be found to have inadvertently provided temporary sleeping accommodation.

Lastly, we made changes to ensure that the introduction of a decent homes standard in the private rented sector works as intended.

[Helen Maguire (Epsom and Ewell) (LD)]

Last week, I asked the Government to ensure that all service family accommodation meets the minimum standards of social housing, as set out in the decent homes standard. The Minister for Veterans confirmed that this is already done, so will the Government support amending the Renters’ Rights Bill officially to extend the decent homes standard to Ministry of Defence service family accommodation?

[Matthew Pennycook]

I thank the hon. Lady for her question and I agree with the objective that she has in mind, but, as we discussed fairly extensively in Committee, we do not think that the Renters’ Rights Bill and the way that the decent homes standard will apply to assured tenancies in this sector is right for MOD accommodation. The MOD is undertaking its own review, and I shall touch on that issue later in the debate.

As I was saying, the changes around the decent homes standard will guarantee that the appropriate person can always be subject to enforcement action and they close a potential gap that may have been exploited by clarifying the types of accommodation that will be required to meet the standard.

Today, we are proposing a small number of further improvements, most of which are again minor and technical in nature. As I have made clear repeatedly, the Government have long recognised that demands for extortionate amounts of rent in advance put undue financial strain on tenants and can exclude certain groups from renting altogether. I am sure that many of us in the Chamber will have heard powerful stories from our constituents about the impact of such demands. The typical story is all too familiar. Tenants find and view a property which, as advertised, matches their budget only to find that, on application, they are suddenly asked to pay several months’ rent up front to secure it. Tenants in such circumstances often confront an almost impossible choice: do they find a way to make a large rent-in-advance payment, thereby stretching their finances to breaking point, or do they walk away and risk homelessness if they are unable to find an alternative?

[Florence Eshalomi (Vauxhall and Camberwell Green) (Lab/Co-op)]

I thank the Minister for the work he has been doing. He highlighted the issue of tenants being asked to pay up front. In my constituency and many other London constituencies, that up-front cost amounts in some cases to a deposit to purchase a home. Does he agree that we need to look into that issue and into estate agents effectively getting tenants to bid against each other for private rented accommodation?

[Matthew Pennycook]

My hon. Friend the Chair of the Select Committee is absolutely right and, as I will detail, that is precisely why the Government are moving to prohibit that practice. As she will know, the Government have already moved to ban bidding wars through the Bill, where desperate tenants are often pitted against each other so that a landlord can extract the highest possible rental payment. Demands for large rent-in-advance payments—in many parts of the country, they can be six, nine or even 12 months’ rent in advance—can have a similar effect, with tenants encouraged to offer ever larger sums up front to outdo the competition and secure a home that may or may not be of a good standard, or risk being locked out of renting altogether.

As I stated previously, the interaction of the new rent periods in clause 1, which cannot be longer than a month, and the existing provisions of the Tenant Fees Act 2019 related to prohibited payments, arguably provide a measure of protection against requests for large amounts of advance rent. As I made clear in Committee, however, there is a strong case for putting the matter beyond doubt, and that is what we intend to do.

[Chris Vince (Harlow) (Lab/Co-op)]

As the Minister will know, before coming to this place I worked for a homelessness charity in Harlow called Streets2Homes. Part of our role was to support homeless people—both rough sleepers and the hidden homeless—to get into rented accommodation, and often we provided deposits for that. Does he agree that the legislation will help charities like Streets2Homes provide more support to more people in need?

[Matthew Pennycook]

It absolutely will. I will detail some of the other changes that we are making to ensure that the Bill achieves our objectives.

Having listened to the concerns raised by numerous stakeholders, the views expressed on Second Reading and in Committee, and the representatives made to me by individual hon. Members, including my hon. Friends the Members for Darlington (Lola McEvoy), for Sheffield Central (Abtisam Mohamed) and for Leeds Central and Headingley (Alex Sobel), we have tabled new clauses 13 and 14.

New clause 14 would limit the amount of rent that a landlord can require to a maximum of one month. It would prevent unscrupulous landlords from using rent in advance to either set tenants against each other in de facto bidding wars or to exclude all together certain types of renters who are otherwise perfectly able to afford the monthly rent on a property. It does so by amending schedule 1 to the Tenant Fees Act 2019 so that any payment of rent made before a tenancy agreement is signed will be a prohibited payment. If a landlord or letting agent invites, encourages or accepts such a payment, they could face local authority enforcement action and a fine of up to £5,000.

New clause 13 would amend the Housing Act 1988 to ensure that tenants continue to be protected from unreasonable requests for rent to be paid early once a tenancy has commenced. Landlords will no longer be able to include any terms in the tenancy agreement that have the effect of requiring rent to be paid prior to the rent due date. Tenants will retain the flexibility to make payments of rent in advance within a tenancy agreement should they wish to do so.

The effect of the new clauses will be that tenants can be certain that the financial outlay to secure a tenancy will not exceed the cost of a tenancy deposit and the first month’s rent, and that they will not be required to pay their rent earlier than agreed. The new clauses will thereby reduce the barriers that stop tenants moving from substandard or insecure housing, and I commend them to the House.

Hon. Members with large student populations in their constituencies will know that the dynamics of the general student rental market in many parts of the country see students compelled to make important decisions about accommodation long before they have formed stable friendship groups, or have had time to properly judge a property’s condition or location, and to consequently pay substantial deposits at a point in time when they are already coping with significant additional costs. This arms race, in which students are pressured ever earlier in the year to enter into contracts for the subsequent academic year, clearly is not benefiting them, and it is arguable whether it benefits the student landlords engaged in it.

The Government have therefore tabled amendments 18 and 53, which will prevent the use of possession ground 4A in instances where a student tenancy was agreed more than six months in advance of the date of occupation, thereby helping to reduce the prevalence of the practice. I want to be clear that the amendment will not lead to an outright ban on contracts being agreed more than six months in advance. Instead, making the use of ground 4A conditional on not doing so will act as a strong disincentive against landlords who wish to use it to pressure students into early sign-ups, as many do now. I thank all those who have advocated for this change, including the former Member for Sheffield Central, Paul Blomfield, during his time in Parliament, my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central and Headingley, and organisations such as Unipol.

Having taken up the cause of a family in her constituency who were forced by a letting agent to continue to pay as guarantors for a property that had been rented by their son before he tragically took his own life, my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) has been campaigning for many years to protect bereaved families by prohibiting the practice. I pay tribute to her for her tireless efforts to secure a change in this area. She was unable to persuade the previous Government to make the necessary changes to the Renters (Reform) Bill, but this Government are determined to act to end the abhorrent practice where guarantors are held liable for unpaid rent owed solely as a result of the death of a tenant who is a family member.

We have tabled new clause 15, which will limit the liability of a guarantor of a tenancy agreement for rent in circumstances where a tenant has died. I should make it clear that if in a joint tenancy the guarantor is not a family member, their liability for rent will be maintained. We consider that fair because we do not think it is reasonable to remove the guarantor’s liability and therefore expose a landlord to additional financial risk where the guarantor is not related to the deceased. Our new clause strikes the right balance: guarantors will be protected from being held liable for rent when they are grieving; landlords will be able to reclaim costs owed prior to a tenant’s death; and guarantor’s liability for other costs incurred under the tenancy will not be affected.

I turn to amendments 40 and 41, which will amend existing powers to charge fees for the private rented sector database. The amendments will expand the definition of relevant costs that can be considered when calculating such fees and would enable fee revenue to include PRS enforcement costs incurred by local housing authorities. Hon. Members should be assured that database fees will be calculated and agreed at a later date, with further details set out in secondary legislation and developed on the basis that fees must be reasonable and proportionate. The amendments do not alter that position. In setting the fees, a range of factors will be considered, including the costs incurred by landlords. However, we need to ensure that when calculating fees, we can take into account all relevant costs, and the amendments will ensure that that is the case.

Enabling fee revenue to include PRS enforcement costs is also important. For the reforms to have the impact we all want, effective enforcement will be crucial, and that point was debated at length in Committee. As we have touched on frequently throughout our consideration of the Bill, local housing authority capacity and resourcing is a real problem. The amendments provide an additional lever to help ensure that every local housing authority has the tools and resources it needs to carry out its enforcement role, so that good tenants and landlords benefit from a well-regulated and enforced PRS.

Amendments 35 to 39 will expand the scope of what can be covered by the compulsory fee that private landlords will be required to pay to fund the new PRS landlord ombudsman. They will ensure that the fee can cover the set-up costs of the ombudsman and activities specified in the regulations beyond those strictly necessary for mandatory aspects of landlord redress. That will allow the ombudsman to set up the core redress service and to provide additional member benefits, such as landlord-initiated mediation or voluntary member redress, without the costs having to be borne by the taxpayer.

I turn to amendments 42 to 52. Rent repayment orders are an important and effective tenant-led enforcement tool. They deter landlords from non-compliance and empower tenants to take action against unscrupulous landlords. The Bill will significantly strengthen rent repayment orders, including their extension to superior landlords in rent-to-rent arrangements. But we intend to go further and ensure that those sorts of arrangements cannot be used to evade responsibility and escape enforcement action. We are also making it clear that tenants and local authorities can seek a rent repayment order against any landlord in the chain, regardless of who they paid the rent to.

Amendments 24 and 26 will limit the circumstances in which landlords can use ground 7 to obtain possession from a person who has inherited a tenancy following the death of a tenant. They will provide greater security for bereaved tenants by preventing them from losing their home, and I acknowledge the role that Marie Curie has played in advocating for change in respect of the matter. Landlords will still be able to use ground 7 if the original tenant had inherited it by will or intestacy, or if the inheriting individual did not live in the property before the tenant passed away. Landlords will also be able to use ground 7 for specialist tenancies, such as supported and temporary accommodation. That is in recognition of the critical role such tenancies play in supplying housing to those with specialist needs.

Private registered providers are currently restricted from using the possession ground for redevelopment—ground 6—apart from where they have a superior landlord who wants to redevelop the property. Other possession grounds, such as the suitable alternative accommodation ground—ground 9—can be used to move tenants, but only if clear conditions are met. Although we expect PRPs to work closely with tenants to facilitate moves to enable redevelopment work, the Government accept that in limited cases it is increasingly hard to meet those conditions, preventing PRPs from progressing with crucial redevelopment work. I thank the National Housing Federation for raising concerns about that matter with me.

14:30

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)]

I welcome what the Minister just said. Is he aware that a lot of landlords are using unreasonable arguments to terminate tenancies or raise rents ahead of this legislation coming into force, and is there anything he or his Department can do to protect tenants during this stressful period for them?

[Matthew Pennycook]

There is a lot of bad practice out there. That is the very reason why the Government have acted so quickly to introduce these reforms, and we are confident that once they are in place, they will provide tenants with the protection that they deserve. In the interim, I am afraid that there will continue to be bad practice of the kind that the Bill will stamp out.

For the reasons that I have just alluded to, we have tabled amendments 19 and 22 to give private registered providers an alternative route for obtaining possession for redevelopment and for decant accommodation. Where the landlord seeks possession on ground 6 or ground 6ZA because they intend to carry out redevelopment work or want to move a tenant on from decant accommodation, they will need to provide alternative accommodation that meets specific requirements. That includes the accommodation being affordable, in a suitable location and not overcrowded. The accommodation must also be let as an assured tenancy or equivalent, unless it is being let for a temporary period pending the tenant being moved to an assured tenancy or equivalent. To use ground 6ZA, landlords must give tenants prior notice to ensure that they are fully aware that the accommodation is provided for temporary decant use. If the landlord does not do that, they are liable for a fine of up to £7,000.

Where landlords wish to accommodate tenants temporarily in properties that are earmarked for redevelopment, social landlords must give prior notice, and set out in a written statement the intention to redevelop the accommodation and the timeframe for redevelopment. Under those circumstances, alternative accommodation will not need to be provided. Social landlords will also be required to pay removal expenses for social tenants when using ground 6 and ground 6ZA. We do not expect that the need to use those grounds will arise often in practice through the engagement of PRPs with tenants, but where needed, the amendments will ensure that significant redevelopment work is not unduly delayed.

Government amendments 12, 13, 17, 20, 21, 23, 28 to 30 and 54 are related and consequential provisions to reflect the new ability for landlords to gain possession for redevelopment and for decant accommodation. We think that this group of amendments gets the balance right, enabling PRPs to progress redevelopment and use temporary decant accommodation during redevelopment works, while ensuring that tenants are provided with appropriate alternative accommodation and removal expenses.

Let me turn finally to amendment 34. Clause 30 ensures that long leases can continue to function by excluding leases over seven years from the assured regime. Those leases are typically used in purchases of leasehold and shared-ownership properties. I am grateful to stakeholders for raising concerns about the possibility of some unscrupulous landlords using clause 30 to circumnavigate the new assured regime by issuing leases of over seven years with a break or early-termination clause that is operable in the first few years. Tenants must not be cheated out of the protections of the assured tenancy regime. The amendment will therefore exclude all leases over 21 years from the assured regime. That will act as a much stronger deterrent to landlords who seek to avoid the assured tenancy regime. The amendment also excludes existing leases of between seven and 21 years, to ensure that they can continue to operate as currently intended. It also ensures that regulated home purchase plans can continue to enable consumers to purchase properties using the principles of Islamic finance by adding them to the list of excluded tenancies in schedule 1 to the Housing Act 1988.

The amendments that the Government have tabled for consideration today are a series of targeted changes designed to ensure that the Bill works as intended, and I commend them all to the House. I thank hon. Members for their efforts to improve the Bill, and for the scrutiny and challenge that the Bill has received so far. I look forward to listening to the remainder of the debate.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

I call the shadow Minister.

[David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)]

May I echo the Minister’s comments, and extend my thanks to him and his team, the other Members who served on the Committee, and the many witnesses who came in to share their views? It is clear that a lot of the discussion has been on the real-world impact that the legislation will have, rather than on political points, and in that spirit, I will set out my responses, and the rationale behind a number of the amendments that we have tabled, which will be the subject of debate and votes this afternoon.

Clearly, legislation is about striking the right balance. This afternoon, we will recognise—as we have done in our contributions to debate on this issue—the impact that the Bill will have on tenants, landlords and the stakeholders whom our amendments seek to protect. I highlight in particular the impact on students; on financially vulnerable tenants, such as those with low credit scores; on tenants who have pets; on small landlords, who are themselves vulnerable to financial shocks; and of course on other groups, such as agricultural workers and those with work-related accommodation, including NHS workers, military families and school staff, all of whom were mentioned in Committee and will, I am sure, be covered again later. All our amendments have sought to address practical issues, such as ensuring that when work is required on a property and a tenant is reluctant to allow the landlord in to carry out that work for whatever reason, there is sufficient freedom and flexibility in the legislation to ensure that the work can take place.

[Daisy Cooper (St Albans) (LD)]

The shadow Minister talks about situations in which tenants must leave a property. A constituent of mine had a terrible ordeal. She moved into a new rental property, but after three months it became uninhabitable, and she spent a further 11 weeks going in and out of eight Airbnbs. She was left thousands of pounds out of pocket because the landlord’s insurance covered his loss of rent but did not cover the accommodation costs that she incurred as a tenant. Will the shadow Minister support my new clause 22, which would require landlords to hold appropriate insurance for the purposes of paying any costs related to alternative accommodation in such situations?

[David Simmonds]

There are a number of ways to address that issue. The Minister has talked compensation, and we have tabled amendments on insurance, but clearly there needs to be an effective dispute resolution mechanism in place, so that such situations can be resolved when they arise. We were focused in particular on ensuring that there is sufficient flexibility when, for example, work must be carried out to improve energy efficiency or to address health and safety concerns such as mould, and a tenant needs to leave because the work will render the property uninhabitable.

Although there have been substantial areas of agreement on the Bill, much of which takes forward work that started under the previous Government in their Renters (Reform) Bill, we have concerns that it creates significant new problems for the availability and affordability of accommodation in the private rented sector. That sector, we must not forget, enjoys the highest tenant satisfaction of any private tenure: 82% of private renters say that they are satisfied with their accommodation.

The backdrop is challenging, and has become a lot more so recently. The Chancellor’s Budget has set inflation rising, and borrowing costs are soaring. Markets are responding to the chaos in No. 11, and that is causing a great deal of uncertainty for tenants and landlords alike. Her decisions are stoking inflation, and that is pushing up rent and housing costs of all kinds. The black hole in local government funding, which was unveiled just before Christmas, means that councils facing the twin existential threats of wholesale reorganisation and growing funding shortfalls lack certainty from the Government about the funding to deliver this enormous increase in workload.

[Florence Eshalomi]

I know that the shadow Minister cares passionately about this area, especially in the light of his local government experience. Given that financial pressures on local authorities are added to by the need to provide temporary accommodation to families facing eviction, does he agree that we should have abolished section 21 no-fault evictions sooner?

[David Simmonds]

I say gently to the hon. Lady that had Labour-run Lambeth council not recently rushed to put 200 of its own people on the streets using section 21, because it is concerned about the impact that the Bill will have on its housing situation, that would have more credibility. It is clear that this is a difficult situation in all parts of the country. There is a significant shortfall in emergency accommodation in London in particular, and a rising cost attached to it there, just as other areas of the country have a surplus of accommodation. That is all part of a complex picture. We need to make sure that everything works efficiently and effectively together, and it is absolutely right that we set out our concerns about whether the Bill goes far enough in all areas towards addressing those issues—and about whether, in some cases, it goes too far.

I touched on the impact of the black hole in local government funding. Another area that is driving significant pressure is the Government’s approach to asylum. They are granting refugee status faster, so people are being pushed out of the doors of Home Office asylum dispersal accommodation and on to local housing waiting lists. I am sure that many hon. Members in this Chamber will have been lobbied by their local authority about the impact of that additional pressure—those additional people, who under our laws are perfectly entitled to that housing—on supply in their area. All those things have a huge collective impact on the pool of available housing.

Of course, as we have seen in the news, the declining confidence abroad in our economy is reducing the number of overseas students. That makes it more important than ever to support thriving student accommodation through tenancies that address students’ needs properly—especially the needs of students who are older, have families, or are studying for higher degrees and have a fixed commitment to a location. All those requirements need to be addressed effectively in this legislation.

Does the Bill in its new form rise to those challenges? It is clear that it fails to ensure that landlords can recover their property quickly when they need to. That reduces their incentive to rent it out, especially for small landlords. If the hon. Member for Hampstead and Highgate (Tulip Siddiq) needs to recover some of her property portfolio to return it to another owner, will she have the assurance under this Bill that due process is available to her? The Bill fails to ensure a flexibility and freedom of contract that allows tenants and landlords to agree a deal that suits them both. Students wanting to book accommodation for a guaranteed period of two years—or shorter or longer—and those moving to a new location for a fixed-term work contract require opportunities and flexibility that are taken away by this legislation.

The Bill takes away landlords’ opportunity to make allowances for financially riskier tenants, such as those with a poor credit record, through rent in advance or other safeguarding arrangements that give the landlord confidence that they will not lose out. That locks financially vulnerable people out of the rental market. The Bill also puts enormous obligations on local councils—one of the biggest additional sets of burdens and expectations in generations—and there is no real clarity yet on how it will be resourced, at a time when all the wider uncertainties that I have described add up to a great deal of additional cost. The Bill also fails to provide the necessary assurance that tenants who have pets and need to access insurance as part of their tenancy conditions will be able to find affordable insurance. That is dealt with in our new clause 21. More concerning still, the Bill is a missed opportunity to provide this House with a proper impact assessment, or the assurance of a future review that would give us really good evidence on which to base our decisions. Our new clause 20 would address that shortcoming, and the House will have the opportunity to vote for it shortly.

Let me give an example of where there is significant uncertainty. In some of the political knockabout, the Government have sought to blame their predecessor for court delays, while claiming that there are no delays worthy of regard in the passage of this Bill, which loads more regulation on to the sector. Both of those things cannot be true simultaneously, so let us properly assess the impact of the Bill before we legislate. There is a lot of good will—for example, on the point about tenants with pets being able to access the accommodation that they need. We do not want to find ourselves returning to this issue in the House because the legislation failed to achieve what we had hoped.

Clearly, it is the role of this Chamber to scrutinise and question, and it is the role of the Opposition to oppose when we cannot see that the legislation before us will result in an improvement in the lot of the people of this country. A pattern is emerging. The Government came after the farmers. They came after the pubs. They came after the small businesses. They came after the private schools. They came after our local councillors. Now this Bill, in its new form, comes after our tenants and our landlords. It is very clear from the number of Government amendments, which the Minister referred to, that the points we made in Committee about the many shortcomings of the Bill that need to be addressed were not lost on the Government.

I return to the point that even a Labour council—a bastion such as Lambeth, led by the Labour chair of London Councils—is rushing to use section 21 to evict its own tenants in advance of this Bill because of the impact it will have. A Labour council and a Labour Government are putting their own people out of their homes.

14:45

I know that the Minister is no Corbynista—we have certainly learnt that in the debate; in fact, I even discovered that he has named his dog after Clement Attlee, who I assume is a great political hero—but Government new clauses 13 and 14 will make this Bill so much worse for prospective tenants. Many of us will have had constituents come to our surgeries who are turning their life around. They have got a job, an income and some savings, but they do not have a good credit record, and they face being locked out of the housing market because the necessary flexibilities and measures that would address that credit score concern are effectively prohibited. Foreign workers coming to the UK, needing to access accommodation and provide sufficient guarantees; foreign students; people who are retired and looking to downsize to a rental property; and people who, for family reasons, cannot access a guarantor will all find themselves significantly disadvantaged by Government new clauses 13 and 14, which increase the risk to landlords by taking away mitigations and take away people’s freedom to reach a contract and an agreement that suits them.

I know that Labour Members are very keen on asking Conservative Members for apologies, so I am going to conclude with one.

[Alex Sobel (Leeds Central and Headingley) (Lab/Co-op)]

Apologise!

[David Simmonds]

I promise the hon. Member that that is exactly what I am going to do. I am going to make an apology to all those in the private rented sector. [Interruption.] The Minister says from a sedentary position that I have only four hours. I am afraid that I will not be able to go through all the private tenants individually, but the apology will be fulsome. I say to those in the private rented sector, 82% of whom are very satisfied with their accommodation, that I am sorry that they will be faced with the mess that this Bill will create, whether they are seeking to rent their first home or need to move to a new one.

[Chris Vince]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[David Simmonds]

I will not give way, because I am concluding. We on the Conservative Benches give those people the undertaking that while they may have to endure that situation until the next election, we will put it right, for the benefit of landlords and tenants alike.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

I call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.

[Gideon Amos (Taunton and Wellington) (LD)]

I thank the Minister for his constructive work with the Liberal Democrats and other parties in Committee.

For a generation cut off from the dream of home ownership who find that, after half a century of flogging off social houses and council houses—over 1.5 million have been lost since 1980—there are now basically none left, it is vital that we restore hope to millions who aspire to a decent home. As such, the Liberal Democrats support the key principle of this Bill, which is to bring an end to no-fault evictions. After the continual stop-start of the previous Government, giving tenants the security they deserve is long overdue. It is time to end once and for all the fear that any complaint from any tenant could be met with an instant eviction notice at any moment.

Of course, landlords do not generally act in such a cavalier fashion; most are good landlords, and we value them and what they bring to the market. As such, to sustain a healthy private rented sector, we have tabled amendment 10, which would extend to off-street student rental landlords the same possession laws that apply to purpose-built student accommodation. Given that fully 31% of properties on the Accommodation for Students website are one or two-bedroom properties rather than houses in multiple occupancy, as Unipol and the Higher Education Policy Institute have pointed out, that is a big chunk of the market, and one that needs to be addressed.

The need for more homes is why we have tabled amendment 2, which would particularly incentivise more build-to-rent accommodation. In Taunton and Wellington, our Lib Dem council has supported the delivery of tens of thousands of new homes; our population increased by 10% up to 2021. Our manifesto called for 150,000 social homes per year—I refer the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests regarding my experience as a social landlord. We clearly set out the borrowing of £6 billion per year that would make that happen, unlike the Labour and Conservative manifestos, which included no numbers whatsoever for social housing.

We need a lot of that build-to-rent accommodation also to be rent to own, so renters can accrue ownership of their own home. It is time to give a whole generation of young people who have been excluded that elusive first step on the housing ladder. Amendment 2 would therefore give a developer of build-to-rent housing the security of a fixed term of 24 months for the first tenancy. Since that was tabled, I have heard from the British Property Federation and others, and they have suggested that an initial fixed term of six months would enable them to secure the investment they need to build more and to get building. That would not undermine the general principle of moving to periodic tenancies, as build to rent is only 0.1% of the housing stock. We will not press amendment 2, but I genuinely urge the Government to take up the idea, run with it and generate more investment in new homes.

Let me turn to the interests of tenants, which have been so overlooked for so long. My constituent and friend Mike Godleman, who was disabled, died while recovering from major surgery and under the threat of a no-fault eviction notice, for no reason he could possibly work out. In part in his memory, our new clause 23 would ensure that landlords of both private and social tenancies must give permission for home adaptations when a home assessment has been carried out. If rental bidding is to be outlawed, as the Minister said, it must not be replaced by bidding up rent in advance, so our new clause 1 would limit rent in advance to two months’ rent. In that respect, I welcome Government new clause 13.

In-tenancy rent increases also need to be limited to protect tenants from exorbitant increases. The most sensible way to do this is set out in our amendment 1, which would peg increases to the Bank of England base rate. Property is a financial and investment asset, and landlords’ costs are more directly influenced by mortgage rates rather than by the general inflation and the cost of living. New clause 22, in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for St Albans (Daisy Cooper), would require landlords to pay for alternative accommodation when dwellings are unfit for human habitation.

Turning to the amendments proposed by other hon. Members, we support the proposed new clause 10 in the name of the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes), which will prevent the guarantor from being liable on the death of a tenant, and we recognise that the Government have tabled new clause 15 to limit that liability, rather than end it altogether. We also support amendment 7 on the content that must be submitted for inclusion in the database. The database could be a very powerful instrument for tenants if it provides information, as I spoke about at some length in Committee. We also support new clause 6, which would give care leavers support through funding for a deposit when they move out of care. Both those amendments are in the name of the hon. Member for Liverpool Wavertree (Paula Barker).

One of the biggest concerns to landlords, tenants and local communities in Taunton and Wellington, as it is in Cornwall, the lakes and other places, is that there is no control over the number of homes being turned into holiday lets and Airbnbs. This has prompted a significant increase to about 3,000 holiday homes in Somerset—a 33% increase in short-term rentals in the south-west since 2019. Visitors of course bring welcome investment, but in some areas second homes are pricing locals out of local markets.

[Mr Lee Dillon (Newbury) (LD)]

My hon. Friend is talking about second homes, which can particularly affect rural communities. Schedule 1 provides mandatory grounds to recover possession in order to house an agricultural worker, but does he agree that the definition of “agricultural worker” is limited and does not reflect rural workers—for example, those who work in the horse training industry in the village of Lambourn in my constituency, where local housing is key to that industry given the nature and the hours of the work of stable staff?

[Gideon Amos]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. That definition needs to cover the breadth of agricultural workers, and I am sure the Minister has heard his point.

Liberal Democrats have long argued for a licensing system and tougher planning controls for second homes, with a new use class to cover second homes and short-term lets. Both this and previous Governments have said that they would create a new use class, so I urge the Minister to say in today’s debate whether that will really happen. Without controls, there is a serious risk of second homes proliferating if landlords do not wish to be part of a more regulated private rented sector following the enactment of this Bill. Our new clause 2 would therefore require the Government to assess properly the growth in short-term lets, and I urge the Minister to do so. In fact, I am not sure why anyone would oppose that amendment.

Finally, our amendment 3 would apply the Bill’s proposed decent homes standard to military service family accommodation. I am grateful to the Minister for taking the time to write to me on this, but the argument that a standard would not be suitable for service family accommodation does not stand up, because clause 98 allows the Secretary of State to establish whatever version of the decent homes standard they feel is appropriate. I do not think anyone across the House would understand why that should be different for service families. We will no doubt hear the Ministry of Defence say that 90% or more of service family accommodation already meets the decent homes standard so it is all okay, but in that case, why not make that claim evident by subjecting that accommodation to the decent homes standard in the Bill?

To say that the recently published “Service Accommodation” report from the Defence Committee, under the chairmanship of the hon. Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi), says something different from the official reports would be a massive understatement. The Select Committee reported evidence from one service family, who said:

“It is impossible to challenge the ‘Decent Homes Standard’ without paying for a survey yourself. It is widely accepted that each house has not been checked but either guessed or it is assumed that the standard of one house is the same as all in one area.”

I therefore ask how sure we can be of the self-declared statistics from the Defence Infrastructure Organisation, or were they from Annington homes? As another witness before the Select Committee said:

“It is disingenuous for DIO to present glossy brochures about being ‘decent homes plus’ when they are anything but”

and

“it is clear that the DIO’s property frequently does not meet the standards.”

Crucially, the witness added:

“Moreover, there is no local authority”—

or anyone else—

“to hold them to account as would be the case for private and other local landlords.”

That is exactly what amendment 3 would provide.

In the Kerslake report, commissioned before the election by the now Secretary of State for Defence—a former Housing Minister—reports of damp, mould and, in other service accommodation, rat infestations abound. If all the witnesses and all these reports are wrong and the official figures are right, showing that over 90% of properties meet the decent homes standard, there is nothing for the MOD to fear in subjecting service accommodation to that assessment, just as social and private landlords will have to do under the Bill. The hard work of my hon. Friend the Member for North Shropshire (Helen Morgan) got even the previous Government to come round to the idea, and the then Minister, the former Member for Redcar, said in this Chamber on 24 April last year that the Government:

“intend to ensure that service accommodation meets the decent homes standard”.—[Official Report, 24 April 2024; Vol. 748, c. 1029.]

Service families such as those of 40 Commando Royal Marines, part of our Taunton and Wellington family community, make massive sacrifices for our country, and sometimes make the ultimate sacrifice. They deserve decent homes, and the MOD should be required to meet the standard, just as the Government are requiring that of other landlords. I am grateful to see support for amendment 3 from across the House. We will be voting for it this evening to support our service families, and I urge Members across the House to vote for it, too.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

I call the Chair of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee.

[Florence Eshalomi]

I start by paying tribute to Members from across the House who have tabled an amendment at this stage, and to the Minister, who has engaged constructively with Members between Second Reading and Report.

As we debate this Bill today, it is important to remember why it is so badly needed: the dire situation that many tenants across all our constituencies are facing through no fault of their own. We have to ask ourselves how we got to a position where tenants have the threat of eviction held over their head for no good reason. How did we get to a position where tenants can be given only a couple of months to raise thousands of pounds for rent in advance, on top of moving costs and the deposit? How did we get to a position where the average rent went up by 9.1% last year? For far too long tenants have been the innocent victims of an unjust power balance in the rental market. As a result, many of them have been unable to keep a roof over their heads and, sadly, have fallen into homelessness. This cannot continue any longer. We need a fairer deal for renters.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Has the hon. Member noticed, as I have, an increase in the number of threatened evictions at the present time, as well as no-fault evictions, excessive rent rises and harassment by landlords of private sector tenants? Does she believe that there is any immediate and urgent protection that we can give those tenants?

15:00

[Florence Eshalomi]

As a fellow London MP, the right hon. Member will see what I see in my inbox, with many tenants facing that threat on an almost daily basis. They are the same tenants who come to our advice surgeries and are turned away from overstretched council departments, and who cannot apply to social housing waiting lists because those lists are already full. It is important that we get guarantees and protections for those tenants as outlined in the Bill, and hopefully help my constituents and his, and people up and down the country.

This situation cannot be allowed to continue. I am proud that the Bill will be strengthened by some of the welcome amendments that Members have tabled. I extend my support to new clause 3, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central and Headingley (Alex Sobel), on limiting rent payable in advance. That is a big issue in my constituency of Vauxhall and Camberwell Green, and I have spoken to many tenants who are being asked to stump up six to 12 months’ rent in advance. That leaves many people priced out of the rental market, ending in a race to the bottom where landlords can charge more and more for less in return.

How can someone finally find a place that they want to call home, only to be told that they need to pay out thousands upon thousands of pounds up front? In some cases, because of the rents charged in my constituency, and many others, the money that people are asked to stump up in advance would amount to a deposit if they took it to purchase a home in another part of the country. We are talking in excess of £30,000 if someone is asked to stump up, with an average rent of £2,500 per calendar month in my constituency. The result is that those who do not have significant savings or family wealth end up needing to borrow money just to have somewhere to live. That cycle of exploitation is pushing thousands of people into debt, impacting them for the rest of their lives.

Research from StepChange shows that one in six private renters are relying on credit to make ends meet. Something must change, because the system is broken. We must lower immediate financial pressures on tenants and make private renting fairer for everyone. That is why I welcome the amendments tabled by the Secretary of State, and I urge the House to support measures that will reduce up-front costs for all renters.

My constituency is home to thousands of university students from great universities across London. Students often have the most insecure housing, because landlords know that they can charge a new group higher rents every year. I therefore welcome measures that restrict the time that a landlord can agree a new tenancy, prior to the end of the current tenancy in student housing. Many of us will remember the time when we went to university and looked for accommodation. We signed up to live with friends or someone we knew—perhaps by Christmas we had all fallen out, and there was that frantic search when someone left the property and we had to find a new flatmate. Many social media posts are put on SpareRoom.com or Facebook, and university students need time to bed into their new accommodation. The new clause will help to give students that breathing space, and avoid the problems they face as a result of early sign-up accommodation.

New clause 10 addresses a vital issue, and I pay tribute to my constituency neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes), for tabling it and for her tireless campaigning. The death of a loved one is a difficult and challenging time for anybody, and the one thing people need is the time and space to grieve. Under current rules, guarantors can end up facing a huge bill for the remainder of their loved one’s rent. None of us would want to be placed in that situation. It is right that the Government have acted to prevent guarantors from being faced with that unacceptable scenario, and I urge the House to support the new clause.

I also wish briefly to touch on some other amendments, which I hope the Government will consider during the Bill’s passage in the other place. Although the Bill introduces a rent tribunal for unfair rent rises, there is concern from groups such as the Renters Reform Coalition that measures in the Bill do not go far enough to prevent landlords from evicting a tenant under the guise of a large rent increase. I am particularly concerned that market rent may not be an appropriate benchmark when market data is poor. Renters at the bottom end of the market could end up being told that an unaffordable rent rise is acceptable under this system. We need guarantees that the use of a tribunal will resolve that, and that it is available and accessible to tenants.

In Scotland, only a handful of rent increase cases a year go through the tribunal system to the rent officer, and it would severely undermine the Bill if tenants who were being exploited did not take up the option available to them. I would be grateful if the Minister could explain how the Government will encourage the take-up of such a provision, and whether he will support the alternative measures and safeguards in the Bill, such as amendment 9, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool Wavertree (Paula Barker).

Finally, a number of amendments have touched on the vital issue of home adaptations in the private rental sector. It is not fair that disabled tenants end up with reduced access to their own homes. The Government are rightly looking at making it easier for disabled people to thrive in the workplace, but what is the point of someone thriving if they do not even have an adequate home or housing?

We cannot expect someone to go out and work and contribute to the economy if they have not had a good night’s sleep. Can any of us imagine being unable to have a shower in our own flat because the landlord refuses to make the necessary adaptations, or trying to cook in a kitchen when we cannot even reach the worktops? None of us would want to live in such conditions, yet that is the reality for many disabled people in the private rented sector in 2025 in the UK. People face such issues on a daily basis, with more challenges and blockages when trying to get private landlords to address them.

I urge the Government to ensure that disabled people do not face a private rented sector that is far too often completely inaccessible to them. I look forward to the Government responding to the report by my Committee’s predecessor on disabled people in the housing sector. The House must continue to look at how we fight for a rental sector that works for everyone, regardless of their background.

[Rebecca Smith (South West Devon) (Con)]

I was privileged to serve on the Bill Committee, and it is good to see many fellow members of the Committee in the House this afternoon. Before I start, I wish to pay tribute to the many excellent landlords across our country. The Bill has been designed to tackle the worst offenders, but it is worth putting on the record that thousands upon thousands of landlords do a good job of providing long-term accommodation for many people in the private rented sector. On Second Reading and in Committee we spoke about the unintended consequences that exist in the Bill, some of which still remain—that was alluded to by my hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (David Simmonds).

[Rebecca Paul (Reigate) (Con)]

My hon. Friend raises an important point about unintended consequences. Does she agree that it is important we consider our key workers, such as NHS staff and police, who rely on accommodation tied to their employment? With the abolition of assured shorthold tenancies, it is important to ensure that provisions are there to support such tenancies, so that they can continue and we can retain and attract much-needed police officers and NHS staff.

[Rebecca Smith]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend, and that is a perfect example of one of the unintended consequences that I do not believe have been put in deliberately but are something that we might see as a result of the Bill. Other issues include accidental landlords—those who did not intend to be landlords and are not large portfolio holders—and small landlords, and we have already heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner about the challenge they face regarding economic drivers and the risk of the market shrinking. We talked a lot about that on Second Reading, but ultimately landlords are leaving the market, and if there are fewer homes for people to rent, we are in a worse situation.

I support new clause 20, which stands in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner. I believe a review of the Bill’s impact on the housing market after a year is important to ensure that we make it even better than it already is, and to address those unintended consequences. We can all agree that is important, given the challenges we have already heard about regarding the long housing waiting lists and the homelessness rife across our country. It is also important to listen to landlords.

In particular, I draw attention to some of the reasons why new clause 20 is so important. Plymouth Access to Housing, known as PATH, is a key player in tackling homelessness in my constituency, and it works especially with those who are harder to place into accommodation. It has rightly said that it supports the Bill in principle—as we have heard, the Opposition support large parts of it too—but in a buoyant private rental market. It is concerned that it is not buoyant, so there is already a challenge. That is why a review would be important. PATH also says that it has received funding in the past to support landlords to stay in the private rented sector. What plans does the Minister have, perhaps outside of this Bill, to ensure that such organisations, in which some Members present today have worked, might be able to mitigate the impact of some of those future challenges?

The South West Landlords Association, which I have mentioned, would benefit from new clause 20, because it would allow for an assessment of a provision that essentially amounts to a doubling of the amount of rent arrears that can be accrued and of the notice required for possession before a landlord can get somebody out of their property. Landlords are particularly concerned about that, for the financial reasons we have already set out. If they have to wait for three months of arrears and then another month’s notice before they can remove someone from their property when they have not been paying rent, that has a massive impact on small landlords, and on those accidental landlords in particular—that is nearly half a year of income they would lose. Ultimately, it is the luck of the draw. We do not know in advance how good tenants will be. If someone has an excellent tenant, it is not a problem, but with a bad tenant it is not so good.

[Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. Does she agree that, fundamentally, the only way to secure the rights of tenants is to ensure the buoyant rental market that she is talking about, where landlords want to enter and invest in it? They are then competing for tenants in the market, which is the biggest and most powerful force of all. That will drive decent behaviour towards tenants, and without that, landlords cannot gain and retain tenants.

[Rebecca Smith]

I appreciate the point that my right hon. Friend makes. I agree that the market is important, but I also appreciate that there are some whom the market has failed. We have to find a situation where those who are not looked after by their landlords can receive support, but, as I have already said, my concern is that the Bill goes too far in the opposite direction.

[Graham Stuart]

With the freedom of being on the Back Benches, I can say that the last Conservative Government got this wrong. When they stopped landlords being able to offset the interest payments on the mortgage for that commercial asset against their income, it was one step among many that reduced the number of landlords coming into the market. Each step along the way, instead of seeking to strengthen the market, successive Governments—Conservative then, and the process is bound to be completed by Labour now—moved against landlords to make it a less and less investable asset. Ultimately, those who lose out most are tenants.

[Rebecca Smith]

I agree with my right hon. Friend that ultimately tenants are at risk of losing out if there are no properties left in the market. That leads me on to my next point and one of the other reasons why an assessment would be useful in the light of new clause 20. We heard in Committee that rural landlords are particularly concerned. According to the Country Land and Business Association, 44% of landlords are planning to sell in the next two years, and only 21% are planning to build new properties. When 90% of those planning to leave cite reforms to the private rented sector as a reason, we need an opportunity to reflect and to see the impact assessment.

Having set out some of my reasons for supporting new clause 20, I will turn briefly to new clause 15, which has been mentioned many times already. I appreciate why it has been tabled in the tragic circumstances that have been laid out. In the light of some conversations we had in Committee, I am interested to see who is in scope to be considered family for the purposes of that guarantor system. The new clause lists

“child…grandchild…parent…grandparent…sibling…niece or nephew…aunt or uncle…or, a cousin”.

That is a wide but—I think we would all agree—highly realistic view of what family is. However, in schedule 1 to the Bill, a landlord can only evict an existing tenant to house a parent, grandparent, sibling, child or grandchild.

I raised this matter with the Minister in Committee, and I know that he thinks tenants’ rights would be inhibited if we extended the definition of family, but I find it puzzling that a wide extended family is justified in new clause 15, but not in the determination of who lives in a property under schedule 1. Often, those family members may be vulnerable themselves and need somewhere to live. It is a niche point, but for the Government to say that someone cannot house their niece or nephew—or, in the light of new clause 15, their aunt, uncle or cousin—feels like an overreach of the state. We are slightly testing ownership rights and restricting trust and freedom in society as a result.

15:15

Briefly, I am not a big fan of amendment 7. It lists some excessive details for what has to be provided in the landlords register, in particular the landlord’s name and address. We all know how worried we are about our names and addresses being in the public domain, and expecting landlords, who are ultimately business people, to do the same is one step too far. We also need to look at when a conviction for being a bad landlord is spent. If a landlord is reformed at some point, we have to give them the opportunity to show that and ultimately provide homes as a result.

Finally, I support new clause 6, tabled by the hon. Member for Liverpool Wavertree (Paula Barker), on looked-after children. This issue came up in last week’s debate on the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, and I spoke to it then. We need to do more to ensure that as corporate parents, which ultimately every single local authority is, we act like parents and that wider family. If a young person needs a deposit or a rent guarantee to enable them to get into the private rented sector when other options for housing are not available, we should look at that. I am not sure whether that measure will be voted on today, but in principle the hon. Lady has my support, and I hope we will be able to work together on that.

[Michael Wheeler (Worsley and Eccles) (Lab)]

I was pleased to serve on the Public Bill Committee for this legislation, which is a concrete example of the positive difference that this Labour Government are making to people’s lives. I fundamentally believe that everyone should have somewhere they can call home and that they should feel secure in that home. The Bill will deliver massive improvements for the millions of tenants in the private rented sector, who for too long have been forced to pay over the odds for housing that is often inadequate and insecure. It finally addresses the clear imbalance of power between landlords and tenants by levelling the playing field through the delivery of a once-in-a-generation boost to tenants’ rights, moving away from expensive, precarious, poor-quality accommodation and ending a status quo that has left tenants under the constant threat of losing their home.

On the Bill Committee, we heard evidence of landlords demanding multiple months of rent up front at the start of a tenancy. That highly exclusionary practice shuts lower income renters out of the market by requiring them to hand over thousands of pounds on top of their deposit at the start of a tenancy. The spread of this practice would have a devastating impact on the choices available to many tenants, so I warmly welcome new clauses 13 and 14 in the name of my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner), which address the issue.

Turning to section 21 evictions, one of the absolute privileges of being an MP is going to visit local schools to answer questions from pupils. Those questions can be about anything, but they normally relate to the interests and experiences of the children, such as, “What can you do about the traffic?”, “How can you make my park and playground better?”, and even—this is a real one—“I really like trees. Do you like trees?” On a recent visit to St Andrew’s primary school in Eccles, I was given a poignant reminder of why we are here and why this Bill is so important. One of the pupils asked me, “What are you doing to stop people being kicked out of their homes for no reason?” It was a shocking question to hear from someone so young, and it serves as an appalling illustration of how wide the fear of no-fault evictions is. No child should even know what a section 21 eviction is, and no child should live in fear of losing their home. We cannot allow these evictions to continue. For me, that is the most critical part of the Bill. It is beyond time to end the spectre of homelessness that hangs over these tenants and end section 21 evictions, giving people a steady, strong, secure foundation to build their lives around.

Unfortunately, no-fault evictions are just one of the many challenges facing tenants. Action to tackle unaffordable rents is badly needed, which is why the measures in the Bill to end rental bidding wars and stop the use of unreasonable rent increases designed to drive out tenants are so important. Never-ending rent increases are bad for tenants and bad for the economy, absorbing money that could be spent more productively elsewhere.

I welcome the measures in the Bill to drive up standards across the sector, such as the application of the decent homes standard and the establishment of a private rented sector database. All of those reforms are entirely necessary in a market where, year after year, tenants are expected to pay more for less.

It is hard to overstate the impact that housing has on people’s lives or the detrimental effects caused by the sector’s current flaws. The Bill’s reforms decisively rebalance a broken sector, ending the scandal of no-fault evictions and encouraging the market to provide affordable, high-quality accommodation with security of tenure. The Bill represents real and meaningful action, which we all should welcome.

[Mr Will Forster (Woking) (LD)]

Many of us are described as either a dog person or a cat person. I have had my dog for over five years now, and as a result I definitely feel like a dog person. Joking aside, it is quite clear that we as a country are in love with our pets; so many of us are defined by them. The laws that govern us should reflect how we live and how we choose to live, but our lack of respect for people’s ability to bring a pet into their home is shocking. That is why I am pleased with the Bill.

Sadly, there are gaps for pet owners in the rental market in particular, which not only creates an uneven playing field for people choosing new homes but fills animal shelters with much-loved pets that should be in their stable homes. Many pets are in animal shelters because of landlords’ unfair rules introduced over the years. According to research conducted by Battersea Dogs and Cats Home, only 8% of private landlords list their properties as pet-friendly. I do not just want to talk about statistics, as the numbers have real-life consequences for families and animals.

In my constituency of Woking, a woman along with her family were evicted after 16 years of a tenancy because the landlord decided to sell the property. The council tried to find alternative housing for the family but repeatedly came up against obstacles, including a no pets policy, which would have forced her and her family to give up their three cats, including one that her autistic son is emotionally bonded to—his emotional support pet. A letter from the GP stated how important the cat was to her child’s wellbeing, but it did not help. The cat reduced her son’s anxiety levels and helped him with his day-to-day functioning—it had a huge impact. Housing officers noted that they could have considered the family for a place in some new flats that the council had built, but the housing provider did not accept pets.

Sadly, that case, which is not unique, perfectly illustrates the emotional toll that the rules can have on families, particularly those with additional needs. Pet ownership might seem like a small issue in the face of homelessness, eviction and the heart-wrenching issues that we have heard about, but it is clear that sometimes, because there are no protections for families with pets, people are forced into a horrible situation. It is fair to say that the culture of a country should be reflected in the laws that govern it, and most of us have pets, so let us ensure that we are allowed to keep them.

I was pleased to hear my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton and Wellington (Gideon Amos) pursue my party’s amendments, and I was pleased to hear from the Chair of my Select Committee, the hon. Member for Vauxhall and Camberwell Green (Florence Eshalomi). There has been much cross-party support for the Bill, while we push the Government to go further still. As supportive as I am of the Bill, it could be better and help reduce our casework of heart-wrenching stories of vulnerable tenants pushed out and treated badly by landlords. The Bill will help us, but, through the amendments tabled and others that I know will be proposed in the other place, it could be better.

[Bell Ribeiro-Addy (Clapham and Brixton Hill) (Lab)]

I declare an interest: like one in three households in my constituency, I rent my home. As a renter and an MP who represents a large number of renters, it will come as no surprise that I rise to speak in favour of the Bill, which will bring in some important, long-overdue reforms to provide private renters with decent and secure homes.

Crucially, I am pleased to see the abolition of section 21 evictions, which was promised by the Conservative party, including in its 2019 manifesto, but never delivered. Close to a million people faced no-fault eviction notices in the last Parliament because of that failure, which added to the homelessness crisis that we now face.

I am happy to see measures in the Bill that focus on affordability. In my borough of Lambeth, renting a one-bedroom home now costs the average person more than half their take-home pay. When teachers, rail staff, nurses and other key workers went on strike to call for inflation-matching pay rises, the last Government attacked them and rejected their demands, calling them greedy, but that Government shrugged their shoulders as private landlords collected above-inflation rent hikes from some of those same key workers year after year.

In recent years, the situation has been particularly pronounced. In March 2024, the Office for National Statistics reported that monthly rents rose by 9.1%, the highest annual increase since records began in 2015. I am glad that the Bill brings some common sense to the situation, ensuring that rent increases can no longer be written into contracts and that landlords will be able to legally increase rents only once a year, and protecting tenants from egregious rent hikes.

Also highly positive are the new measures to strengthen enforcement against slum private landlords, to extend the decent homes standard to the private rental sector and to widen council enforcement powers while extending the range of financial penalties available to local authorities to fund enforcement activity.

I am pleased that the Bill legislates for a consultation on improving energy efficiency standards in rented homes. The UK has some of the most energy inefficient homes in Europe, with 2.6 million private rented homes falling below minimum energy efficiency standards in England and Wales alone. Almost a quarter of renters live in fuel poverty, the highest rate of any tenure.

The Bill contains important measures to provide renters with some basic security and to place some basic responsibility on landlords. However, so much more could be done to strengthen it. I am pleased to see that the Government are supporting the amendments tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central and Headingley (Alex Sobel), and I am pleased to support amendments 9, 5 and 6 tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool Wavertree (Paula Barker), which would better protect sitting tenants from unaffordable rent increases. In its current form, the Bill caps rent increases only at market rate—the prices that landlords set. The amendments would instead cap them at the rate of the consumer prices index or wage growth, whichever is the lowest. I have yet to hear a compelling reason why landlords should see their incomes grow faster than people who actually work for a living.

I place on record my support for the Renters’ Reform Coalition’s call for a national rental affordability commission, to investigate methods to bring down rents relative to incomes.

Although there are not many Members on the Opposition Benches, the few speeches that they have made have talked about homes almost entirely as assets, forgetting that people need to live in them. I welcome the amendments that remember that people with a variety of different circumstances are living in those homes, and they should be viewed with compassion. I welcome and support new clause 10 tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes), as well as new clause 9 tabled by the hon. Member for Bristol Central (Carla Denyer) on adaptations for disabled people.

It is welcome that the legislation would make it illegal to discriminate against benefit claimants and families for exactly the same reason. I would like further changes to prevent discrimination, such as scrapping right-to-rent checks and reforming the laws around guarantors more generally. I would like the legislation to go further on preventing illegal and back-door evictions. As the London Renters Union has pointed out, for the many families struggling with housing costs, a 20% rent hike is simply a no-fault eviction under a different name.

During my time as an MP, I have seen too many unscrupulous attempts to remove tenants to be unconcerned about a likely increase in illegal evictions in response to scrapping section 21. I welcome new enforcement powers, but we have to acknowledge the financial difficulties that local authorities face after 14 years of massive cuts. The Government must ensure that local authorities have the resources to use these enforcement powers.

15:30

Finally, on disrepair, tenants should have the right to withhold rent when repairs are not carried out within appropriate timescales. That happens far too often. Too many renters are paying for a shoddy service and to live in awful conditions. Too many renters, young people in particular, face a despairing future of spending a lifetime as private renters, and are left living in dire conditions of extreme disrepair while continuing to have to pay their full rental amount each month, lest they face eviction. The Bill should provide that they have the right to withhold rent in such circumstances, thereby supporting its stated intention of ensuring that the decent homes standard applies to the private rented sector.

More generally, renters have been neglected across different pieces of legislation over the years. If this landmark Bill is truly to reform the rental sector and shift the balance of power to create a more equal relationship between renters and landlords, more needs to be done. I urge the Government to agree to the amendments.

[Calum Miller (Bicester and Woodstock) (LD)]

I broadly welcome the Bill and the strength and protections that it will provide private tenants. I associate myself with the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton and Wellington (Gideon Amos) and the amendments that he and my hon. Friend the Member for St Albans (Daisy Cooper) have tabled.

I wish to focus on one aspect of the Bill to see if I can encourage some last-minute reconsideration by the Minister. The Government recently repurchased more than 36,000 Ministry of Defence properties from the private sector. This move is a step in the right direction, yet many properties, including those in my constituency of Bicester and Woodstock, have fallen into disrepair, having failed to be managed properly, and are now substandard or unsafe. Service personnel and their families living in Ministry of Defence accommodation in Ambrosden and in Caversfield in my constituency have expressed frustration with the current management and maintenance companies.

Liberal Democrats are clear that our service personnel and their families deserve the same decent standards that the Government are proposing for the rest of the private rented sector. I am proud to support amendment 3 tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton and Wellington. Will the Government now commit to using the Bill to ensure that the recently reacquired Ministry of Defence accommodation will be covered by the decent homes standard, so that those living in service family accommodation in my constituency can access safe, weathertight and warm accommodation?

In response to my hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell (Helen Maguire) the Minister argued that it would not be appropriate to extend the decent homes standard to service family accommodation. Will he therefore clarify, so that I can inform my constituents, whether they should expect to live in service family accommodation that meets that standard and, if they should, how and to whom they can appeal if the accommodation continues to fall below that standard?

[Amanda Martin (Portsmouth North) (Lab)]

There are concerns that military accommodation, which I have in my constituency, is not included in the Bill, but one of my main concerns is the immense cut in funding to that accommodation. The properties are in such a state of disrepair that the Government have had to go back and re-buy them. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that there is a larger issue, which we need to deal with when looking at the Armed Forces Commissioner role?

[Calum Miller]

I wholeheartedly agree. The Ministry of Defence’s service family accommodation estate is in disrepair because of a significant lack of investment by the last Government, which failed to maintain the standards that should be enjoyed by our hard-working and dedicated service personnel and their families. However, the fact that this Government have made the welcome step to purchase that estate means that it is now their obligation to uphold standards. As we are talking about legislation that is intended to set the standard that all renters should expect, including those who are paying rent now to the Ministry of Defence for their accommodation, why are the Government resisting the opportunity to set that high standard for service personnel?

Finally, in the notes to the Bill, the Government emphasise that the concerns that led to Awaab’s law will now be extended to the private rented sector. Given how serious those concerns were, and given that the death occurred as a result of a failure to maintain property in the social rented sector, will the Minister tell me how I can go back to my constituents, who are tenants of the Ministry of Defence, and tell them they will enjoy the same protection as other private renters under Awaab’s law?

[Adam Thompson (Erewash) (Lab)]

Stability for 11 million renters, and, indeed, for 2.3 million landlords, is necessary to build our better Britain. For the tenants enduring the least affordable, poorest quality housing, disregarded renters’ rights have had a profound impact on people’s lives. Britain deserves more than dodgy landlords, back-door evictions and dismal living standards. The British people deserve to feel secure in their own homes.

Some of my constituents are forced to live in terrible accommodation, facing damp and mould. This treatment is fundamentally unacceptable.

[Mike Martin (Tunbridge Wells) (LD)]

The Defence Committee’s recent report described service accommodation as “shocking”, saying that two thirds required massive investment to bring it up to standard and that damp and mould were legion. The hon. Gentleman talks of dodgy landlords—would he characterise the Ministry of Defence as one? Should we be bringing those homes up to the decent homes standard that everyone else in the country will benefit from if the Bill is passed?

[Adam Thompson]

In his opening remarks, the Minister addressed the fact that there are issues in the space, but they go beyond the scope of the Bill. We need to continue having these conversations as we move forward. The hon. Gentleman raises a very important point.

Conservative failure has led to more than 200,000 households with children being forced to live in privately rented damp and squalid homes. According to The Guardian, each year, 31,000 children aged four and under are admitted to hospital because of damp and mould-related issues. I strongly believe that this simply cannot be allowed to continue. Shelter has recently found that a quarter of renters are afraid to ask their landlords for basic repairs for fear of being evicted, and that 26,000 households are at risk of being made homeless from the no-fault evictions we have been discussing today. We need to change, and fast. The abolition of section 21 will end these no-fault evictions for good. This is a vital part of this legislation, which will ensure peace of mind for tenants in their own homes, to which they devote a sizeable portion of their income.

Pressure on local authorities to provide temporary accommodation has become totally unsustainable. Crisis estimates that £2.2 billion of council funds in England were spent on temporary accommodation for 120,000 households between 2023 and 2024—an increase from 85,000 in 2019. My good colleagues at Erewash borough council tell me that they spent three times more on alternative accommodation in 2024 than in 2019. These temporary measures are incredibly costly and ultimately untenable. With accommodation including bed and breakfasts and hotels, alternative housing is an inadequate long-term solution. The Bill will make an excellent start to save council taxpayers’ money and protect tenants’ welfare from unsuitable temporary accommodation.

The vital extension of Awaab’s law to include private rental properties will prevent unsafe living conditions, landlord discrimination and bidding on rental properties. Prospective tenants in the housing crisis simply cannot afford bidding wars aimed at pricing them out. Discrimination based on receipt of benefits and having children will be prevented, ensuring an inclusive and impartial rental market. Hazardous properties will require prompt and efficient landlord responses, and tenants will be protected from unjustifiable rent inflation. Today, while we have been debating the Bill, I have received a communication from a constituent whose rental price recently went up by 21%, which is disgusting. The measures are essential for the efficient operation of rental markets in the UK and for the protection of tenants’ rights.

The much-needed introduction of the decent homes standard will further empower tenants to leave poor-quality homes and provide better value housing for all. According to the English housing survey 2023, one in five privately rented homes is considered substandard. The enforcement of the decent homes standard will put an end to this appalling practice. With the introduction of a £7,000 penalty for non-compliance, landlords will finally be properly incentivised to maintain the necessary high standards that renters deserve. New legal protections will secure quick, impartial, binding resolutions to protect both renters and landlords. Given the new private rented sector landlord ombudsman and the strengthened council enforcement for which the Bill provides, tenants and adults will feel assured that their concerns are respected and will be handled with compassion and certainty.

The Bill will allow us to end backdoor evictions and extortionate rents designed to force renters out. Periodic tenancies ensuring that rent increases are made per the market rate, once a year, will protect renters from unreasonable increases and unexpected evictions. Access to a private rented sector database will help landlords to understand their legal obligations and demonstrate compliance with the new regulations. These measures will allow for certainty in the law for both landlords and tenants. I understand that landlords are concerned about investing and entering the market for fear of payment insecurity, but the current system is designed around uncertainty. The serious lack of clear legislation has caused decades of chaos for both landlords and tenants, with unsafe homes and unsuitable dispute resolution. A transparent and fair system is needed so that all parties can make informed decisions.

As for student accommodation, the changes proposed in the Bill are necessary for the protection of landlords and students alike. Students deserve security as much as everyone else in society. The assured continuance of annual short-term student tenancies will still provide certainty in respect of landlord income, with the ability to evict tenants at the end of the academic year and to increase rents for new tenants as required. According to the National Union of Students,

“the average student loan...leaves students with just 50p a week to live off after…rent”.

Despite those extortionate costs, cold, damp, unsuitable housing has become the norm in student accommodation. Students are at risk of being unable to pay for basic essentials, so it is vital that they are protected from living in poor conditions under unfair terms.

The Bill will extend vital safety and reassurance to thousands of people in Erewash. My constituents cannot continue to endure poor housing at the hands of inadequate renters’ legislation; they deserve security in their own homes. The Renters’ Rights Bill is our way forward, and I urge all Members to support it, as amended today by the Government.

[Rachel Gilmour (Tiverton and Minehead) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to be called to speak in today’s debate on such an important topic. The Bill has many laudable aims, and represents a once-in-a generation opportunity to finally fix the private rented sector for the 11 million people in England—including me—who rent privately. I know that about 13,000 private renters in Tiverton and Minehead will be watching this debate with interest—particularly Owein and his family, whom it took me six months to rehome earlier this year—in the hope and expectation that the House can finally do what it promised to do under the last Government, and pass meaningful rental sector reform. That Conservative Government neglected renters, and I am pleased that this Government are introducing meaningful legislation now. Tiverton and Minehead sits at 88th out of 543 constituencies in England on the barriers to housing and services index of deprivation. I will think closely about anything that the Government can do to improve that, to ensure that it represents a fair deal for renters, particularly those in my constituency.

Let me start by stating the obvious. This is a good Bill, on the whole. It takes strong steps to protect tenants, especially when landlords are not maintaining their properties. Provisions such as Awaab’s law should and must be extended to the private rented sector, so that landlords have a duty to fix hazardous living conditions like those that cost that precious toddler his life, within a set timeframe. Shelter is a basic need, not just a want. I am very pleased that the Bill seeks to apply the decent homes standard to the private rented sector for the first time: such an extension is overdue, and very welcome.

As a pet owner, I am happy to see in the legislation the right for tenants to request a pet. Pets are often an integral part of the family, as they have been for me. My party’s former spokesperson on this issue, my hon. Friend the Member for North Shropshire (Helen Morgan), welcomed the inclusion of this measure in a previous iteration of the Bill, and I echo that welcome.

The Bill should be commended for its ambition in many sectors. For example, it creates a national private rented sector database, so that tenants know about their landlords. It also looks to stop bidding wars, and to ban in-tenancy rent increases being written into the contract. Those are all fantastic reasons to support the Bill today.

15:45

I understand that the Government want the Bill to support cheaper and quicker resolution where there are disputes about a lease arrangement. That is a laudable aim, but I worry about the effect on rural landlords. I welcome the removal of section 21 no-fault evictions from the rental market, but rural landlords say that issues will arise from the implementation date of the measure not being known; it will come into effect on Royal Assent. Everyone—renters and landlords—is very keen to hear firmer news on that, while respecting the fact that the Bill will have to pass through the other place. There are also nuances to be ironed out regarding the status of agricultural landlords. I would welcome any reflection from the Minister on how the Bill can suitably reflect the concerns of the 85% of rural businesses that provide accommodation as part of their offer to attract staff.

The Bill does make some great strides, but we have the chance to go further, faster and better, and I hope that Members across the House agree. As I represent Tiverton and Minehead, where more households include a veteran than the national average, I explicitly echo the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton and Wellington (Gideon Amos) about amendment 3, which calls for an extension of the decent homes standard to Ministry of Defence service family accommodation. That should be welcomed across the whole House, but if it is not voted on today or supported, I would still urge the Secretary of State to look at the proposal and seriously consider enacting it for those who spend their life serving our country, and for their families.

We have all seen the inflationary pressures on the cost of energy in recent years, especially in rural areas, where people often pay a rural premium for things. The Bill needs to push for improved energy efficiency standards in rented housing. I join my Liberal Democrat colleagues in asking the Government to reintroduce the requirement on landlords to upgrade the energy efficiency of their homes to an energy performance certificate rating of C or above by 2028. Too many tenants live in subpar housing, which makes them ill and costs the NHS money. The Government might not want to listen on the impact of the winter fuel allowance cuts, but I hope they will proactively take steps to insulate against fuel poverty.

How can we check that the Bill is working? There is no point in seeking to improve the lot of those who rent property if it just means that landlords shift how they categorise their properties, so that they can keep going about their business as they did before. I therefore add my public support to new clause 2, in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton and Wellington, which calls on the Secretary of State to review whether the prohibition on fixed-term contracts has increased the number of landlords choosing to offer short-term lets instead of letting in the private rented sector. I simply ask the Government what they have to lose by accepting the new clause.

My Liberal Democrat colleagues and I welcome the new Government’s bringing forward legislation to improve the situation for renters. We have been scrutinising it carefully, to ensure that renters really do get the fair deal that they deserve. It is a step forward, and I will support it, but I urge the Government to go further and take up the challenge of improving the Bill, so that it truly represents the seizing of this once-in-a-generation opportunity.

[Naushabah Khan (Gillingham and Rainham) (Lab)]

I join colleagues from across the House in saying that I was proud to serve on the Public Bill Committee. For too long, tenants in my constituency of Gillingham and Rainham have been at the mercy of a broken rental market. The system has gone unchecked for the last few decades, and left renters with a lack of security, limited rights and too often no choice but to live in unacceptable conditions. The previous Government promised change. Ministers stood at the Dispatch Box and assured the public that they would deliver fair reform in the rental sector, yet they failed. They kicked the can down the road, while tenants faced soaring rents, substandard housing and the ever-present threat of losing their home at a moment’s notice.

The failure to address the housing crisis is perhaps one of the most glaring legacies of the last Government. The number of people renting privately has exploded. Many are renting not from choice, but because it is the only option. In Gillingham and Rainham, 22% of households now live in the private rented sector, and rents have risen sharply over the last decade. Families, young people and older residents alike feel trapped. They are locked out of home ownership and housing security, and locked into paying for homes that are too often cold, damp or unsafe.

Recently, my inbox has been full of stories of constituents who have been evicted through section 21 evictions. Pat Cooper, for example, was told just before Christmas that she would have to leave her home of 35 years. It has left her feeling incredibly distressed, facing real uncertainty about what the future holds for her, with limited choices that she can afford. There are countless similar stories of people who have been plunged into uncertainty and the risk of homelessness because of no-fault evictions. The previous Government had every opportunity to end this injustice, but they chose delay and inaction over the wellbeing of often vulnerable families.

My constituents know that this Government are different. Within their first 100 days, they have brought forward this landmark legislation, which I know will deliver the security, dignity and fairness that renters in my constituency deserve. I welcome the fact that the Bill will end the scourge of no-fault evictions once and for all. I welcome the decent homes standard being extended to the private rented sector; that will guarantee that tenants no longer have to put up with mould, disrepair or unsafe conditions. Crucially, I welcome the introduction of an ombudsman to hold accountable those who do not uphold the law, and to give tenants a clear route to justice. I thank the Minister for considering representations from Members of different parties and the amendments in front of us, which introduce new rules to cap advance rent payments and provide safeguards for bereaved families—something that has been spoken about powerfully today.

This Bill sends a clear message: it is the end of the era of unchecked power for landlords who do not want to follow the rules. For far too long, too many tenants have been treated as second-class citizens in their own homes, and I am glad to see that this Government are putting an end to that. It is high time that renters across the country were treated with the fairness, dignity and respect that they deserve, and I am proud to support this Bill as it progresses through this place and the other place. It will give my constituents their basic rights.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

Before I call the next speaker, who I am sure will speak to her amendments, I remind Members that on Report we should consider the amendments and new clauses to the Bill; the debate is neither a rehash of Second Reading, nor a precursor to Third Reading.

[Carla Denyer (Bristol Central) (Green)]

I should declare that I am a member of the Association of Community Organisations for Reform Now, which campaigns on renters’ rights. I thank it for its important work on this Bill, including alongside me.

The Bill is hugely welcome, but it can and should go further to fix the grave and urgent housing crisis. I therefore rise to speak to my new clause 7, on rent controls and affordability; new clause 9, on home adaptations for disabled people; and new clauses 17 and 18, on selective licencing schemes. I also want to put on the record my strong support for a number of amendments tabled by others, including the hon. Members for Leeds Central and Headingley (Alex Sobel), and for Liverpool Wavertree (Paula Barker).

We have people living on the streets and in temporary accommodation because they cannot afford their rent. New clause 7 proposes a living rent body, which would set the rules that applied to the calculation of rent between tenancies. That would control rents and make them fair, considering factors such as the home’s property type, condition and size, average local incomes and so on. Local flexibility will be important. The measure is needed. The Bill gives renters a once-in-a-generation set of new rights that they have long been denied, but rent controls are still needed, because it is no help to anyone if they have a right to something that they cannot afford or access.

Once the Bill does away with section 21, we will need rent controls to prevent rogue landlords from instead hiking rents to kick people out. The Government’s changes to the tribunal system do not go far enough to protect renters from that. First, most tenants do not have the time or energy to navigate the system. Secondly, tribunal panel judges only judge whether a rent rise is fair compared with market rates, and the market rates are too high.

We have a generation of people who will never be able to earn enough to have a mortgage, and who cannot even afford their rent now. If a 21-year-old in my home city of Bristol rents a single room today at the average rate, they will have put £80,000 into their landlord’s bank account by their 30th birthday. No wonder that a third of private renters struggle with their housing costs. New clause 7 addresses the plain fact that the market is failing, with terrible costs for people who are struggling and made homeless.

There are huge economic costs, too; the Government are set to pay private landlords £70 billion of taxpayers’ money in the five years from 2021 to 2026. That is multiple times the spend on new affordable homes. Surely that is the wrong way round. We can add to that the huge annual spend on temporary accommodation, which cost councils at least £1.74 billion in 2022-23. Rent rises are far outstripping inflation. The Deposit Protection Service rental index found that rents outstripped inflation by one third in 2023. Rightmove reports show that asking rents outside London have risen 60% since 2020, and I assume that I do not have to tell the House that incomes have not grown by the same amount.

As I set out in Committee, discussion is vital if we are to avoid unintended consequences, and I do not dismiss the importance of that detailed work. At the same time, we cannot ignore the acute affordability crisis for renters. Key workers are being forced out of cities, and people are being forced out of communities that they have made their home. The average rent in my constituency of Bristol Central has hit nearly £1,800 a month.

I know what the criticisms will be, but let me remind the House that rent controls are an established part of private renting in 16 European countries, where they are a completely normal part of housing policy. It is interesting that private renters in England spend a higher proportion of their income on rent than those in any European country apart from Luxembourg and Norway. Our homes are in worse condition, too.

Rent controls are of course not a panacea. They are needed alongside a suite of housing policies, and increasing social housing supply is really important. However, the private rented sector is in an affordability crisis now, and it will take huge amounts of effort and time, even with the best will in the world, to increase the social housing supply on a scale that will impact private rents. Modelling from Generation Rent and other economists predicts that building 1.5 million homes over this Parliament will decrease the private rent burden by just over 1%.

Moving on to new clause 9, there are 16 million disabled people in the UK—more than a fifth of the population—and 19% of them live in the private rented sector. The Equality and Human Rights Commission estimates that a shocking one in three disabled people in the private rented sector lives in unsuitable accommodation, and a Government survey reveals that an appalling 44% of private landlords have said that they will not rent to someone who requires home adaptations.

My amendment seeks to ensure that, if all tenants can put up shelves, disabled tenants should be allowed to put up grab rails. If all tenants can replace a showerhead, disabled tenants should be allowed to put in accessible washing facilities. It is not acceptable that disabled tenants must get permission for these most basic adaptations.

In Committee, the Minister was sympathetic to my concern but argued that the Equality Act 2010 already covers this issue. However, it clearly is not doing the job. Disabled people are explaining this very clearly and patiently, as did the Chair of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, the hon. Member for Vauxhall and Camberwell Green (Florence Eshalomi), whom I thank.

16:00

The Equality Act is underused in housing law for several reasons. First, what amounts to a reasonable request is poorly defined. Secondly, the law refers to changes in physical features, but the charity Disability Rights UK tells us that some landlords still refuse. And thirdly, the hassle and delay in appealing an adaptation refusal, given the major backlog in the courts, makes it prohibitive for many and unfairly puts the onus on the tenant. I sincerely hope the Minister will take another look at this issue, which is so important to so many people, and I hope that Members will vote with me on my amendment later today.

New clauses 17 and 18 would remove unnecessary barriers to the use of licensing schemes to improve housing standards. This matters because private renters often face terrible conditions. Constituents tell me about mould and damp, shorting fire alarms and electrics, rat infestations and, recently, student renters being left without a working boiler for a whole month. I could go on.

Licensing schemes are vital because they enable local authorities to target regulation where it is needed most, on tackling the worst landlords and supporting the most vulnerable tenants. New clause 17 would enable local authorities operating selective licensing schemes to use the conditions of those licensing schemes to improve housing quality directly.

There is currently a strange disconnect in the Housing Act 2004, highlighted by the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, where local authorities can introduce selective licensing schemes to address poor housing but cannot include conditions in the licence requiring the physical state of the licensed property to be improved. By contrast, additional licensing schemes for houses in multiple occupation can include such conditions. My new clause 17 simply seeks to close this hole by amending section 90 of the Housing Act to enable local authorities to use licensing conditions to improve housing standards.

The complementary new clause 18 would increase the maximum duration of HMO licensing schemes and selective licensing schemes from five to 10 years. Given that these schemes cost a fair bit to set up in the first place, it does not make sense for local authorities to be limited to only five years of operation. The extension would allow local authorities to advertise longer-term staff posts, including training for new staff, and would allow more time for local partnerships to be set up.

Unfortunately, the lack of time today means that we will not be able to vote on all four of my amendments, but I would like to test the will of the House on new clause 9, on adaptations for disabled people. This is not party political, and it is surely not controversial, so we should be able to agree on this today.

Turning to my other amendments, I sincerely hope that the Minister will consider the need for bold moves to create a system that really tackles the affordability crisis that private renters now face, so that all citizens in this country can access a safe, stable and affordable home.

[Rachel Blake (Cities of London and Westminster) (Lab/Co-op)]

I must declare an interest: my husband works for an organisation that funds the Renters’ Reform Coalition, which has been referred to today.

It is a privilege to speak in this debate after serving on the Bill Committee, which took a thorough approach to each element of the Bill. This topic is of great importance to me, I having worked in housing for my entire working life and representing 27,000 private renters in the Cities of London and Westminster. I speak today thinking of those constituents and their experiences.

One landlord revoked a promise to provide free heating for their tenant’s home, leading to it becoming infested with mould. The landlord later refused to respond to repeated reports of pests in the property, before subsequently charging that tenant £1,500 to fumigate the house. I also bear in mind my constituents who were evicted under a section 21 notice, are now living in temporary accommodation with three children and have been on the social housing waiting list for nearly 15 years.

After being let down by dither and delay from the Members on the Conservative Benches when they were in Government, renters such as my constituents have been denied the crucial powers to hold their landlords to account in even the most basic fashion. If those Members had delivered on their promise and tackled the dissenters in their midst, renters would already have the protections that we are introducing in this legislation. Yet the Opposition have the audacity to claim that the legislation and principles that they had tried to introduce when they were in power will, mysteriously, not work now.

On the amendments, the Opposition claim that the legislation will lead to landlords exiting the market, but they repeatedly fail to suggest where the homes owned by landlords would go. Even in his case for new clause 20, the shadow Minister started talking about where the homes might go, so I take the opportunity to ask him directly whether he thinks the homes would disappear. Would he have rather let a home lie vacant than let it out or sell it if it were unprofitable? And if a sale took place, would the mysterious buyers not live there? I will happily give way if he wants to answer—okay, he does not.

To continue on to my main point, I want to focus on the parts of the Bill that consider local authority enforcement and the new clauses that address that. Current regulations in the private rented sector have suffered from a lack of enforcement by local authorities due to a lack of knowledge about private rented stock, limited enforcement capacity and the range and complexity of laws relevant to enforcement. The legislation goes a long way towards addressing those issues. The Bill puts local authorities clearly in the driving seat in enforcing regulation, cleaning up the confusion of the past regime. It expands the range of civil penalties that can be used by local authorities to crack down on poor behaviour. Importantly, it introduces mandatory reporting for local authorities’ enforcement activity, ensuring that councils are accountable to their constituents and to central Government.

The introduction of the private rented sector database will also fill a key gap in the existing regime: a lack of knowledge of the location and nature of private rented properties. The remaining gap in the regime will be funding, and it is essential that fees for the private rented sector database are sufficient to fund the enforcement measures in the Bill. It is therefore encouraging to see that recognised by Government amendment 40, which I am happy to support.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I support what the hon. Member says about resources for local government. Does she also accept that there is a real problem, particularly in London, where there is simply a lack of advice available for tenants because the advice agencies are completely overwhelmed and underfunded? We therefore need to fund independent advice agencies as well.

[Rachel Blake]

I will come on to some of the incredible work that advice agencies do in my constituency.

Funding will need to be met with an active approach by local authorities to recruit the right individuals with the appropriate skills to act as inspectors for the regime. Additional funding may be needed for the immediate recruitment and upskilling of inspectors, and to deal with a backlog of cases related to enforcing existing regulations. Most importantly, landlords must have as many points of potential accountability as possible. That means that reporting on enforcement activity should be published publicly, with the naming and shaming of poor-performing landlords.

The Bill marks not just an era of rights for the millions of private renters across the country, but a step change in the necessary enforcement activity by councils and by renters themselves. The campaigning groups and advice agencies that have stood up for renters for years, including Generation Rent and also Z2K, which operates in my constituency, deserve a mountain of praise for their work in keeping this issue on the agenda of parties and actors across the political spectrum, and I pay tribute to them for their work. The scale of support that this Bill has from Members on the Government Benches demonstrates the significance of this issue. It is important that we work together across Government and civil society to enforce this new rights framework and provide renters with their long-overdue protections.

[Claire Young (Thornbury and Yate) (LD)]

I am sure that all Members have plenty of examples in their inboxes of why this Bill is so needed. Recent cases in my inbox have ranged from someone who had to wait two years for a boiler to be fixed, to someone who has a home so damp that they cannot walk through it without shoes on, as the carpets are permanently wet. They have had numerous electrical appliances fail and have lost their property to mould. Worst of all, they are permanently ill. Even the ombudsman finding in their favour has not produced decisive action to address the problem. It is an outrage that people are living in such conditions in the 21st century and, after the inaction of the previous Government, I welcome the approach set out in this Bill to fixing hazards such as mould.

I also welcome the security of tenancy. So often when people approach their MP about homelessness issues, they talk about the importance of being in a particular location. They say it is because their children are settled in their school, because they need to care for a relative who lives there, and because they need the support of family and friends. Repeatedly moving around robs people of vital community links and stability. It also affects the life chances of children and young people. It is not only no-fault evictions that lead to people moving around; so too do rent rises. So I welcome the amendment of my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton and Wellington (Gideon Amos) to limit the maximum rent increase. Far too many people are forced out of their rental properties by exorbitant rent rises, and this Bill does not go far enough to prevent that situation.

The hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Rachel Blake) asked where the properties will go. In some cases, as our new clause 2 sets out, they will go to people on short-term contracts. We therefore need to consider the impact on the market as a whole.

I wish to raise one small concern of a landlord about the impact that the changes will have both on them and on their tenants. They own a single, upper-floor, leasehold flat. They own only the inside of the flat—not the exterior, the wall gaps or the loft. The Bill’s provisions on energy efficiency and so forth are of concern to them. Obviously, we want people to have homes that they can afford to heat and that meet climate change obligations, but not all small landlords are scrupulous, and relying on them to be so is not appropriate protection for tenants. As the Bill progresses, I ask the Minister to consider how the Government will support small landlords who want to do the right thing, so that the private rental sector does not become the sole preserve of well-heeled, large landlords.

[Matthew Pennycook]

I wonder whether I might provide some helpful clarification: this Bill has no provisions in it that deal with minimum energy-efficiency standards in the private rented sector. The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero will shortly go out to consultation on those MEE standards for the PRS, but it is not within the scope of this Bill.

[Claire Young]

I thank the Minister for that clarification.

In conclusion, I welcome the Bill and the protections it provides, but I urge Ministers to accept the Liberal Democrat amendments put forward by my hon. Friends the Members for Taunton and Wellington and for St Albans (Daisy Cooper).

[Paula Barker (Liverpool Wavertree) (Lab)]

This is groundbreaking legislation, and I pay tribute to the Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister for the excellent work that they have done so far. In October, I said in this place that my hon. Friend the Minister for Housing and Planning, under the leadership of our Deputy Prime Minister, will get this job done, and they are doing exactly that.

This Government are getting on with the job. The previous Government made empty promise after empty promise, ultimately caving in to the landlord lobby on their own Benches. Perhaps that is why the Opposition Benches are so empty today.

The Bill goes a long way towards redressing the power imbalance between those who own assets and those who need to use such assets for the basic human needs of housing and shelter. It will finally see an end to section 21 evictions. To boot, the Bill ensures a protected period at the beginning of a tenancy, the end of discrimination faced by those in receipt of social security, an end to bidding wars, and the rolling out of the decent homes standard across the private rented sector. Indeed, the Government have indicated their intention to strengthen the Bill further by limiting the amount of rent payable in advance at the start of a tenancy.

16:15

I have tabled several amendments, and I am grateful to the Minister for the constructive dialogue we have had to date, even if we do not agree on all of them. New clause 5 is about deposit reform. New clause 6 would provide help to care leavers by placing a duty on local authorities to help them pay or to guarantee any required deposit to enable them to agree a tenancy in the private rented sector. Amendment 7 would introduce specific requirements for landlord and dwelling entries on the private rented sector database. Amendment 8 would apply the decent homes standard to all temporary accommodation. Amendment 55 relates to landlords passing on the costs of grant schemes for energy efficiency improvements to tenants. I acknowledge that the Minister has said that the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero would probably be the most appropriate Department to have a dialogue with on that issue.

Of course, my amendments 5, 6 and 9 look at rent stabilisation. I am also pleased to support amendments tabled by my hon. Friends the Members for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) and for Leeds Central and Headingley (Alex Sobel). Ministers in this Department know all too well that, as with any legislation, I believe that we should look to go further. I hope that we can continue our constructive dialogue on these specific points in the months ahead.

I thank Shelter, the Renter’s Reform Coalition and Generation Rent for their engagement on the contents of the Bill. I wholeheartedly agree with their assessment that affordability in the private rented sector must be tackled head-on. Specifically on amendments 5, 6 and 9, it is all well and good the Government saying that they do not support rent stabilisation, but as a country, we have to come back to this issue. That may not happen tomorrow or next month, but inevitably at some point we will have to, because the private rented sector has lost all sense of proportion, and on that, nothing will change. The problem of affordability will continue to get worse.

Like many right hon. and hon. Members across the House, I am fortunate to be a homeowner. As representatives, however, we should be acutely aware of the unaffordability of rents in south London, Greater Manchester and, of course, my home city of Liverpool and my constituency of Liverpool Wavertree. Sadly, aside from those right hon. and hon. Members with adult children, there is an ignorance among the homeowners in this place, who simply do not understand what it is to face life at the sharp end of the private rented sector.

Our cities have a pull for this generation of young adults, and in those cities we are leaving them to the mercy of landlords and letting agents. Some letting agents play a sinister role, often driving large-scale increases in rent for their own ends. We hear all the time about struggling landlords who run businesses, but how many properties do not have a mortgage next to their name? I would suggest it is a considerable amount, yet rents continue to rise again and again.

The reason we have the Bill in the first place is that, as a society, we have lost faith in the ability of the landlord class to regulate themselves, yet we continue to trust them on the rent they charge. For tenants to break free of handing a gargantuan proportion of their income to fund the passive income of the landlord class, the death of a grandparent or an early advance on their inheritance might help them out, if they are so lucky. This country has utterly failed a generation—the millennials, if you will—who are now not so young and are the first generation not to be better off than their parents by many metrics. In nothing is that more true than housing.

This housing crisis is what happens when we commodify a very basic human need. Forty years on, we still live with the consequences of the Thatcherite settlement that laid the foundations of the modern-day housing crisis. High rents cost the taxpayer considerably: they keep the homeless stuck in temporary accommodation, which costs our councils billions and has put them on the verge of bankruptcy; and they considerably burden the Department for Work and Pensions, whose local housing allowance routinely fails to keep pace with rent increases.

Labour Governments of the past have generally had a radical history on renting, and the Bill keeps that tradition alive. It was Tony Crosland—not exactly from my wing of the party—who remarked in the 1960s:

“The landlord often looks on house-property simply as an investment to give [them] a perpetual return with the minimum of expenditure…Worse still, [they] wield a degree of personal power over [their] tenants which can be offensive and intolerable.”

What Tony said in the ’60s remains true in 2025. I am disappointed that the Bill will not address affordability head-on, but I give it my wholehearted and enthusiastic support in the name of progress.

[Liz Jarvis (Eastleigh) (LD)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in this debate, which is important to my constituents, and to me personally, as I grew up in rented accommodation.

New clause 1 would limit the maximum rent that landlords can request or receive in advance to no more than two months-worth of the tenancy. Excessive deposits mean that far too many people face exclusion from the housing market altogether. For families on lower incomes, younger tenants or those receiving benefits, that practice can make finding a home almost impossible. Landlords increasingly use methods such requiring rent in advance to exclude those they deem undesirable tenants. According to the charity Shelter, 52% of private landlords refuse to let to tenants receiving housing benefit. By capping rent in advance, the new clause would help to level the playing field and reduce the financial burden on those who are looking for somewhere decent to live but cannot get in the door because they are living pay cheque to pay cheque.

Amendment 1 would ensure that any rent increase is capped at a maximum rate in line with the Bank of England base rate. Unchecked rent increases are driving families in Eastleigh and across the country into financial hardship. In the current system, unscrupulous landlords can impose excessive hikes that effectively force tenants out. One couple in my constituency, who are already working two jobs to provide a home for their young children, were forced out of their rented accommodation when their landlord hiked their rent to an unaffordable level. They had no choice but to move to a smaller property that does not cater as well to their family’s needs. Allowing that practice to continue undermines the stability and security that the Bill seeks to provide. Linking rent increases to the Bank of England base rate is both logical and fair. It would create predictability for tenants, while allowing landlords to adjust rents reasonably in response to economic conditions. Office for National Statistics figures show that private rents in Eastleigh rose by 7.6% in 2024. The amendment would provide more protection for people who are struggling because of the cost of living crisis and cannot pay extremely high rents.

New clause 23 would ensure that landlords approve necessary home adaptations for disabled tenants where a professional home assessment has been carried out. One in three disabled people in private rented properties live in unsuitable accommodation. The failure to secure appropriate housing can be life-limiting and make regular activities such as accessing a bathroom or moving between rooms very difficult. In England, 8.8% of disabled people rely on the private rented sector because of the chronic shortage of social housing, yet private rented properties are rarely accessible or adaptable, and only 6.6% of disabled facilities grants are used to make such homes suitable for disabled renters. Unsuitable housing not only hinders independence, but increases reliance on social care, leads to higher hospital admissions and reduces participation in work and community life. The amendment would ensure that disabled tenants have the autonomy and dignity to live independently in homes suited to their needs.

Finally, I express my support for amendment 10, which would extend protections to students in HMO properties. Students are some of the most vulnerable renters, often dealing with insecure housing, high rents and landlords who fail to maintain properties. This amendment would ensure that landlords of student HMOs are held to the same standards as other landlords, providing greater security and accountability. I also express my support for new clause 6: all young people deserve somewhere safe to call home, and as much support as possible to help them find it.

I welcome this Bill as an opportunity to reset the balance of power in the rental market. My constituents in Eastleigh and renters across the country deserve a rental market that works for them, not against them. I urge Members to support the amendments to which I have spoken, to ensure that the Bill delivers the fair deal that renters have been waiting for.

[Mike Reader (Northampton South) (Lab)]

I note for the record my interest in this area, because I am a landlord. As the Member of Parliament for Northampton South, I come to the Chamber today to speak strongly in support of the Bill and many of the amendments. The private and social rented sectors account for around a third of all households in my constituency—that is 35,000 people who will directly benefit from this legislation.

My constituents work hard. Northampton South has a higher economic activity rate than the UK average, yet despite working hard, many people still face incredibly high levels of housing insecurity, high rents and low housing standards. Housing remains the No. 1 issue in my inbox, and the Renters’ Rights Bill will help to address the insecurity and unfairness that my constituents have faced when renting. This Government are taking the decisive action that people in Northampton have long asked for.

I will speak to the amendments, but I have to start by addressing section 21. Ending no-fault evictions will protect my constituents. Right now, millions of renters across the country live with that sword hanging over their heads—that they could be forced to leave their home through no fault of their own. That means parents lying awake at night, worried that they will have to move their children mid-term; it means nurses and teachers being forced out of the communities that they work in; and it means families being unable to put roots down or plan for their future because they can be uprooted at any moment.

The numbers impacted by this insecurity are shocking, and it is really positive that the Government have not only recognised this, but included further protections through their amendments to strengthen protection for renters. I am particularly pleased by the amendments that limit rent to be paid in advance. We have heard some shocking stories today—my mouth dropped when I heard some of the rents being asked for in advance in certain parts of the UK. Protecting renters in this way is definitely the right thing to do.

I welcome the provisions that expand the decent homes standard. I have heard from people in my constituency who live in properties plagued by damp, mould and electrical hazards. Having spent nearly 20 years working in the construction industry and having worked with some great private and social landlords, I can say that it is not that difficult for people to maintain and look after the properties that they run. The fact that 21% of private rented homes in this country fail to meet basic standards is simply unacceptable. Landlords who do not properly maintain safe properties are irresponsible and deserve to be held to account, and this legislation will make sure that that happens.

I am particularly pleased that the Bill will recognise the impact on guarantors in the awful situation where a tenant who they support passes away. The new clauses that have been tabled will mean that guarantors are protected, while also providing fair recourse and support for landlords in that awful situation. I encourage Members to support those amendments.

I am encouraged by the provisions relating to the landlord redress scheme, which provides a clear route for tenants to resolve issues without costly court proceedings. However, I have had extensive conversations with students in Northampton and the Northampton Landlords Association, and with a number of my constituents who are part of the HMO action group, and they told me that, while they support the aims of the scheme—and they have been following the stages of the Bill up to Report in detail—they have concerns that the courts system or the justice system just will not be up to scale. I am encouraged by the Minister’s statement that this is being looked at, but it is critical for professional HMO landlords in my constituency, who will need quick resolution to disputes, and measures to deal with antisocial tenants and tenants who negatively impact on their co-habitees.

16:30

I will finish by picking up some of the comments made in his opening statement by the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (David Simmonds), and some other speeches. Not everyone in this House is of the same mind and some have expressed concerns that reforms may restrict market supply, but I can tell hon. Members that, in my experience, evidence from across the world shows that similar regulations have not prevented growth in the private rented sector. To take Ireland, for example, it introduced protected tenancies way back in 2004, but that sector has doubled and it continues to grow and thrive with those controls in place. Looking at Germany, Australia, Sweden and across the developed world, we see that rebalancing between landlords and tenants has meant that private rented sectors have flourished. The reality is that countries with strong regulation on rental standards have seen faster growth than those that do not have it.

Let me clear: this Bill is pro-market, not anti-landlord. It will help create a more stable rental sector in which good landlords can thrive and bad landlords are held to account. This is good for tenants, it is good for responsible landlords and it is good for our economy.

[Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)]

I rise to speak on new clause 10 in my name and Government new clause 15, but before I do so, I would like to make some brief remarks about other aspects of the Bill. In my constituency of Dulwich and West Norwood, housing is overwhelmingly the biggest challenge that my constituents face. Housing costs have spiralled, and the previous Government wasted more than a decade failing to build the homes we need. The effect of this has been that more and more of my constituents are living in privately rented homes, in which they are currently systematically denied the basic stability and security that most of us would agree are essential to being able to function properly in the rest of life.

Private tenants live with the constant fear that their landlord can at any time, without reference to the terms of their tenancy agreement, decide that they want their property back and serve an eviction notice. I have seen this happen time and again. It stops people putting down roots in their community, because they know that they are likely not to be able to stay. It means that parents live with the constant anxiety that they may have to move far away from their children’s school. It means that older people are denied security of tenure in their retirement. In return for extortionate rents, tenants all too often face appalling standards, and find it far too difficult to get basic health and safety issues addressed.

I therefore welcome this Bill, which delivers the biggest package of reforms to private renting for 40 years, redressing the current imbalance between landlords and tenants, strengthening tenants’ rights and providing much-needed additional security. I particularly welcome the scrapping of section 21 evictions—I have been speaking on them in this place since 2016—the strengthening of local authority enforcement powers and the creation of a new private rented sector ombudsman, and the application of Awaab’s law to the private rented sector.

There is a very great challenge about the affordability of private renting, particularly in London, and my constituents experience that every day. I hope the Minister will keep under review the measures in this Bill that are designed to limit the rate of rent increases to ensure they are as effective as they need to be to create a functioning rental market. I trust that the Minister will do that, and will not hesitate to take further action in future if it is needed.

I now turn to my own new clause 10 and Government new clause 15, which would ban the use of guarantor agreements in the event of the death of a tenant. In this place, all of us know that there are sometimes emails that stop us in our tracks. So it was for me when, in 2023, I received an email from a constituent that read as follows:

“Late last year I became a guarantor for my son so that he could secure accommodation with some friends for his second year at university; without me doing so, he would have lost the house. I had no real concerns about my son paying the rent as he had shown he was a hard worker in a variety of jobs he engaged with to supplement his student loan, which would have covered the rent anyway. The tenancy was due to start at the beginning of July. Tragically, two weeks ago he took his own life, leaving myself, my wife and his sister utterly devastated. On top of everything, I now find myself liable to pay the rent for his room for the entire length of his tenancy if a replacement tenant cannot be found…I wonder if there might be scope to look into the practice of expecting bereaved parents to continue in a role of guarantor to a loved one after they have died.”

I do not think anyone could read that email and think that what happened to my constituents who were facing the worst kind of pain was remotely acceptable. I contacted the letting agent who refused to budge, simply stating that they were following the contract that had been signed.

[Florence Eshalomi]

I thank my hon. Friend and neighbour for making such a powerful speech and reading out what must have been a difficult email to receive on behalf of her constituent. Does she agree that, sadly, many other tenants up and down the country might have had to go through that, and suffered in silence because they were grieving?

[Helen Hayes]

I agree with my hon. Friend, and I will speak in a moment about evidence I have received that this issue is more widespread than any of us might have imagined. I raised the issue at Prime Minister’s questions, and after that I was contacted by many people, including families who had experienced exactly that, as well as letting agents who told me that they explicitly did not use such clauses, and that such clauses were not necessary because the loss of rental income in the event of the death of a tenant is an insurable risk for landlords.

I am grateful to Members across the House who have supported my campaign, including 48 Members who signed new clause 10, and those who signed my amendment to the Renters (Reform) Bill in the last Parliament. I engaged extensively with two different housing Ministers in the previous Government, both of whom said that they were sympathetic but declined to take action in that Bill or support my amendment. I am therefore grateful to the Minister for Housing and Planning for his compassionate and rigorous engagement on this issue. He has listened and, more importantly, he has acted where his predecessors did not. Government new clause 15, tabled this week, bans the use of guarantor agreements in the event of the death of a tenant who is a family member. That is what my constituent asked of me, and I am proud that that is what we will achieve today. I hope my constituents will take some small comfort from knowing that by speaking out and contacting their MP, other families faced with the heartbreak of losing a loved one will not be pursued by a greedy landlord or letting agent, adding financial stress and hardship to an already unbearable situation.

New clause 15 does not go as far as new clause 10, extending protection only to bereaved guarantors who are related to the tenant. While that protection would have helped my constituent, and while I agree that institutional guarantors should not automatically be released from their responsibilities on the death of a tenant, the limitations of the new clause mean that there could still be hard cases in future—for example, a close friend who is bereaved. I therefore trust that the Minister will keep the situation under review to ensure that new clause 15 is as effective as he intends. As a consequence of the Minister’s engagement on this matter, I am content to withdraw new clause 10 and support Government new clause 15. I urge all right hon. and hon. Members to do the same, and to support this Bill, which will deliver the step change in regulation of the private rented sector that we have all been needing for far too long.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes), and I pay tribute to her for the work she has done in trying to alleviate the pain caused when someone dies and all the demands then descend unexpectedly on those who were rent guarantors. She has done a very good job on that and I welcome Government new clause 15.

My constituency, like other constituencies in London and most of our big cities, has a huge number of people living in the private rented sector, with probably more than one-third of the electorate living in private rented accommodation. Collectively, they face insecurity. Collectively, they are often stressed. Collectively, they are often paying high and excessive levels of rent. It is heartbreaking to see the number of people who make their home in the area, become active in the community and make a huge contribution to our community life in lots of ways, but then the rents go up and up, and they simply can no longer afford to stay. Anyone looking for private rented accommodation within the local housing allowance in most inner London constituencies would search for a long time and be unlikely to find anywhere remotely near that allowance. I see my friend the hon. Member for Bristol Central (Carla Denyer) nodding, and the same situation exists in many other cities across the country.

People on average earnings and working-class communities are simply being driven out by the greed of the private rented sector and the market that goes with it, with rents going up by 10%, 15% and sometimes 20%. That is why I intervened on the Minister earlier, and I am grateful that he gave way and acknowledged the real crisis happening day in, day out across the country. Long-term private sector tenants are at threat, because their landlords know this Bill is coming and that there will be greater restrictions—perhaps there should be more—on their raising of rents and doing no-fault evictions, so they are presently trying to evict large numbers of tenants. I meet many constituents who are going through incredible levels of stress about that. I realise that the Bill is not yet law and has to go through the House of Lords, and I am not clear what date it will be finally enacted; I just hope it is soon. I urge the Minister to consider any kind of urgent action and advice he can give to protect existing tenants in the run-up to the introduction of this legislation.

I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Liverpool Wavertree (Paula Barker) for the amendment she has tabled on rent levels. While there is much in the Bill that I welcome, it is sadly a bit of a missed opportunity. Although it restricts the ability of landlords to raise rents in the future, it does not protect those rents being at a reasonable level. Her amendment, which is a good step forward, would link all rent increases to a combination of wage levels and CPI and give local authorities the power to enforce that. We surely should return to that. I hope that the Government will accept one or other of the many amendments that talk about the ability to review this legislation a year on and two years on to see its effects on rent levels and, above all, on security of tenure and whether ways have been found to get around it.

New clause 9, tabled by the hon. Member for Bristol Central, concerns the protection of tenants with disabilities to ensure that they are not discriminated against, and it is important. It has been widely supported across the House, and I hope the Government will agree it, or at least introduce something similar on Report in the Lords if necessary. The hon. Member is representing an important and genuine need across the country.

Lastly, we have a housing crisis in Britain that is utterly beyond belief and utterly unnecessary. I talk to people every day where I live who are rough sleepers. They are walking around, spending the whole day trying to sell The Big Issue to raise £10 or £20 to pay for a bed in a night shelter that they can only access in the evening and have to leave in the morning. It is not accommodation, it is literally just that: a night shelter. Their life is searching for £20 in order just to survive. I am not saying that the local authority does not do all it can to help—it does. I am not saying there are not lots of housing charities that do the same—there are.

But we have a well known number of people living in destitution in our society, grotesque overcrowding in many council and housing association homes, and insecurity in the private rented sector. The Bill goes a long way in reducing insecurity in the private rented sector, but it must be a wake-up call for our society to invest far more in council housing and in sustainable, affordable social housing.

16:45

I understand all the demand for building housing, but owner-occupation, right to buy and all that will not necessarily solve the housing crisis that so many face. It is up to us in Parliament and the Government to do a great deal more to try to alleviate the massive levels of housing stress. The Bill goes some way towards that, but we could go further on rent controls and protection of tenants, and we could do much more on the empowerment of tenants.

I conclude by saying thank you to the often underfunded voluntary sector agencies that do so much to give advice. They are essentially part of the housing community. I thank in particular Acorn, which has done so much to empower tenants in the private rented sector to realise that they are not alone in facing irrational decisions by landlords who should know better than to pursue no-fault evictions, which will thankfully be ended by the Bill.

[Alex Sobel]

I express my gratitude to the Minister and the Secretary of State for tabling amendments on regulating the student lettings season, and on rent in advance. Both are issues that I have been campaigning on. Over a year ago, I went to Leeds University Union’s cost of living event, where those issues and others were brought home to me starkly. They were also brought home to me by the National Union of Students’ cost of living inquiry, and the all-party parliamentary group on students, which was led by our former colleague Paul Blomfield, and on which I served.

I really thank the Government for tabling amendments 18 and 53 on regulating the student letting season, building on the work of Paul Blomfield, who spearheaded work on this in his constituency of Sheffield Central. I will not press my new clause 4, and I urge Members to support those Government amendments. If there is no regulation of the letting season, students are pressured and intimidated by the rental market into signing tenancies with people they hardly know, sometimes nine months before they are due to move in. Students of all backgrounds are forking out deposits to hold properties. Care leavers, estranged students and students from low economic backgrounds are left to either spend money that they do not have or risk housing insecurity for the next academic year. The Government’s decision to limit the letting season to six months gives students the space and time to create healthy social relationships and save money for a deposit for the next academic year, drastically improving their mental wellbeing.

Government new clauses 13 and 14 are landmark measures that ensure that students are not subject to excessive and exploitative up-front costs by limiting rent in advance. That creates a fairer, more accessible rental market. For example, my constituent Olivia was once required to pay £2,500—six months’ rent up front—to move into a four-bed shared property. She is moving to Leeds to begin her masters. Leaving her without savings for a move to a new city is not how we should treat any person vulnerable to the rental market or looking to be an asset to the community. The Government new clauses will help prevent such unreasonable demands and alleviate financial pressure on tenants, so I am withdrawing my new clause 3 on limiting rents, and urge support for the Government new clauses.

My constituent Olivia’s up-front costs were so high because she could not get a guarantor. Now that we have set limits on rent in advance, we must deal with the other side of the issue: the requirement for tenants to provide guarantors. The practice can exclude individuals who cannot meet those demands, or limit their access to secure housing. Adults who earn their own income can be excluded from signing up to rent basic accommodation in a shared house simply because they are not related to someone who owns UK property. My new clause 11 would place tighter restrictions on the requirement for tenants to provide a guarantor, especially when a tenant’s rental history or income offer sufficient security. By refining those provisions, we can balance the legitimate interests of landlords with the rights and needs of tenants.

My new clause suggests that the need for a guarantor should be restricted when the following circumstances apply: when a reasonable assessment shows that personal income, including state benefits received and any other lawful source of income, is sufficient for the tenant to pay the full rent due under the tenancy; when arrangements are made for housing benefit or the housing element of universal credit to be paid directly to the landlord; when the landlord has entered into a contract of insurance, through which they are insured against non-payment of rent—that has been covered by other amendments—and in such other circumstances as may be prescribed in regulations by the Secretary of State. That gives the Government a wide avenue for implementing my new clause.

The expectation that tenants, despite entering into legally binding rental agreements, must secure a third-party guarantor undermines the very purpose of their rental contract. For many students, particularly those who cannot rely on family support, such as care leavers and estranged individuals, that requirement can make renting nearly impossible. The Bill provides a generational opportunity to raise standards of living in the UK to where they should be. As I will not push my new clause to a vote, I would welcome further discussion and engagement with the Minister as the Bill progresses on how we can change the reliance on guarantors in our rental markets. I know that he is open to that discussion.

In my constituency, 44.8% of constituents live in private rentals, compared with a national average of 19.4%. Leeds is home to a population of over 36,000 non-home students. The Bill is imperative to my constituents. Through its measures, I am hopeful that we can establish a rental market that promotes fairness, reduces inequality and strengthens communities across the UK. I am very happy to support the Government amendments.

[Jessica Toale (Bournemouth West) (Lab)]

I thank the Minister for introducing the Bill, and all hon. Members on the Bill Committee who gave their time to consider with gravity this long-overdue reform, which will provide greater security and stability for millions of renters across the country. The Bill is particularly important to my constituency, where more than 31% of households are in the private rental sector. That figure is as high as 55% in some wards such as Bournemouth Central, and up to 45% in the wards of Winton, Westbourne and West Cliff.

The private rental sector should provide people with flexibility and be a stepping stone to home ownership, and it should support our local economies, but for too many, as we have heard from many hon. Members, it exacerbates instability and adds financial stress, locking people out of building the savings that they need to get on the housing ladder, as well as adding to mental health issues. That is particularly salient in my constituency, where the cost of housing is disproportionately expensive, given the wages that people can command. The average rent and property price is above the national average in Bournemouth, but average wages are 5% lower than the national average.

The Bill is timely, because in recent months I have been deeply concerned about the growing number of residents who have been in touch to raise issues about housing, to the point that we are hosting three additional housing super-surgeries, aimed at providing constituents with the opportunity to share specific issues, and at giving them advice and guidance from many local organisations that specialise in these issues.

I want to raise a few issues relating to the amendments that many hon. Members will find apply in their constituencies. The first is poor-quality accommodation. In my constituency, one young woman and her daughter have been bounced from mouldy bedsit to mouldy bedsit while they wait for an appropriate social home. In the process, the woman’s daughter has developed asthma. I welcome the reforms relating to the decent homes standard and Awaab’s law.

Lots of people have been in touch who are being forced into homelessness by eye-watering rental increases or section 21 notices. The average increase last year for a one-bed flat in my constituency was 10%. Another young woman and her daughter were made homeless by a section 21 notice following an unaffordable rent increase. She has been unable to find anything that meets her physical and mental health needs—but in any case, she cannot meet the up-front cost of much private rental sector accommodation in our constituency. I welcome the amendment to address up-front costs. Her situation is compounded by long social housing waiting lists. I welcome the wider housing reforms that the Government are bringing forward, including the increased targets for social housing and the wider house building programme.

There are almost 20,000 students living in my constituency. I recently met student union representatives from Bournemouth University and the Arts University Bournemouth, who told me about the struggles their students face, from the stress of finding an appropriate place to live to the timetables for finding accommodation and the struggle to rent. Many students are forced to couch surf because they cannot afford the deposit money or do not have a guarantor who meets the requirements.

Bournemouth is one of the top 10 most expensive places to be a student in the UK; some 95% of the maintenance loan is eaten up by housing costs, leaving many students with about £4 a week afterwards. That is not a sustainable situation. I therefore welcome the measures to protect student tenancies and address the up-front costs for students. It is my hope that in the longer run, many students will benefit from these reforms, will fall in love with Bournemouth and want to stay, and will be able to find appropriate and affordable places to live.

As we have heard, good and responsible landlords have nothing to fear from these reforms. I welcome the measures to give landlords more clarity and a better understanding of their legal obligations, and to address repossession rights. The abolition of section 21, Awaab’s law and the up-front cost provisions will allow my constituents and many across the country to breathe a sigh of relief. I therefore welcome the Bill and new clause 13.

[Jacob Collier (Burton and Uttoxeter) (Lab)]

For years, renters have faced instability, insecurity and, in many cases, exploitation. Today, we are taking a decisive step towards confronting these injustices. It was a pleasure to serve on the Bill Committee; I believe that we will look back on the Bill as one of the proudest achievements of this Labour Government.

I am proud to support the Government’s new clause 13, which limits the security deposit that a landlord can demand from tenants to just one month’s rent. This change addresses one of the most significant barriers for renters in my constituency: the crippling up-front cost of high security deposits. Previously, landlords were able to demand deposits of up to six months’ rent, a practice that has often priced out renters and left many unable to secure a home. By capping deposits at just one month’s rent, we are making it far easier for tenants to move into their home without facing a financial burden that has long been a barrier to entry to the rental market. New clause 13 is a vital step in making the rental market more accessible and affordable, particularly to those who have been excluded from the market due to high costs. This change will ensure that renters are treated fairly and can more easily get the stability that they need, without facing financial hardship.

The Bill is just one part of a package of measures that support renters and tackle the housing crisis in this country. Those measures include getting on with building those 1.5 million new homes through planning reform; an industrial strategy that gives us the tools to build those homes; and the technical excellence colleges that will deliver skilled people. This Government recognise that the housing crisis is not a problem that can be solved in isolation.

As one of the younger Members of this House, I am part of a generation that feels that we have been trapped in renting. Recent data shows that under-30s are spending more than 30% of their income on rent, which is more than any other group. The people who told us to stop eating avocados and cancel Netflix were not serious about confronting the gravity of the situation. They failed my generation; it is this Government who are taking action today.

The previous Conservative Government had ample opportunity to enact meaningful reform, and I note that Conservatives continue to fail to stand up for renters. Despite their promises to abolish section 21 no-fault evictions—a leading cause of homelessness—they failed to deliver. Instead, under their watch, Parliament was clocking off early while the problems in the country mounted up. They retreated from their housing commitments, and prioritised the appeasement of powerful landlord interests over the welfare of millions of renters.

On Second Reading, the Leader of the Opposition said that resolving the housing crisis hinges solely on increasing housing supply and reducing immigration. Need I remind her that her Government did the exact opposite? In response to comments from the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (David Simmonds), let me note that the Government have already increased housing targets and acted decisively to address illegal migration. However, I reject the premise that renters rights’ should be contingent on these factors alone.

The protection and empowerment of renters is entirely independent of such matters.

As we heard from Shelter and Generation Rent in the Bill Committee, we need to rebalance the power between landlords and tenants. In recent years the balance has favoured landlords over tenants, but the Bill and the Government amendments introduce several key reforms designed to rebalance that relationship. For renters in my constituency, the Bill presents transformative change: families will no longer face the fear of sudden, arbitrary evictions and can truly make their rented properties their homes.

17:00

The tragic death of Awaab Ishak, caused by mould exposure in his social housing, highlights an issue that we must address. Extending Awaab’s law to the private rented sector is a crucial step towards ensuring safe and healthy living conditions for all. Key to this will be enforcement of the law, and I know that the Government are fully aware of that following the Minister’s commitments in Committee, which he has repeated today.

One of the Bill’s most significant but often overlooked reforms is the creation of a national landlord database, which will empower tenants to make informed choices and protect them from rogue landlords. Remarkably, we often have more information about the available takeaway options than about those whom we trust with our homes and our incomes. This measure raises market standards while also recognising the responsible landlords who maintain quality homes. Having introduced a similar system as community officer in the University of Nottingham students’ union, I am aware of the positive impact such transparency brings, and I am proud to see that vision realised here today.

In contrast, I must express my concerns about the Opposition’s new clause 21, which proposes that the Secretary of State consult the insurance industry to ensure that specific insurance products are available to landlords who are letting properties to tenants who are on benefits or will be keeping pets. On the surface that may appear to be a constructive solution, but in practice it risks perpetuating harmful stereotypes and creating further barriers for tenants. The implication that tenants on benefits or pet owners inherently represent a greater risk is both unfair and unhelpful. It reinforces outdated prejudices at a time when we should be focusing on inclusivity and reducing discrimination in the rental market, which is exactly what the Bill is about. As we heard from the hon. Member for Tiverton and Minehead (Rachel Gilmour), pets are part of our families, and I am glad to see the provisions that support that.

Moreover, introducing specialised insurance products may have the unintended consequence of discouraging landlords from letting to those specific groups. Such products are unlikely to make renting more attractive; instead, they may result in higher premiums or more complex terms that landlords will interpret as a reason to avoid letting properties to a tenant altogether. We must not jeopardise the gains in the Bill by introducing measures that risk creating an unequal and discriminatory rental system. The future of the rental market should be one in which responsible landlords and renters co-exist on an equal footing, supported by policies that prioritise fairness and dignity.

These reforms are not mere administrative changes; they represent a profound shift toward justice and equity in our housing system. They acknowledge that while many landlords operate ethically, there exists a minority whose practices undermine the integrity of the rental market and the wellbeing of tenants. To them, we are sending a clear message: “Your time of exploiting loopholes and avoiding accountability is over.”

Ultimately, what our constituents want is simple: they want the security of a roof over their head for them and their family, a job that pays the bills, and healthcare that works for them when they need it. This Government are getting on with delivering all those things, and the Bill is a key part of that. It is a pivotal step towards a fairer, more just housing system. It reflects Labour’s unwavering commitment to protecting renters, supporting good landlords and rectifying the systemic issues that have plagued our rental market for far too long. I am proud to be supporting the Bill and the Government amendments tonight.

[Deirdre Costigan (Ealing Southall) (Lab)]

A third of people in my constituency live in private rented accommodation. That is already pretty high, and well above the national average of 19%, but in some wards, such as Southall Green, it rises to almost 50% of people living in rented homes. Ealing borough is what is known as super-diverse, with people from all over the world having made it their home. For many of my constituents in Southall, English is a second, third or even fourth language that they sometimes struggle with. That leaves them wide open to abuse by rogue landlords, and under the previous Government there was nothing they could do about it.

The Conservatives made promise after promise to renters but never delivered. In hock to vested interests, they reneged on every pledge they made to renters, and some of the amendments tabled by the Opposition today continue to prioritise the needs of bad landlords over those of renters.

In 2023, Generation Rent produced a report into renting by the British-Indian community, using data from renters in Southall. The report found that over a third had not received any of the six important documents they were entitled to from their landlord. A third stated that their landlord had threatened them with an unaffordable rent increase. Over half said that their rent had increased in the previous six months, with the average increase being £200 per month, and many were living in damp, overcrowded conditions. The Renters’ Rights Bill will ensure that vulnerable tenants such as those in Ealing Southall are able to go to the housing ombudsman for help. They will also be able to challenge arbitrary evictions and unfair rent rises.

I welcome the Government’s amendments today, which strengthen the Bill even further, particularly new clause 13, which will end the astronomical deposits often demanded from tenants in advance. That is a very important change, particularly in Ealing Southall, because where people face low pay and massive rent costs, it will reduce a barrier to them getting into good-quality, safe housing and ensure that we do not continue to see people sleeping on the streets.

The previous Government sat back while renters in my constituency were condemned to mouldy flats, huge rent rises and the threat of no-fault evictions, but Ealing’s Labour council took action. It introduced a new selective licensing scheme for private landlords, and these schemes were discussed in Committee. Selective landlord licensing schemes require private landlords to have a licence to rent out properties in designated areas of high deprivation or poor housing conditions. They have to meet certain conditions to obtain the licence, such as providing safe and suitable accommodation, complying with fire safety regulations and managing their properties in a responsible manner. In the absence of action from the previous Government, these schemes have allowed councils such as Ealing to enforce higher standards for renters, as the licensing fees and any fines raised from irresponsible landlords are ringfenced for enforcing standards. In Ealing it has also increased awareness for vulnerable tenants of the minimum standards to be expected in rented accommodation.

The previous Government were not big supporters of licensing landlords in this way. They preferred standing up for landlords, rather than standing up for renters. In fact, they changed the law to give the Secretary of State a veto on selective licensing schemes that covered more than 20% of a council area. It looks like the Conservatives still are not big supporters of these schemes, as one of the amendments they tabled in Committee would have removed selective landlord licensing altogether. That would be a massive backwards move, and I am glad the Minister agrees with me.

In fact, before Christmas the Minister announced that he would be removing the Conservatives’ veto, and councils will now be able to expand schemes such as the one in Ealing to the whole borough if they want to. I am delighted that the Government have taken fast action on this without waiting for the Bill to pass, and I look forward to more councils with poor housing and high deprivation levels being able to bring in successful licensing schemes such as the one in Ealing. I also welcome the Government amendments, which will give more power to local authorities to enforce renters’ rights and to pay for enforcement and investigation.

The Conservatives have proved today that they do not care about renters, and most of the points that they have raised are about protecting bad landlords—although so few of the party’s Members have turned up that I wonder whether they care about anything. By contrast, Labour believes that it is time we rebalanced the power relationship between landlords and tenants so that constituents such as mine know their rights and can enforce them, including the rights to fair rent, to safe homes and to secure tenancies. I welcome the real difference that this Bill and the Government amendments will make to the lives of families in Ealing Southall.

[Steve Yemm (Mansfield) (Lab)]

The reforms outlined in this Bill and the amendments are, of course, long overdue. When I stood for election last year, I promised that I would deliver on five missions for Mansfield, one of which was to fix our broken housing market and ensure that people have affordable homes to rent. Sadly, that mission is necessary because many of my constituents face the constant risk of eviction. They live in fear of massive rent hikes, or endure substandard and even dangerous conditions in their homes.

I will discuss two key aspects of the amendments. First, I support Government new clause 13, particularly in respect of rent and deposits in advance. I will read a few lines from a recent casework email that I received from one of my constituents:

“I saw a house listed for rent and paid a deposit and rent in advance to secure the property. There were a few things that needed doing, which the agency said they would let the landlord know about and get fixed. I received the keys and was shocked that the damp and mould was still there, the radiator in one of the bedrooms was left on the floor and the bathtub was still out of place. The agent told me that the gas engineers told them that ‘the pipes in the house are all botched’. Winter is around the corner and if the heaters were to stop working, I’d have to stay in the house freezing. I’m a nurse and it would not be ideal for me to be off work sick.”

My constituent further wrote:

“I tried every day to get an update and find out if the landlord had sorted out the problems. Every time I had to leave in disappointment. Expecting to move into the new house, I vacated my previous occupancy. I was so mentally, emotionally, physically and financially drained that I went to the agency and I gave them the keys back. I did not feel comfortable living in a house where the landlord is neglecting tenants. If I was to move in and something was to go wrong, he would never come out or get it fixed on time.”

Those are really powerful words from my constituent.

Following that, my constituent was denied any kind of refund for a period of months. They were only able to secure a refund due to a last-minute intervention by my office, after I had suggested that I would name the letting agent in my speech. The letting agent was kind enough to get back to my constituent and has provided them with a full refund today. That outlines the importance of Government new clause 13 and why I am pleased to support it, and it emphasises why the reform set out in the Bill and the amendments is needed. I understand that the decent homes standard outlined in the Bill will force landlords in the private rented sector to make their homes safe and secure, and to give tenants more avenues for financial redress when things go wrong, as in the case of my constituent.

My second point is that we have seen rents increase at a dramatic rate year after year, and it is time that people in the private rented sector got a better deal.

There are usually many applications from prospective tenants when a new property comes to market in my constituency, which often leads to bidding wars driving up the price that is paid to rent the property, pitting tenant against tenant. This leaves only one winner.

I am pleased that the Government have also set the target of building 1.5 million new homes in England over five years, which will make a huge difference. I recognise and welcome those measures.

17:15

Finally, by abolishing section 21 no-fault evictions and fixed terms, the Bill will remove the threat of arbitrary evictions from my constituents and increase tenant security. A constituent recently came to me following a disagreement with her landlord about a proposed increase in her rent and repairs needed to the property. I understand that halfway through the repair process, the landlord suspended the work and served her with a section 21 notice. This was particularly difficult given the tenant’s medical issues and her son’s special educational needs. No reason at all was given for serving the notice. This Bill and the amendments will outlaw such practices and give tenants in my constituency security in their homes.

For the reasons I have outlined, and indeed for the many more reasons that have been outlined by my colleagues in the Chamber today, this Bill and the amendments will have a significant impact on the quality of life of the people in Mansfield who elected me to this place. By supporting this legislation, I am delivering on one of my missions to help fix the broken housing market for local people in my constituency.

[Neil Duncan-Jordan (Poole) (Lab)]

I would like to echo the comments of my neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth West (Jessica Toale), and the references that she made to the housing problems in our area. Today marks a once-in-a-generation moment, with the biggest change to private renting since the Conservatives’ Housing Act 1988. The Thatcher reforms aimed to rejuvenate private renting by making it more attractive to landlords, but instead they helped to sow the seeds of the housing crisis we see today.

England’s 12 million private renters face some of the worst-quality housing in the developed world, with shocking levels of damp and mould and low rates of insulation resulting in health problems and unaffordable energy bills. Instead of producing competitive and affordable housing, decades of tipping the scale towards landlords has resulted in homes that are insecure, eye-wateringly expensive and often short term in nature. While renters in countries such as Germany enjoy secure, long-lasting tenancies with rights to redress when things go wrong, tenants in England can be put out on the street by a no-fault eviction if they complain about a leaky roof or a broken boiler.

I rise to speak in support of new clause 3, which would limit rent in advance of tenancy; new clause 7, which would limit proposed rent levels; and new clause 9, which covers the right to have home adaptations made to a property. We know that this legislation will end the exploitative bidding wars that drive up rental prices, stamp out discrimination on renting to families with children or those on benefits, and give renters the right to request pets in their home.

With section 21 finally consigned to history, tenants will also benefit from longer notice periods, giving them more security in their homes, and we will hold landlords accountable for health hazards in their properties. No longer should tenants and their families suffer damage to their health because a landlord refuses to act. However, to truly deliver a more secure future for renters in England, the Bill needs to close a loophole that would allow no-fault evictions to continue via rent hikes. Amendment 9, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool Wavertree (Paula Barker), would cap in-tenancy rent rises. It would introduce a cap on the amount a landlord can raise the rent of a sitting tenant, so that no one has to face a rent hike higher than wage growth or inflation.

Everyone deserves to have basic security in their home, whether they rent or own. People with mortgages tend to have relatively predictable costs. Tenants have no such peace of mind. Today, there is nothing to protect tenants from extortionate, unjust rent hikes. The Renters’ Rights Bill does not do enough to change that. Last year, a Government survey of landlords found that rent increases of 15% or more when renewing or extending a contract are common. Despite the Bill’s passage, renters who cannot afford extortionate rent hikes will continue to have no alternative but to move, fall into debt or face eviction. There is a real danger that landlords will continue to evict tenants or threaten them with eviction at will, with unfair rent increases taking the place of section 21 evictions.

The Bill’s provisions to allow renters the right to appeal to a tribunal that can determine a market rate increase are insufficient. By definition, market rates are already unaffordable for many renters. Only capping rent increases will give renters genuine security in their home and stop landlords threatening vulnerable people with unaffordable rent hikes or homelessness.

Beyond security, the biggest issue most renters face is the fast-growing cost of having a home to live in. The amount of income that families in this country are losing to rent is rapidly becoming unsustainable. Nearly two thirds of working renters in England struggle to afford their rent, according to recent research by Shelter. Rent produces almost zero social benefit. It takes money away from working-class people who could otherwise spend it in their community, and it passes that money to property owners. What simpler, more effective way could there be to ease the cost of living crisis for millions of people and put money back in their pockets than by limiting their largest outgoing?

Rent stabilisation measures are common across Europe. In France, the annual increase is limited to 3.5%. Meanwhile, in England, rent has been rising faster than wages for well over a year, and the average annual increase reported in December was 9.3%. A cap on rent increases has the support of housing charities, renters’ organisations and major unions. It also has strong public support. When it comes to the housing crisis, we must keep all options on the table, and I hope the Government will back these changes to the Bill.

Ultimately, we need to increase the supply of council housing at affordable rents. In my constituency of Poole, we have some of the highest rents relative to wages in the country. Change, therefore, cannot come soon enough for those renters, and this Bill is a welcome first step.

[John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Ind)]

I will address new clauses 5 to 7 and amendments 9, 5 and 6, which deal with rent controls.

Before I do so, I should say that I take a particular interest in new clause 9, tabled by the hon. Member for Bristol Central (Carla Denyer), which I have signed. I chair an unpaid carers group, and there is a real concern that even where renters have an assessment done for aids and adaptations, they cannot enforce it on their landlord, which leaves them vulnerable. They then have no choice but to move, with all the disruption that involves, particularly if they are caring for someone with significant disabilities.

I did not think that this was a contentious issue, and I hope the Minister will assure the hon. Member for Bristol Central that there can be further dialogue as the Bill goes to the House of Lords. If we have that dialogue, I think we can find something that will satisfy all concerned, to give strength to those with disabilities and those caring for them, while satisfying the Government about the ramifications of an amendment of this nature. If we can get that form of words, I would urge the hon. Member not to press her amendment to a vote. If it were voted down, it would send a message to the Lords that the Commons does not support it, whereas I think there is support in this House, but not necessarily for this form of words. Sometimes it is best not to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. I think we might have something here, but I will leave that to the hon. Member’s judgment.

Briefly, on rent controls, my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing Southall (Deirdre Costigan) mentioned her constituency. Mine is next door, and I represent a working-class, multicultural community, where we have been going through a housing crisis for at least the last decade. I have lived there for 50 years and the crisis is on a scale that we have never seen before, caused, as others have said, by the selling off of our council houses. The irony here is that the same council houses that have been put into the hands of private landlords are now being rented back at very high rents to house the homeless people the council is placing in them.

With the Government’s policy of increasing housing supply and the 1.5 million new homes we are about to build, I hope that a large number of those homes will be social or council housing. As a result, we can start to tackle the housing crisis in my constituency. In the meantime, however, we will be dependent on the private rented sector.

The only reason I am speaking is the representations I have had from constituents, knowing that the Bill was coming up. I have also worked with Acorn, the Renters’ Reform Coalition and various other agencies. Those constituents have said, “Can you try to at least get across the plight we are facing at the moment?” That plight is dependent, to be honest, on landlords who are ripping them off. The concept of price gouging is emerging in all our discussions about the economy; well, here is an element of price gouging. With private rented landlords, particularly in London, we have seen profit ratios of anything between 5% and 20%. The argument is made that we can have a tribunal system. People can go to the tribunal, which will determine things on the basis of the market rent. In fact, the market rent is determined by what is almost an oligopoly of landlords in a particular area, who maintain high rents because they want to maximise profits.

The housing conditions in the private rented sector in my constituency are, in some instances, absolutely appalling. If a tenant complains, that is when the section 21 comes in. Indeed, tenants are terrified of complaining because if they get evicted, they probably face higher rent elsewhere. That is why we need a comprehensive system of rent controls. I do not see any other solution and I hope that, although the Government will not accept the amendments today, we can have a dialogue. That way, maybe between now and the Bill’s passage through the Lords or in future legislation, we can address the issue of rent controls.

The argument is very simple: we just want a system where rents are linked to wages or inflation. That way, people cannot be ripped off by higher rent increases. That is not rocket science. I am old enough to remember when we had rent controls, with a local rent officer who the local authority would send round. They would determine a fair rent and also what was fair in terms of wages and income for any future rental levels. Rent controls operate across Europe and it has not had an impact on the supply of private rented housing elsewhere. It is a system that could be readily introduced.

I worry that if we do not do that now, we will be back here in a couple of years’ time with the same problems. Although we want to build new homes at speed, we will still be dependent on the private rented sector and on some, but not all, landlords—we have good landlords as well—who are basically profiteering at the expense of homeless people.

Turning to my final point, the issue of developing a tribunal system was raised by the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn). The tribunal system needs to ensure that people are properly represented and have time to take on the system. Most of us with a trade union background will have dealt with employment tribunals over the years. They can be effective, but the only reason for that is that we have the might and organisation of the trade union movement. We do not have that in the rental sector to represent tenants.

Although I welcome the idea that we will have a thorough tribunal system that is effective in dealing with hard cases, it is not realistic to expect tenants in my constituency to utilise that without the resources to do so, particularly as we have lost a lot of our advice agencies as a result of austerity. That is why we will need to come back and discuss again the solution of rent controls, which my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool Wavertree (Paula Barker) brought forward.

[Amanda Martin]

Good-quality, secure and decent rentals should not be too much to ask, and I thank those landlords who do provide that in my city and beyond. I welcome the Government amendments to this detailed Bill, which will help residents in Portsmouth North to rent homes that are both secure and decent.

17:30

This new, fairer system includes an end to excessive, up-front costs, huge deposits and advance rents. It will also prevent students from feeling pressured to sign up to an agreement very early in their term, and protect bereaved families by limiting a guarantee liability in the event of the death of a family member or a tenant. The changes, along with the expansion to the decent homes standard, are necessary and part of a significant package of reforms. Behind each one of these issues is a human face and a heartbreaking story.

The reforms will reverse the environment of uncertainty and fear. In the past, tenants’ fear of raising issues has destabilised families and communities and contributed to the broader housing crisis. This is no more starkly seen that in a section 21 no-fault eviction, which was mentioned my hon. Friend the Member for Worsley and Eccles (Michael Wheeler). As a teacher, I, too, have seen distraught kids who have been evicted from their homes as a result of a section 21 notice.

I wish to share the stories of two of my constituents—Sally and Rachel. Sally is a student nurse in receipt of universal credit with a child with special educational needs and disabilities. She has privately rented her home for 14 years. The landlord has neglected the property significantly during this time, and the house has had extensive issues, with mould, leaks and water damage. Despite that, Sally wants to stay. Her landlord decided that it would be easier simply to evict her through a section 21 notice in order to carry out the extensive repairs that needed to be done to the house, leaving her and her son homeless. The callous use of a section 21 notice to displace a family in order to more conveniently perform repairs that should have already been done shocked me.

Rachel is a mum in Portsmouth North with four children, two of whom have SEND. She was given a section 21 notice by her private landlord before Christmas and asked to leave on 8 January—a no-fault eviction with no reason. The cruelty of the timing is shocking. Had the previous Government enacted their 2019 manifesto, Rachel would not be in this situation. She has since been informed by the council that she could be waiting for five or six years for a property that meets her needs, and she is now facing living in costly temporary accommodation that will not meet her children’s needs. In addition, the housing team at the council have warned her that, as too few houses have been built in the city over the past decade, she may be housed in a different area—away from her children’s schools, away from her support network and away from her job.

The Bill finally removes section 21 no-fault evictions, and today’s amendments will strengthen the fairness of the market for a wider set of tenants. On behalf of all the Sallys and Rachels, I wish to acknowledge the work of this Government in their commitment to rebalance the relationship between landlords and tenants and to produce changes that are pro-market, pro-tenant and pro-community. The abolition of section 21 notices and the fair changes that we need cannot come soon enough. It is too late for some people, but this Bill and its provisions will ensure that people in Portsmouth and across the country have access to a good-quality and fair housing system.

[Tom Hayes (Bournemouth East) (Lab)]

There can be few places in our country that need this Bill more than Bournemouth East. A total of 33% of households in my constituency are in private rented accommodation, which is considerably more than the national average of 19%. In Boscombe West, a ward, 60% are private renting, and in East Cliff, where I live, it is 56%. Rents went up in Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole by 9% in the year to October 2024, which is higher than the national average. Some 81% of respondents to Shelter’s Dorset survey in BCP said that they were struggling to pay their rent. As somebody who used to lead a mental health charity, I know the link between health outcomes, poor mental health and poor rented accommodation. For everybody living in poor rented accommodation in Bournemouth East, I know there will be a significant effect on health outcomes.

I want to talk briefly about the abolition of no-fault evictions and bring my constituents into the debate. My constituent Caroline from Boscombe had lived in overcrowded private rented housing with her two children with special educational needs and disabilities for 11 years before being given a section 21. Being forced to move at short notice has significantly negatively affected her mental health. The Labour Government’s abolition of so-called no-fault evictions in the Bill will go a long way to giving tenants like Caroline greater security.

I also welcome a decent homes standard now being applied to the private rented sector. My constituent Naomi, from Boscombe, recently contacted me about the repeated incidence of mould in her one-bedroom rented flat, which she shares with her partner and their 10-week-old baby. The flat also has dangerous loose floorboards, a leaking shower and fire doors that do not close. Her landlord continues to ignore her emails. The provisions in the Bill that apply the decent homes standard to the private rented sector will give renters like Naomi safer, better-value homes and remove the blight of poor-quality homes from our communities.

[Mr Luke Charters (York Outer) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. May I raise the case of one of my constituents? He is a dad with a young daughter, and he has a chronic illness. Not only did he have many unfair deductions to his deposit at the end of his tenancy, but the landlord refused to fix the shower because they claimed it was some other sort of device—what a disgrace. Does my hon. Friend agree that we need to get through that Division Lobby, fight for our constituents and reform renters’ rights once and for all?

[Tom Hayes]

I never disagree with my hon. Friend, and his point shows why we need the Bill.

I welcome the Bill’s protections against unreasonable rent rises and rental bidding. My disabled constituent Tracey, also from Boscombe, got in contact with me about how a substantial hike in her rent acted as an effective eviction as she was unable to pay. Despite looking to use her personal independence payment towards her rent, she was forced to look for alternative accommodation, and we all know how difficult that is in the private rented sector for people with disabilities. I welcome the protections in the Bill against unreasonable rent rises because they will provide much-needed security for renters like Tracey who struggle to find appropriate accommodation in the rented sector to meet their needs.

I also welcome the introduction of a new ombudsman service, which will provide quick, fair, impartial and binding resolutions for tenants’ complaints about their landlord, bringing tenant-landlord complaint resolution on a par with established redress practices for tenants in social housing or consumers of property agent services. I welcome the move to make it illegal for landlords to discriminate against tenants in receipt of housing benefit or other benefits or with children when choosing to let their property. That particularly affects James in my constituency, who is homeless and cannot secure private rented housing because he is in receipt of benefits.

All of us who hold constituency surgeries week in, week out will know these stories. All of us have campaigned for better renters’ rights because we have heard those stories on the doorstep, and I commend the Government for bringing forward the Bill at such an early stage in this Parliament. We must of course make the point that not all landlords are bad, but the Bill is important because it weeds out those bad landlords so that the good landlords—those who care about their tenants and who provide an important duty to the housing market—can continue to have a good reputation, and so the overall market continues to have that good reputation.

I commend the Bill and the ministerial team for bringing it forward. I am thrilled that renters in Bournemouth and across Britain will finally, after many years of delay, get the renters’ rights they deserve—no, that they are entitled to.

[Matthew Pennycook]

Let me begin by thanking all hon. Members for their contributions. It has been a thoughtful and good-natured debate, and while there are many genuine points of difference and emphasis, there is a consensus across the House that reform of the private rented sector is long overdue and must be taken forward.

In the time I have available to me, I will respond to a number of the amendments and key arguments. In his contribution, the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (David Simmonds), suggested that Government new clauses 13 and 14 risk locking out of the rental market those renters who are on the financial margins and fettering landlords and tenants coming to fair agreements on tenancies in the assured regime that we are introducing. I gently say to him that he seriously downplays the imbalance between landlords and tenants, and the fact that requiring multiple months of rent from a tenant in advance when agreeing a tenancy is unfair, places considerable strain on tenants and can exclude some people and families from renting altogether.

Landlords will continue to be able to take a holding deposit of up to one week, a tenancy deposit of five or six weeks’ rent and up to one month’s rent in advance before a tenancy has begun. They will also be free to undertake the necessary referencing and affordability checks to give them confidence that a tenancy is sustainable for all parties. If and when they are not satisfied by the outcomes of pre-tenancy checks, options are available to tenants and landlords to ensure that rent in advance need not be used—requesting a guarantor or engaging in landlord insurance, for example. I hope that provides the shadow Minister with a degree of reassurance on that point.

The shadow Minister tabled a number of amendments—several of which we debated in detail in Committee. With regard to amendments 57, 58 and 60, I restate the argument that I made in Committee: fixed terms mean that tenants are locked into tenancy agreements without the freedom to move should their personal circumstances change, and compel tenants to pay rent regardless of whether a property is fit to live in, reducing the incentive for unscrupulous landlords to complete repairs. For that reason, the Government remain firmly of the view that there is no place whatsoever for fixed terms of any kind in the new tenancy regime that the Bill introduces.

A number of hon. Members referred to problems with short-term lets. The Government are cognisant of the impact that excessive concentrations of short-term lets can have on the affordability and availability of local housing and the sustainability of local communities. We are committed to monitoring that issue and, as the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, the hon. Member for Taunton and Wellington (Gideon Amos), knows, we are exploring what further powers local authorities need to bear down on it. However, putting an arbitrary deadline in law, as new clause 2 would do, is not the way to proceed.

[Gideon Amos]

I am grateful to the Minister for his response on that issue. Will he comment on the question of a use class order for second homes?

[Matthew Pennycook]

The hon. Gentleman tempts me to engage in an entirely different debate. I am more than happy to update him, at the appropriate time, with all the measures that the Government will take forward in response to that issue. He can be assured, however, that we are giving it serious attention, and this will not be a case of the Government kicking something into the long grass.

The Government are clear that we will not delay on giving renters the long-term security, rights and protections that they deserve by making the necessary and long-overdue transformation of the sector, contingent on a broad and undefined assessment of the possession process, as new clause 19 and amendment 56 propose. The shadow Minister knows that I fully agree with him that court readiness is essential to the successful operation of the new system. That is why my officials and I are working closely with the Minister for Courts and Legal Services and her team to ensure that the Courts and Tribunals Service is ready when the new tenancy system is brought into force.

The shadow Minister also pressed the Government to place in the Bill a legal requirement to publish an annual review of its impact on the availability of homes. He will know that the Government have published a green-rated impact assessment. We will, of course, closely monitor the impact of the Bill on the housing market, but setting an arbitrary deadline in law for doing so would, we believe, detract from that work. Although I do not begrudge him for tabling new clause 20 to make that point, he will know that no Government could accept such an amendment.

The Liberal Democrat spokesperson, the hon. Member for Taunton and Wellington, and several Members of his party raised the issue of military accommodation and tabled amendment 3. There is no dispute about that amendment’s objective—namely to ensure that all service accommodation equals or exceeds the decent homes standard. The Government have made that commitment. Where we do disagree is on whether the approach that we are taking in the Bill is appropriate for the unique circumstances surrounding Ministry of Defence accommodation. We do not believe that it is, for various reasons that we discussed at length in Committee, including the problems that local authorities have in inspecting accommodation that is behind the wire on sensitive MOD bases.

As the hon. Gentleman is aware, the Ministry of Defence is committed to reviewing its decent homes-plus standard for accommodation, with the aim of improving the standard of SFA across the estate, where it needs improvement, as part of its long-term strategy for service accommodation. That review will be informed by my Department’s work on housing standards, including our review of the content of the DHS, which Ministers in the Ministry of Defence are committed to aligning with. The Ministry of Defence will provide further information on the review of its target early in 2025.

[Gideon Amos]

The Minister is generous in giving way. On the question of accommodation behind the wire, to clarify, amendment 3 deals with service family accommodation. Service family accommodation is generally not behind the wire; it is on the street, where councils can access it.

17:45

[Matthew Pennycook]

That is only one of the issues; as the hon. Gentleman knows, we debated many others in Committee. I appreciate that there is a principled disagreement on this point. We share his objective, but we think that there is a different and more sensible way to go about meeting it. Addressing service accommodation through this Bill is not the way to proceed.

[Calum Miller]

Will the Minister give way?

[Matthew Pennycook]

I will, happily, and then I will make some progress.

[Calum Miller]

I am very grateful to the Minister; I appreciate the time constraints that he faces. The critical question is when those in our communities who live in service accommodation can expect it to reach the standards that he and his colleagues intend to set out. I appreciate the co-operation with Defence Ministers, but can the Minister give us a date by which that standard will be in place?

[Matthew Pennycook]

I am sympathetic to the hon. Gentleman’s question and his desire for that information, but it is not for me to give a date from the Dispatch Box today; my colleagues in the Ministry of Defence will provide further information on the review of that target standard early this year.

The Liberal Democrat spokesman, the hon. Member for Taunton and Wellington, along with my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool Wavertree (Paula Barker) and the hon. Member for Bristol Central (Carla Denyer), spoke in support of their respective amendments to introduce forms of rent control. I assure each of those Members that I entirely understand their concerns about the affordability of rent generally, and specifically the potential for retaliatory no-fault economic evictions. Once section 21 evictions are done away with, unscrupulous landlords will no doubt attempt to evict tenants who assert their rights by means of extortionate rent rises.

However, as we debated extensively in Committee, the Government sincerely believe that the introduction of rent controls in the private rented sector could harm tenants as well as landlords by reducing supply and discouraging investment. While I fully appreciate that there is a broad spectrum of regulation that falls under the title of rent control, there is, as we debated at length in Committee, sufficient international evidence from countries such as Sweden and Germany, cities such as San Francisco and Ontario, and the Scottish experience since 2017, to attest to the potential detrimental impacts of rent control. For that reason, we believe that we should proceed on the basis of the protections that the Bill provides against unreasonable within-tenancy rent rises, as well as wider action to improve affordability, not least support for the growth of the build-to-rent sector.

My hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool Wavertree also tabled new clause 5, which would place a duty on the Secretary of State to conduct a review of the tenancy deposit protection schemes and requirements. The contracts governing those schemes are due to end next year, and their re-procurement provides an opportunity for the Department to review their objectives and how they operate. I am more than happy to engage with my hon. Friend on that process; on that basis, I ask her to not divide the House on her new clause. I am also more than happy to ensure that she is closely involved in the development of the PRS database. We believe that there are good reasons for the detail relating to that database to be laid out in secondary legislation, rather than put in the Bill, as her amendment 7 stipulates. However, it is our clear expectation that the database will capture key information about landlords, and we recognise that there may be clear benefits in using it to collect a wider range of information, as her amendment suggests.

My hon. Friend also tabled new clause 6, which would require local authorities, if requested, to pay or guarantee the tenancy deposits of care leavers seeking to access the private rented sector. I am of the view that local authorities, rather than central Government, are best placed to assess the best way of supporting care leavers in their area. I reassure my hon. Friend that while local authorities maintain their ability to support care leavers in their areas, the Government are committed to putting in place the support that local government needs to do so effectively.

My hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central and Headingley (Alex Sobel) made a strong case for new clause 11 on acting to limit guarantors. I appreciate fully that obtaining a guarantor can be difficult for some prospective tenants, and I understand the reasoning behind his amendment. However, I am also mindful that in some instances the use of guarantors can provide good landlords with the assurance necessary to let their properties to tenants who may otherwise find it difficult to access private rented accommodation. For example, there are those with a poor credit history—the kind of tenant who the shadow Minister worries our rent-in-advance amendments will harm. Having considered this issue in great detail, I ultimately concluded that limiting guarantors could inadvertently make life more difficult for certain types of renter. That said, I will keep the matter under review, and I am more than happy to engage in a dialogue with my hon. Friend about this in the weeks and months to come.

Several Opposition Members mentioned new clause 22, in the name of the hon. Member for St Albans (Daisy Cooper). The Government are clear that all landlords must keep their properties in a fit state, and that there need to be robust routes of redress when they do not. However, tenants can already take their landlord to court if their home is unfit for human habitation, and if the courts find that landlords have not met their obligations, they can award compensation, as well as requiring landlords to carry out repairs. For that reason, while agreeing entirely with the objective, I believe that the hon. Lady’s amendment is unnecessary.

I will briefly refer to two amendments on the amendment paper that were not spoken to by the Members who tabled them. My hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham East (Nadia Whittome) rightly called for protection from discrimination for renters who require home adaptations. The rental discrimination provisions in the Bill are specifically designed to protect victims of discrimination who may not be eligible to make a case under the Equality Act 2010, such as those who have children or are in receipt of benefits. People with a disability are already afforded protections from discrimination relating to the provision of housing or services under the Act. For that reason, we do not believe her new clause 24 is warranted, but I am more than happy to discuss the matter with her outside the Chamber.

My hon. Friend the Member for Warrington North (Charlotte Nichols) tabled amendment 11 to make rent repayment orders available for initial failure to be a member of the PRS landlord ombudsman or to register with the PRS database. She will recognise that we have significantly strengthened the RRO provisions in the previous Government’s Renters (Reform) Bill. However, I took the view that it would be inappropriate to extend rent repayment orders to non-criminal breaches of the kind that her amendment covers. Instead, local authorities will be able to issue civil penalties for the initial failures in question, with the possibility of higher financial penalties and RROs if landlords fail to sign up, having been fined.

Finally, I will mention the amendments relating to home adaptations—both new clause 9, in the name of the hon. Member for Bristol Central, and new clause 23, in the name of the hon. Member for Taunton and Wellington. Both amendments seek to require PRS landlords to permit home disability adaptations for assured tenants when these have been recommended in a local authority home assessment. The hon. Member for Bristol Central tabled the same amendment in Committee, and as we discussed then, the Equality Act already provides that landlords cannot unreasonably refuse a request for reasonable adjustments to a disabled person’s home. As I said in Committee, measures already in this Bill will improve the situation for disabled renters who request home adaptations. The abolition of section 21 notices will remove the threat of retaliatory eviction, empowering tenants to request the home adaptations they need and to complain if their requests are unreasonably refused. In addition, we are establishing the new PRS ombudsman, which will have strong powers to put things right for tenants where their landlord has failed to resolve a legitimate complaint.

I must say candidly to the hon. Lady that I remain somewhat unconvinced that these amendments are the way to address this absolutely legitimate issue—I recognise the problem she identifies—and for that reason, the Government will not be able to accept them. However, I can give her the assurance that we will commit to continuing to consider what more we may need to do to ensure that requests for reasonable adjustments cannot be unreasonably refused, including those recommended by local authority home assessments. I am more happy to engage with Members across the House, and to meet her, the hon. Member for Taunton and Wellington and other Members who have concerns on the subject, to discuss her amendment and the problem generally in more detail. I hope that, on that basis, she will consider not pressing her new clause to a vote.

[Carla Denyer]

If the Minister can confirm that the cross-party meeting will include the Chair of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, and that it will take place before the Bill goes to the Lords, I will be happy to withdraw my new clause.

[Matthew Pennycook]

I will happily give the hon. Member that assurance, and I am more than happy to ensure that my hon. Friend the Chair of the Committee attends, as well as any other Member with an interest in this issue. It is important, and I understand the problem that the hon. Member outlines. There are reasons why we do not think the new clause is necessarily the best way to approach the issue, but I am more than happy to have a dialogue on that point.

In conclusion, today we are making targeted amendments that aim to ensure that the Bill operates as intended. In many cases, we think that the amendments pushed by hon. Members are unnecessary, because we think that the Bill strikes the right balance between the interests of landlords and those of tenants. On that basis, I hope the whole House can get behind the Bill this evening.

Question put and agreed to.

New clause 13 accordingly read a Second time, and added to the Bill.

Prohibition of rent in advance before lease entered into

(1) Schedule 1 to the Tenant Fees Act 2019 (permitted payments) is amended in accordance with subsections (2) and (3).

(2) After paragraph 1(1) (rent is a permitted payment) insert—

“(1A) But a payment of rent is a prohibited payment if—

(a) it is payable before the tenancy is entered into, and

(b) the tenancy is an assured tenancy.

(1B) This paragraph is subject to paragraph 1A.”

(3) For sub-paragraph (2) of paragraph 1 substitute—

“Increased rent

1A (1) If the amount of rent payable in respect of any relevant period (“P1”) is more than the amount of rent payable in respect of any later relevant period (“P2”), the additional amount payable in respect of P1 is a prohibited payment.

(2) That is subject to the following provisions of this paragraph.”

(4) After section 5 of the Tenant Fees Act 2019 insert—

“Other provision about rent in advance

5A Pre-tenancy payments of rent: prohibitions

(1) A landlord must not—

(a) invite or encourage a relevant person to make a prohibited pre-tenancy payment of rent to the landlord in connection with an assured tenancy of housing in England,

(b) accept an offer from a relevant person to make a prohibited pre-tenancy payment of rent to the landlord in connection with an assured tenancy of housing in England, or

(c) accept from a relevant person a prohibited pre-tenancy payment of rent in connection with an assured tenancy of housing in England.

(2) A landlord must not—

(a) invite or encourage a relevant person to make a prohibited pre-tenancy payment of rent to a third party in connection with an assured tenancy of housing in England,

(b) accept an offer from a relevant person to make a prohibited pre-tenancy payment of rent to a third party in connection with an assured tenancy of housing in England, or

(c) accept from a third party a prohibited pre-tenancy payment of rent in connection with an assured tenancy of housing in England.

(3) A letting agent must not—

(a) invite or encourage a relevant person to make a prohibited pre-tenancy payment of rent to the letting agent in connection with an assured tenancy of housing in England,

(b) accept an offer from a relevant person to make a prohibited pre-tenancy payment of rent to the letting agent in connection with an assured tenancy of housing in England, or

(c) accept from a relevant person a prohibited pre-tenancy payment of rent in connection with an assured tenancy of housing in England.

(4) A letting agent must not—

(a) invite or encourage a relevant person to make a prohibited pre-tenancy payment of rent to a third party in connections with an assured tenancy of housing in England,

(b) accept an offer from a relevant person to make a prohibited pre-tenancy payment of rent to a third party in connection with an assured tenancy of housing in England, or

(c) accept from a third party a prohibited pre-tenancy payment of rent in connection with an assured tenancy of housing in England.

(5) The Secretary of State may, by regulations made by statutory instrument, amend this section for the purpose of making provision about the descriptions of rent due in advance to which any provision of subsection (1), (2), (3) or (4) applies.

For this purpose “rent due in advance” means rent due before the period for which it is payable.

(6) Regulations under subsection (5)—

(a) may make different provision for different purposes;

(b) may make supplemental, incidental, consequential, transitional, transitory or saving provision;

(c) are to be made by statutory instrument.

(7) A statutory instrument containing regulations under subsection (5) may not be made unless a draft of the instrument has been laid before and approved by a resolution of each House of Parliament.

(8) In this section “prohibited pre-tenancy payment of rent” means a payment of rent that is prohibited by paragraph 1(1A) of Schedule 1.

5B Effect of a breach of section 5A

A term of an agreement between a letting agent and a relevant person which breaches section 5A is not binding on a relevant person.

Where a term of an agreement is not binding on a relevant person as a result of this section, the agreement continues, so far as practicable, to have effect in every other respect.”

(5) The Tenant Fees Act 2019 is further amended as follows—

(a) in section 6 (enforcement by local weights and measures authorities)—

(i) in subsection (1), in paragraph (b) omit “and” and after that paragraph insert—

“(ba) section 5A (pre-tenancy payments of rent: prohibitions), and”;

(ii) in subsection (3), for “or 2” substitute “, 2 or 5A”;

(b) in section 7 (enforcement by district councils), in subsection (1), for “and 2” substitute

“, 2 and 5A”;

(c) in section 8 (financial penalties), in subsection (1), for “or 2” substitute “, 2 or 5A”;

(d) in section 10 (recovery by enforcement authority of amount paid)—

(i) in subsection (1)(a), for “or 2” substitute “, 2 or 5A”;

(ii) after subsection (2) insert—

“(2A) But that obligation to pay the amount, or remaining part, of the prohibited payment is subject to subsection (3), unless it is a case where the payment is prohibited by paragraph 1(1A) of Schedule 1 (pre-tenancy payment of rent).”;

(iii) in subsection (3), for “But subsection (2) does not apply in relation to a prohibited payment” substitute “Subsection (2) does not apply in relation to the prohibited payment”;

(e) in section 15 (recovery by relevant person of amount paid), in subsection (1)(a), for “or 2” substitute “, 2 or 5A”.”.—(Matthew Pennycook.)

This amends the Tenant Fees Act 2019 so that rent in advance payable before the tenancy is entered into is a “prohibited payment” for the purposes of that Act. The new section 5A then also adds new prohibitions relating to that kind of prohibited payment.

Brought up, and read the First time.

Question put, That the clause be read a Second time.

The House divided: Ayes 372, Noes 114

[Division lists to follow.]

Question accordingly agreed to.

New clause 14 read a Second time, and added to the Bill.

18:11

Proceedings interrupted (Programme Order, 9 October 2024).

The Deputy Speaker put forthwith the Questions necessary for the disposal of

the business to be concluded at that time (Standing Order No. 83E).

New Clause 14

Prohibition of rent in advance before lease entered into

“(1) Schedule 1 to the Tenant Fees Act 2019 (permitted payments) is amended in accordance with subsections (2) and (3).

(2) After paragraph 1(1) (rent is a permitted payment) insert—

“(1A) But a payment of rent is a prohibited payment if—

(a) it is payable before the tenancy is entered into, and

(b) the tenancy is an assured tenancy.

(1B) This paragraph is subject to paragraph 1A.”

(3) For sub-paragraph (2) of paragraph 1 substitute—

“Increased rent

1A (1) If the amount of rent payable in respect of any relevant period (“P1”) is more than the amount of rent payable in respect of any later relevant period (“P2”), the additional amount payable in respect of P1 is a prohibited payment.

(2) That is subject to the following provisions of this paragraph.”

(4) After section 5 of the Tenant Fees Act 2019 insert—

“Other provision about rent in advance

5A Pre-tenancy payments of rent: prohibitions

(1) A landlord must not—

(a) invite or encourage a relevant person to make a prohibited pre-tenancy payment of rent to the landlord in connection with an assured tenancy of housing in England,

(b) accept an offer from a relevant person to make a prohibited pre-tenancy payment of rent to the landlord in connection with an assured tenancy of housing in England, or

(c) accept from a relevant person a prohibited pre-tenancy payment of rent in connection with an assured tenancy of housing in England.

(2) A landlord must not—

(a) invite or encourage a relevant person to make a prohibited pre-tenancy payment of rent to a third party in connection with an assured tenancy of housing in England,

(b) accept an offer from a relevant person to make a prohibited pre-tenancy payment of rent to a third party in connection with an assured tenancy of housing in England, or

(c) accept from a third party a prohibited pre-tenancy payment of rent in connection with an assured tenancy of housing in England.

(3) A letting agent must not—

(a) invite or encourage a relevant person to make a prohibited pre-tenancy payment of rent to the letting agent in connection with an assured tenancy of housing in England,

(b) accept an offer from a relevant person to make a prohibited pre-tenancy payment of rent to the letting agent in connection with an assured tenancy of housing in England, or

(c) accept from a relevant person a prohibited pre-tenancy payment of rent in connection with an assured tenancy of housing in England.

(4) A letting agent must not—

(a) invite or encourage a relevant person to make a prohibited pre-tenancy payment of rent to a third party in connection with an assured tenancy of housing in England,

(b) accept an offer from a relevant person to make a prohibited pre-tenancy payment of rent to a third party in connection with an assured tenancy of housing in England, or

(c) accept from a third party a prohibited pre-tenancy payment of rent in connection with an assured tenancy of housing in England.

(5) The Secretary of State may, by regulations made by statutory instrument, amend this section for the purpose of making provision about the descriptions of rent due in advance to which any provision of subsection (1), (2), (3) or (4) applies.

For this purpose “rent due in advance” means rent due before the period for which it is payable.

(6) Regulations under subsection (5)—

(a) may make different provision for different purposes;

(b) may make supplemental, incidental, consequential, transitional, transitory or saving provision;

(c) are to be made by statutory instrument.

(7) A statutory instrument containing regulations under subsection (5) may not be made unless a draft of the instrument has been laid before and approved by a resolution of each House of Parliament.

(8) In this section “prohibited pre-tenancy payment of rent” means a payment of rent that is prohibited by paragraph 1(1A) of Schedule 1.

5B Effect of a breach of section 5A

(1) A term of an agreement between a letting agent and a relevant person which breaches section 5A is not binding on a relevant person.

(2) Where a term of an agreement is not binding on a relevant person as a result of this section, the agreement continues, so far as practicable, to have effect in every other respect.”

(5) The Tenant Fees Act 2019 is further amended as follows—

(a) in section 6 (enforcement by local weights and measures authorities)—

(i) in subsection (1), in paragraph (b) omit “and” and after that paragraph insert—(ba)section 5A (pre-tenancy payments of rent: prohibitions), and;

(ii) in subsection (3), for “or 2” substitute “, 2 or 5A”;

(b) in section 7 (enforcement by district councils), in subsection (1), for “and 2” substitute “, 2 and 5A”;

(c) in section 8 (financial penalties), in subsection (1), for “or 2” substitute “, 2 or 5A”;

(d) in section 10 (recovery by enforcement authority of amount paid)—

(i) in subsection (1)(a), for “or 2” substitute “, 2 or 5A”;

(ii) after subsection (2) insert—

(2A)But that obligation to pay the amount, or remaining part, of the prohibited payment is subject to subsection (3), unless it is a case where the payment is prohibited by paragraph 1(1A) of Schedule 1 (pre-tenancy payment of rent).”;

(iii) in subsection (3), for “But subsection (2) does not apply in relation to a prohibited payment” substitute “Subsection (2) does not apply in relation to the prohibited payment”;

(e) in section 15 (recovery by relevant person of amount paid), in subsection (1)(a), for “or 2” substitute “, 2 or 5A”.”—(Matthew Pennycook.)

This amends the Tenant Fees Act 2019 so that rent in advance payable before the tenancy is entered into is a “prohibited payment” for the purposes of that Act. The new section 5A then also adds new prohibitions relating to that kind of prohibited payment.

Brought up, and added to the Bill.

New Clause 15

Guarantor not liable for rent payable after tenant’s death

“In the 1988 Act, after section 16M (inserted by section 17 of this Act) insert—

“Guarantors

16N Guarantor not liable for rent payable after tenant’s death

(1) This section applies where—

(a) an individual (the “guarantor”) is a party to an arrangement (the “guarantee”) under which the individual guarantees payment by the tenant of rent under an assured tenancy (“guaranteed rent”), and

(b) the guarantor became a party to the guarantee on or after the commencement date.

(2) If—

(a) only one person is the tenant under the assured tenancy, and

(b) that person dies,

the guarantee is of no effect if, or to the extent that, it guarantees payment of guaranteed rent for the period beginning with the death of that person.

(3) If—

(a) two or more persons are the tenant under the assured tenancy, and

(b) all of those persons die,

the guarantee is of no effect if, or to the extent that, it guarantees payment of guaranteed rent for the period beginning with the deaths of those persons (if they all die on the same day) or beginning with the death of the last of those persons to die (if they do not all die on the same day).

(4) If—

(a) two or more persons are the tenant under the assured tenancy,

(b) the guarantor is a family member of only one of those persons, and

(c) that family member of the guarantor dies,

the guarantee is of no effect if, or to the extent that, it guarantees payment of guaranteed rent for the period beginning with the death of that family member.

(5) If—

(a) two or more persons are the tenant under the assured tenancy,

(b) the guarantor is a family member of more than one of those persons, and

(c) all of those family members of the guarantor die,

the guarantee is of no effect if, or to the extent that, it guarantees payment of guaranteed rent for the period beginning with the deaths of those family members (if they all die on the same day) or beginning with the death of the last of those family members to die (if they do not all die on the same day).

(6) For the purposes of this section, the guaranteed rent for the period beginning with the death of a person, or with the deaths of two or more persons, is—

(a) guaranteed rent which—

(i) is for the rent period during which the person dies or persons die (the “relevant rent period”), and

(ii) is attributable to the time after the death of the person or persons, and

(b) guaranteed rent for every rent period after the relevant rent period.

(7) For that purpose, the guaranteed rent for the relevant rent period which is attributable to the time after the death of the person or persons is the amount calculated in accordance with this formula—

(D/T)×R

where—

D is the total number of days in the relevant rent period which fall on and after the day of the death of the person or persons;

T is the total number of days in the relevant rent period;

R is the guaranteed rent for the relevant rent period.

16P Section 16N: application and interpretation

(1) Section 16N applies to a guarantee—

(a) whether or not it is in writing;

(b) if it is in writing, whether or not it is in the lease;

(c) whether or not it also guarantees the payment of any sum other than the rent.

(2) In section 16N and this section—

“commencement date” has the meaning given by section 143(3) of the Renters’ Rights Act 2024;

“family member” is to be read in accordance with subsections (3) and (4);

“rent period” means a period for which rent is payable.

(3) For the purposes of section 16N, the guarantor is a family member of the following persons—

(a) the spouse, civil partner or co-habitee of the guarantor;

(b) a person who is—

(i) a child,

(ii) a grandchild,

(iii) a parent,

(iv) a grandparent,

(v) a sibling,

(vi) a niece or nephew,

(vii) an aunt or uncle, or

(viii) a cousin,

of the guarantor or of the spouse, civil partner or co-habitee of the guarantor;

(c) a person who is the spouse, civil partner or co-habitee of a person falling within paragraph (b).

(4) If, in accordance with subsection (3), a person (F)—

(a) is a family member of the guarantor when the guarantee is entered into, or

(b) becomes a family member of the guarantor after the guarantee is entered into,

F is to be regarded as being a family member of the guarantor at all times afterwards (regardless of whether F continues to be so in accordance with subsection (3)).

(5) For the purposes of this section—

(a) one person (C) is the “co-habitee” of another person (P) if P lives with C as if they were married or in a civil partnership;

(b) a “niece or nephew” of a person (P) is a child—

(i) of a sibling of P, or

(ii) of a person who is the spouse, civil partner or co-habitee of a sibling of P;

(c) an “aunt or uncle” of a person (P) is a sibling of a parent of P;

(d) a “cousin” of a person (P) is a child—

(i) of an aunt or uncle of P, or

(ii) of a person who is the spouse, civil partner or co-habitee of an aunt or uncle of P;

(e) “sibling” includes a sibling of the half-blood and a step-sibling.””—(Matthew Pennycook.)

This limits a guarantor’s liability for rent following the death of the tenant.

Brought up, and added to the Bill.

New Clause 16

Limitation on obligation to pay removal expenses

“(1) Section 11 of the 1988 Act (payment of removal expenses) is amended as follows.

(2) In the heading, after “expenses” insert “by social landlords”.

(3) Before subsection (1) insert—

“(A1) This section applies to a dwelling-housing let on an assured tenancy if—

(a) the landlord is a relevant social landlord, and

(b) the dwelling-house is social housing.”

(4) In subsection (1), for “a dwelling-house let on an assured tenancy on Ground 6 or Ground 9” substitute “the dwelling-house on Ground 6, 6ZA or 9”.

(5) After subsection (1) insert—

“(1A) If the court makes the order for possession on Ground 6 in circumstances where—

(a) the additional RSL condition is met, and

(b) that condition is met in case B (alternative accommodation provided temporarily until other alternative accommodation becomes available),

the landlord must also pay to the tenant a sum equal to the reasonable expenses likely to be incurred by the tenant in removing from the alternative accommodation provided temporarily.”

(6) In subsection (2), after “(1)” insert “or (1A)”.

(7) After subsection (3) insert—

“(4) In this section—

“relevant social landlord” means—

(a) a private registered provider of social housing,

(b) a body registered as a social landlord in the register maintained under section 1 of the Housing Act 1996,

(c) a body registered as a social landlord in the register kept under section 20(1) of the Housing (Scotland) Act 2010, or

(d) a housing trust, within the meaning of the Housing Associations Act 1985, which is a charity;

“social housing” has the same meaning as in Part 2 of the Housing and Regeneration Act 2008.””—(Matthew Pennycook.)

This replaces clause 21. It expands section 11 of the Housing Act 1988 to cover possession on the new Ground 6ZA and limits the availability of removal expenses to cases where the landlord is a “relevant social landlord” and the dwelling-house is social housing.

Brought up, and added to the Bill.

New Clause 20

Review of the impact of the Act on the housing market

“(1) The Secretary of State must publish an annual report outlining the impact of the provisions of this Act on the housing market in the UK.

(2) A report under this section must include the impact of this Act on—

(a) the availability of homes in the private rental sector;

(b) rents charged under tenancies;

(c) house prices; and

(d) requests for social housing.

(3) A report under this section must be laid before Parliament.”—(David Simmonds.)

Brought up.

Question put, That the clause be added to the Bill.

18:12

Division 76

Ayes: 181

Noes: 363

Clause 1

Assured tenancies to be periodic with rent period not exceeding a month

Amendment proposed: 57, page 1, line 13, at end insert

“unless the tenant meets the student test where the tenancy is entered into.

(1A) For the purposes of this section, a tenant who meets the student test when a tenancy is entered into has the same meaning as in Ground 4A.”—(David Simmonds.)

Question put, That the amendment be made.

18:26

Division 77

Ayes: 118

Noes: 434

Clause 4

Changes to grounds for possession

Amendments made: 12, page 5, line 3, after “5H” insert “or Ground 6ZA”

This is consequential on Amendment 22.

Amendment 13, page 5, line 23, leave out the words from “(a),” to the end of the line and insert “for “, 2, 5” substitute “to 5H, 6ZA, 6A”

This replaces the amendment to section 7(5A)(a) of the Housing Act 1988 with a new amendment to take full account of the changes to the grounds under Schedule 2 to that Act made by Part 1 of the Bill.

Amendment 14, page 5, line 25, at end insert—

“(5B) In relation to the making of an order for possession of a dwelling-house let on an assured periodic tenancy arising under Schedule 10 to the Local Government and Housing Act 1989, Ground 6 is to apply as if—

(a) in paragraph (b), the words “, but only in a case where section 7(5ZA) applies in relation to the tenancy” were omitted;

(b) in the general redevelopment conditions, paragraph (f) was omitted;

(c) in the landlord’s acquisition condition, in paragraph (a), the reference to the grant of the tenancy is a reference to the grant of the long residential tenancy which existed immediately before the assured periodic tenancy arose.”

This inserts a further amendment into section 7 of the Housing Act 1988 to take full account of the changes to the grounds under Schedule 2 to that Act made by Part 1 of the Bill.

Amendment 15, page 5, line 26, leave out “(5B)” and insert “(5C)”

This amendment is consequential on Amendment 14.

Amendment 16, page 5, line 40, at end insert—

“(5D) In subsection (5B), a reference to a “long residential tenancy” is a reference to a tenancy to which Schedule 10 to the Local Government and Housing Act 1989 applies.””

This amendment is consequential on Amendment 14.

Amendment 17, page 6, line 15, after “6” insert “, 6ZA”.—(Matthew Pennycook.)

This is consequential on Amendment 22.

Clause 9

Repayment of rent paid in advance

Amendment made: 27, page 13, line 23, leave out from “rent” to “as” in line 24 and insert—

“for days after end of tenancy

(1) A person who paid rent”.—(Matthew Pennycook.)

This provides that the right to repayment of rent paid for days after a tenancy ends arises whenever the rent is paid.

Clause 12

Duty of landlord and contractor to give statement of terms etc

Amendment made: 28, page 17, line 18, after “5H” insert “, 6ZA”.—(Matthew Pennycook.)

This is consequential on Amendment 22.

Clause 13

Other duties

Amendment made: 29, page 18, line 19, after “5H” insert “, 6ZA”.—(Matthew Pennycook.)

This is consequential on Amendment 22.

Clause 21

Limitation on obligation to pay removal expenses

Amendment made: 30, page 32, line 33, leave out clause 21.—(Matthew Pennycook.)

This is replaced by NC16.

Clause 30

Tenancies of more than seven years

Amendment made: 34, page 39, leave out lines 18 to 20 and insert—

“Fixed term tenancies of more than 21 years

3D A fixed term tenancy of a term certain of more than 21 years from the date of the grant of the tenancy.

Fixed term tenancies of 7 to 21 years granted before the Renters’ Rights Act 2024

3E (1) A tenancy of a term certain of—

(a) 21 years or less, but

(b) more than 7 years,

from the date of the grant of the tenancy.

(2) This paragraph applies only to tenancies entered into—

(a) before the day on which the Renters’ Rights Act 2024 was passed,

(b) during the period of two months beginning with that day, or

(c) after the end of that period under a contract entered into before the end of that period.

Regulated home purchase plans

3F (1) A tenancy which, when it is granted, forms part of a regulated home purchase plan.

(2) In this paragraph “regulated home purchase plan” has the same meaning that it has from time to time in regulation 63F(3)(a) of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Regulated Activities) Order 2001 (S.I. 2001/544).

(3) The Secretary of State may, by regulations, amend this paragraph in consequence of an order made under section 22 of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000.

(4) Regulations under this paragraph—

(a) may make different provision for different purposes;

(b) are to be made by statutory instrument.

(5) A statutory instrument containing regulations under this paragraph may not be made unless a draft of the instrument has been laid before and approved by a resolution of each House of Parliament.”—(Matthew Pennycook.)

The Bill currently provides that a fixed term tenancy of more than 7 years is not an assured tenancy. This moves the boundary from 7 years to 21 years. It also provides for other kinds of leases not to be assured tenancies: existing leases of between 7 and 21 years; and leases in a “regulated home purchase plan”.

Clause 63

Approval and designation of landlord redress schemes

Amendments made: 35, page 92, line 8, leave out “level” and insert “amount or amounts”.

This makes the wording here consistent with Amendment 40.

Amendment 36, page 92, line 12, leave out sub-paragraph (ii) and insert—

“(ii) about the amount or amounts of those fees,”.

This replaces “level” with “amount or amounts” (for consistency with Amendment 40) and omits other provision which is replaced by provision contained in Amendment 37.

Amendment 37, page 92, line 41, at end insert—

“(4A) Fee conditions relating to—

(a) fees payable in respect of compulsory aspects of the scheme may provide for the amount or amounts of the fees to be calculated by reference to such of the scheme costs as may be specified in the regulations, which may include scheme costs relating to the voluntary aspects of the scheme;

(b) fees payable in respect of voluntary aspects of the scheme must provide for the amount or amounts of the fees to be calculated so that (taking one year with another) they are sufficient to meet such of the costs of the voluntary aspects of the scheme as may be specified in the regulations.”

This deals with how the amount or amounts of fees paid by members of a redress scheme are to be calculated. In particular, fees payable in respect of the compulsory aspects of the scheme could recover scheme costs which relate to the voluntary aspects of the scheme.

Amendment 38, page 93, line 16, leave out paragraph (e).

This omits provision which is replaced by provision contained in Amendment 37.

Amendment 39, page 93, line 34, at end insert—

““costs of the voluntary aspects” , in relation to a scheme, means the scheme costs if, or to the extent that, they relate to the voluntary aspects of the scheme (including scheme costs that are attributed to the voluntary aspects of the scheme);

“fee condition” means a condition set out in regulations by virtue of subsection (3)(h) or (i)(ii);

“scheme costs” , in relation to a scheme, means the costs (whether or not connected with a fee-payer) that are incurred in or associated with, or likely to be incurred in or associated with—

(a) the establishment and administration of the scheme (including the investigation and determination of complaints under the scheme);

(b) the performance of any other functions under this Chapter;

(c) the performance of any other functions under the scheme;

including such costs that are, or are likely to be incurred by—

(a) the administrator of a redress scheme, or

(b) the individual responsible for overseeing and monitoring the investigation and determination of complaints under the scheme,

in connection with enforcement by other persons of requirements imposed by or under this Chapter.”—(Matthew Pennycook.)

This sets out definitions of terms used in Amendment 37.

Clause 79

Fees for landlords and dwelling entries

Amendments made: 40, page 102, leave out from line 23 to “be” in line 37 and insert—

“(2) The regulations must—

(a) specify the amount or amounts of the fee, or

(b) provide for the amount or amounts of the fee to be determined by the database operator by reference to such of the relevant costs as may be specified in the regulations.

(3) The amount or amounts specified in the regulations under subsection (2)(a) may be calculated by reference to the relevant costs.

(3A) The “relevant costs” are the costs (whether or not connected with a fee-payer) that are incurred in or associated with, or likely to be incurred in or associated with—

(a) the establishment and operation of the database;

(b) the enforcement of requirements imposed by or under this Chapter;

(c) the performance of any other functions under this Chapter;

(d) the enforcement of any other requirements imposed by or under this Act or otherwise in relation to the private rented sector.

(3B) The amount or amounts specified in the regulations under subsection (2)(a) or determined in accordance with subsection (2)(b) may, in the case of a fee charged for an entry in the database to become active again after becoming inactive as a result of provision made by virtue of section 77(2)(a),”

These changes enable fees charged in relation to the private rented sector database to be set by reference to costs associated with or likely to be associated with the relevant costs (as defined) as well as by reference to costs relating to the enforcement of any requirements under the Renters’ Rights Act or otherwise relating to the private rental sector.

Amendment 41, page 103, line 7, at end insert—

“(7) For the purposes of this section—

Requirements “in relation to the private rented sector” means requirements relating to—

(a) residential premises in England that are let, or intended to be let, under a tenancy;

(b) the common parts of such premises;

(c) the activities of a landlord under a tenancy of residential premises in England;

(d) the activities of a superior landlord in relation to such a tenancy;

(e) the activities of a person carrying on English letting agency work within the meaning of section 54 of the Housing and Planning Act 2016 in relation to such premises;

(f) the activities of a person carrying on English property management work within the meaning of section 55 of the Housing and Planning Act 2016 in relation to such premises;

“residential premises” has the meaning given by section 1 of the Housing Act 2004 except that it does not include social housing within the meaning of Part 2 of the Housing and Regeneration Act 2008;

“tenancy” includes a licence to occupy.”—(Matthew Pennycook.)

This defines what requirements in relation to the private rented sector and other terms mean for the purpose of the amendment inserted by Amendment 40.

Clause 98

Decent homes standard

Amendment proposed: 3, page 117, line 33, after “(homelessness),” insert—

“or that is provided by the Ministry of Defence for use as service family accommodation,”.—(Mr Amos.)

This amendment would extend the Decent Homes Standard to Ministry of Defence service family accommodation.

Question put, That the amendment be made.

18:43

Division 78

Ayes: 186

Noes: 360

Clause 100

Rent repayment orders: liability of landlords and superior landlords

Amendments made: 42, page 120, line 22, after “landlord” insert

“or superior landlord who committed the offence”.

This amendment clarifies that a rent repayment order can be made against a superior landlord who has committed an offence to which Chapter 4 of the Housing and Planning Act 2016 applies.

Amendment 43, page 120, line 24, after “tenant” insert

“(whether the rent was paid to the landlord or superior landlord against whom the order is made, or to another person)”.

This amendment to the Housing and Planning Act 2016 ensures that it is possible to obtain a rent repayment order against a landlord or superior landlord who has committed an offence whether or not the rent was paid directly to them.

Amendment 44, page 120, line 27, at end insert—

“(2A) In a case where the offence was committed by a superior landlord—

(a) references in the following provisions of this Chapter to the landlord are to be read as references to the superior landlord, and

(b) housing in relation to which the person in question is a superior landlord is to be treated for the purposes of this Chapter as let by that person.”

This amendment moves provision that was to go into section 52 of the Housing and Planning Act 2016 into section 40 of that Act to ensure that references to the “landlord” in Chapter 4 of that Act are in appropriate cases read as references to the “superior landlord”.

Amendment 45, page 120, line 27, at end insert—

“(2A) In section 41 (application for rent repayment order), in subsection (1), for “person” substitute “landlord”.”

This amendment is consequential on Amendment 44 and ensures that a rent repayment order is available against both landlords and superior landlords.

Amendment 46, page 120, line 33, at end insert—

“(ai) after “rent paid” (in the first place) insert “by, or on behalf of, the tenant”,”.

This clarifies that the amount to be paid to the tenant under the rent repayment order must relate to the rent paid by them or on their behalf in respect of the specified period.

Amendment 47, page 120, line 34, at end insert—

“(ia) in the heading to the second column to the table, after “by” insert “, or on behalf of,”, and”.

This amendment is consequential on Amendment 46.

Amendment 48, page 120, line 36, at end insert “and,

(ii) in paragraph (a), after “paid” insert “by, or on behalf of, the tenant”.”

This clarifies that the amount to be paid to the tenant under the rent repayment order must not exceed the rent paid by them or on their behalf in respect of the specified period (less any award of universal credit made during that period).

Amendment 49, page 120, line 36, at end insert—

“(c) in subsection 4, after paragraph (a) insert—

“(aa) the amount of any rent received by the tenant in respect of the period mentioned in the table in relation to the housing let to the tenant,”.”

This requires the tribunal, when making a rent repayment order in favour of a tenant, to take into account any rent received by the tenant for the rent period which any amount paid to the tenant would be calculated by reference to, where that rent relates to the housing let to the tenant.

Amendment 50, page 121, line 19, leave out from “(interpretation),” to the end of line 26 and insert—

“in subsection (1), in the appropriate place, insert—

““landlord” is to be read in accordance with section 40(2A);”.”—(Matthew Pennycook.)

This amendment is consequential on Amendment 44.

Clause 102

Unlicensed HMOs and houses: offences

Amendments made: 51, page 123, after line 11 insert—

“(4C) For the purposes of subsection (4B), a term in the tenancy agreement or licence to occupy relating to the occupation of the building or part of the building that is an HMO does not on its own constitute a defence under any of paragraphs (a) to (c) of that subsection.”

This provides that a landlord under a tenancy agreement or licence to occupy cannot rely on a term under that agreement or licence about the occupation of the building, or part of the building, to on its own prove a defence to the offence of failing to obtain a licence for an HMO.

Amendment 52, page 124, after line 4 insert—

“(3C) For the purposes of subsection (3B), a term in the tenancy agreement or licence to occupy relating to the occupation of the house does not on its own constitute a defence under any of paragraphs (a) to (c) of that subsection.”—( Matthew Pennycook.)

This provides that a landlord under a tenancy agreement or licence to occupy cannot rely on a term under that agreement or licence about the occupation of the house to on its own prove a defence to the offence of failing to obtain a licence under Part 3 of the Housing Act 2004.

Schedule 1

Changes to grounds for possession

Amendments made: 18, page 160, line 25, at end insert—

“(ca) the period—

(i) beginning with the day on which the tenancy was entered into, and

(ii) ending with the day on which the tenant was entitled to possession of the dwelling-house,

is six months or less,”

This ensures that Ground 4A is not available if the tenancy of the student accommodation is granted more than 6 months before it begins.

Amendment 19, page 166, line 28, leave out from beginning to end of line 13 on page 167 and insert

“For Ground 6 (excluding the italic heading) substitute—

These conditions are met—

(a) the general redevelopment conditions (in every case);

(b) the landlord's acquisition condition, but only in a case where section 7(5ZA) applies in relation to the tenancy;

(c) the additional RSL condition, but only in a case where the landlord seeking possession is—

(i) a relevant social landlord, and

(ii) the person who intends to carry out the work mentioned in this ground.

The “general redevelopment conditions” are met if—

(a) the landlord seeking possession is mentioned in the first column in a row of the table in this ground;

(b) the tenancy is mentioned in the second column of that row;

(c) a person mentioned in the third column of that row intends to—

(i) demolish or reconstruct the whole or a substantial part of the dwelling-house, or

(ii) carry out substantial works on the dwelling-house or any part of it, or any building of which it forms part;

(d) the intended work cannot reasonably be carried out without the tenant giving up possession of the dwelling-house because—

(i) the tenant is not willing to agree to such a variation of the terms of the tenancy as would give such access and other facilities as would permit the intended work to be carried out,

(ii) the nature of the intended work is such that no such variation is practicable,

(iii) the tenant is not willing to accept an assured tenancy of such part only of the dwelling-house (in this sub-paragraph referred to as “the reduced part”) as would leave in the possession of the landlord so much of the dwelling-house as would be reasonable to enable the intended work to be carried out and, where appropriate, as would give such access and other facilities over the reduced part as would permit the intended work to be carried out, or

(iv) the nature of the intended work is such that such a tenancy is not practicable;

(e) either —

(i) the assured tenancy began at least 6 months before the relevant date, or

(ii) notice of a compulsory acquisition was given in respect of the dwelling-house where—

(A) the acquiring authority was the person who became the landlord who is seeking possession, and

(B) the dwelling-house was transferred to that landlord within the period of 12 months ending with the relevant date;

(f) the assured tenancy on which the dwelling-house is let did not come into being by virtue of any provision of Schedule 1 to the Rent Act 1977, as amended by Part 1 of Schedule 4 to this Act or, as the case may be, section 4 of the Rent (Agriculture) Act 1976, as amended by Part 2 of that Schedule.

The “landlord's acquisition condition” is met if—

(a) the landlord seeking possession acquired their interest in the dwelling-house before the grant of the tenancy, or

(b) that interest was in existence at the time of that grant and neither that landlord (or, in the case of joint landlords, any of them) nor any other person who, alone or jointly with others, has acquired that interest since that time acquired it for money or money's worth.

The “additional RSL condition” is met in case A, case B or case C.

Case A: a case where alternative accommodation that meets the following conditions is available for the tenant or will be available for the tenant when the order for possession takes effect—

(a) it is let as a separate dwelling with adequate security of tenure;

(b) it is affordable;

(c) it is in an appropriate location;

(d) it is not overcrowded.

Case B: a case where alternative accommodation that meets the following conditions is available for the tenant or will be available for the tenant when the order for possession takes effect—

(a) it is being provided temporarily until other alternative accommodation becomes available which will meet the conditions in case A;

(b) it is affordable;

(c) it is in an appropriate location;

(d) it is not overcrowded.

Case C: a case where—

(a) the tenancy of the dwelling-house was not granted pursuant to a nomination as mentioned in section 159(2)(c) of the Housing Act 1996,

(b) when the tenancy was granted, the landlord intended to—

(i) demolish or reconstruct the whole or a substantial part of the dwelling-house, or

(ii) carry out substantial works on the dwelling-house or any part of it, or any building of which it forms part,

within a specific period, and

(c) the relevant social landlord gave the tenant, before the tenancy was entered into, a written statement of the landlord’s wish to be able to recover possession on the basis of that intention to carry out that work within that period (and that period must be included in the statement).

For the purpose of the additional RSL condition, accommodation—

(a) is let “with adequate security of tenure” if it is let—

(i) on an assured tenancy, or

(ii) on terms which will, in the opinion of the court, afford to the tenant security of tenure reasonably equivalent to the security afforded by an assured tenancy;

(b) is “affordable” if it is—

(i) no more expensive than the dwelling-house of which possession is being sought, or

(ii) reasonably suitable to the means of the tenant;

(c) is “in an appropriate location” if it is—

(i) reasonably close to the dwelling-house of which possession is being sought, or

(ii) reasonably suitable to the needs of the tenant and the tenant’s family as regards proximity to place of work;

(d) is “overcrowded” if the result of the occupation of the accommodation by the tenant and the tenant’s family would be that it would be an overcrowded dwelling for the purposes of

Part 10 of the Housing Act 1985.”

This rewrites Ground 6 to incorporate the amendments already contained in paragraph 20 of Schedule 1 and other additional amendments.

Amendment 20, page 167, leave out lines 17 to 23.

The provision made in the first row of this table is superseded by the expansion of the provision made in the second row (see Amendment 21).

Amendment 21, page 167, leave out lines 24 to 30 in the second column and insert

“any tenancy””.

This expands the provision made in the second column of the second row of this table so that it applies in relation to any tenancy.

Amendment 22, page 168, line 25, at end insert—

“New ground for possession of alternative accommodation provided during redevelopment

20A After Ground 6 insert—

“Ground 6ZA

These conditions are met—

(a) the landlord seeking possession (the “current landlord”) is a relevant social landlord;

(b) the dwelling-house (the “current home”) was made available for occupation by the tenant, or a predecessor in title of the tenant, to enable redevelopment of another dwelling-house (the “previous home”) which—

(i) was the only or principal home of the tenant or predecessor in title, and

(ii) was occupied by the tenant or predecessor in title under a tenancy (the “previous tenancy”) of which the landlord was—

(A) a relevant social landlord, or

(B) a registered provider of social housing other than a private registered provider of social housing;

(c) alternative accommodation that—

(i) consists of the previous home and is affordable, or

(ii) consists of other premises and is affordable, in an appropriate location and not overcrowded,

is available for the tenant or will be available for the tenant when the order for possession takes effect;

(d) that alternative accommodation is to be let as a separate dwelling with adequate security of tenure.

For the purpose of this ground, accommodation—

(a) is let “with adequate security of tenure” if it is let—

(i) on an assured tenancy, or

(ii) on terms which will, in the opinion of the court, afford to the tenant security of tenure reasonably equivalent to the security afforded by an assured tenancy;

(b) is “affordable” if it—

(i) is no more expensive than the previous home, making these assumptions—

(A) that the redevelopment of the previous home has not taken place, and

(B) that the tenant, or predecessor in title, has continued to be the tenant of the previous home under the previous tenancy, or

(ii) is reasonably suitable to the means of the tenant;

(c) is “in an appropriate location” if it is—

(i) reasonably close to the previous home, or

(ii) reasonably suitable to the needs of the tenant and the tenant’s family as regards proximity to place of work;

(d) is “overcrowded” if the result of the occupation of the accommodation by the tenant and the tenant’s family would be that it would be an overcrowded dwelling for the purposes of Part 10 of the Housing Act 1985.

In this Ground—

“redevelopment” , in relation to the dwelling-house that is the previous home, means—

(a) demolishing or reconstructing the whole or a substantial part of the dwelling-house, or

(b) carrying out substantial works on the dwelling-house or any part of it, or any building of which it forms part;

“relevant social landlord” has the same meaning as in Ground 6.””

This creates a new ground for possession that is available where a tenant has been provided with alternative accommodation by a registered social landlord while redevelopment affecting the tenant’s original home is carried out.

Amendment 23, page 168, line 27, leave out “6” and insert

“6ZA (inserted by paragraph 20A)”.

Amendment 24, page 170, line 10, leave out from “paragraph” to end of line 11 and insert

“for the words from “The tenancy” to “devolved” insert “The tenancy has devolved on a person (the “new tenant”)”;

(aa) after the first unnumbered paragraph insert—

“But, if the new tenant is occupying the dwelling-house as the new tenant’s only or principal home immediately before the death of the former tenant, an order for possession on this Ground may not be made unless—

(a) the tenancy has previously devolved on the former tenant under a will or intestacy (whenever that devolution occurred), or

(b) the tenancy is a special tenancy immediately before the death of the former tenant.

In this Ground “special tenancy” means—

(a) a tenancy of social housing (within the meaning given by Part 2 of the Housing and Regeneration Act 2008) where the landlord is a private registered provider of social housing;

(b) a tenancy entered into pursuant to a rent-to-buy agreement (which has the same meaning as in Ground 1B) where the landlord is a private registered provider of social housing;

(c) a tenancy of supported accommodation, within the meaning given by paragraph 12 of Schedule 2;

(d) a tenancy where the former tenant’s occupation of the dwelling-house is in pursuance of a local housing authority’s duty to the tenant under section 193 of the Housing Act 1996 (and here “local housing authority” has the same meaning as in Ground 5G);

(e) a tenancy which meets the conditions in paragraphs (a), (b), (d) and (e) in the first paragraph of Ground 5H.””

This removes the possibility of using Ground 7 where the person who inherits was residing in the dwelling-house, except where the deceased person had themselves inherited the dwelling or where the tenancy is a “special tenancy”.

Amendment 25, page 172, line 31, leave out

“Grounds 2ZA, 2ZC, 5C, 5H and 6A”

and insert “certain Grounds”.

This is consequential on Amendment 26.

Amendment 26, page 173, line 4, at end insert—

“(ea) amend the definition of “special tenancy” in Ground 7;”.—(Matthew Pennycook.)

This enables the definition of “special tenancy” in Ground 7 to be amended by regulations subject to the affirmative procedure.

Schedule 2

Amendments relating to Chapter 1 of Part 1

Amendments made: 31, page 179, leave out lines 42 and 43 and insert—

“27 The Local Government and Housing Act 1989 is amended as follows.

28 In Schedule 10 (security of tenure on ending of long residential tenancies)—

(a) in paragraph 5(1)(a), omit “, other than Ground 16”;

(b) for paragraph 5(2) substitute—

“(2) Ground 6 in Schedule 2 to the 1988 Act may not be specified in a landlord’s notice to resume possession if the tenancy is a former 1954 Act tenancy.

(2A) Where that Ground applies to any other long residential tenancy in accordance with sub-paragraph (1), it is to apply as if—

(a) in paragraph (b) of that Ground, the words “, but only in a case where section 7(5ZA) applies in relation to the tenancy,” were omitted;

(b) in the general redevelopment conditions, paragraph (f) was omitted.”;

(c) in paragraph 6(3)(c)—

(i) omit “(other than an assured shorthold tenancy)”;

(ii) for “5” substitute “5H”;

(d) in paragraph 11(3)—

(i) in the opening words, omit “(not being an assured shorthold tenancy)”;

(ii) in paragraph (c), for “5” substitute “5H”;

(e) in paragraph 11(5)—

(i) in the opening words, omit “(not being an assured shorthold tenancy)”;

(ii) in paragraph (c), for “5” substitute “5H”;

(f) in paragraph 12(1), omit “or Chapter II”;

(g) in paragraph 13(4), for “15” substitute “18”.

29 In Schedule 11 (minor and consequential amendments), omit paragraphs 103 and 108.”

This replaces the amendment made to the Local Government and Housing Act 1989 and makes new amendments to the provisions in that Act relating to security of tenure on the ending of long residential leases to take account of the changes made by Part 1 of the Bill.

Amendment 32, page 182, line 12, after “(aa)” insert

“where the EDMO is to be made by a local housing authority in England,”.

This restricts the new requirement on local housing authorities when making an empty dwelling management order to notify the proprietor of their rights and powers under the order, including the right to grant a lease, to local housing authorities in England.

Amendment 33, page 182, line 24, leave out from beginning to “(possession” and insert—

“61A The Housing and Regeneration Act 2008 is amended as follows.

61B In section 180 (right to acquire)—

(a) in subsection (2)(a), omit “, other than a long tenancy”;

(b) in subsection (2A), omit “shorthold”.

62 In Schedule 11”.—(Matthew Pennycook.)

This makes consequential amendments of section 180 of the Housing and Regeneration Act 2008.

Schedule 6

Application of Chapter 1 of Part 1 to existing tenancies: transitional provision

Amendments made: 53, page 219, line 27, at end insert—

“(aa) paragraph (ca) were omitted;”

This is consequential on Amendment 18.

Amendment 54, page 220, line 7, leave out “(ab)” and insert

“(c) in case C where the “additional RSL condition” is met”.—(Matthew Pennycook.)

This is consequential on Amendment 19.

Third Reading

King’s consent signified.

18:57

[Matthew Pennycook]

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time.

It has been a real privilege to take this vital piece of legislation through the House. I want to thank everyone who has played a role in getting the Bill to this stage: my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister for her passionate commitment to improving the lives of England’s 11 million private renters; the Department’s Bill team who have worked tirelessly on the legislation for the past six months; my outstanding private office, including my fantastic private secretary Will Gaby, who has led the team on the Bill; the Clerks, Chairs and parliamentary counsel for facilitating its progress; the witnesses who gave evidence to the Committee; and hon. Members from across the House who provided valuable input today and at previous stages.

The current system for private renting is broken. While the Government recognise that the majority of landlords provide high-quality homes and a good service to their tenants, it remains the case that the private rented sector still provides the least affordable, poorest quality and most insecure housing of all tenures. This intolerable state of affairs is why renters have been demanding change for many years, and I am extremely proud that this Government have acted so early in the Parliament to deliver it.

The Renters’ Rights Bill will deliver on our manifesto commitment to overhaul the regulation of the private rented sector and to decisively raise standards within it. It is bitterly disappointing that despite not forcing a single Division in Committee, the Opposition decided today to set their face firmly against private rented sector reform on the basis of a series of specious and, indeed, spurious arguments. They may be intent on letting down England’s private renters once again, but this Labour Government will not put tens of thousands of them at risk of homelessness, nor will we prolong the uncertainty that responsible landlords across the country have experienced over recent years by hesitating. We will finish the job and give England’s 11 million private renters the greater security, rights and protections they deserve. I wish Baroness Taylor the best with moving the Bill forward in the other place, and I commend it to the House.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

I call Kevin Hollinrake, who has 35 seconds.

18:59

[Kevin Hollinrake (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)]

I draw the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

It is not wrong, spurious or specious to stand up for 11 million tenants. We know that tenants and landlords are two sides of the same coin. As the Leader of the Opposition said, we agree that tenants need a better deal, but this Bill will not give that to them. The Minister is following in the footsteps of Scotland. The Bill will reduce supply and push up rent, and that is why we are against it—

19:00

Debate interrupted (Programme Order, 9 October).

The Deputy Speaker put forthwith the Question already proposed from the Chair

(Standing Order No. 83E), That the Bill be now read the Third time.

19:00

Division 79

Ayes: 440

Noes: 111

Bill read the Third time and passed.