Grand Committee
(1 day, 12 hours ago)
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Arrangement of Business
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The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate) (Con)
My Lords, if there is a Division in the Chamber while we are sitting, the Committee will adjourn as soon as the Division Bells are rung and resume after 10 minutes.
Pneumoconiosis etc. (Workers’ Compensation) (Payment of Claims) (Amendment) (No. 2) Regulations 2026
(1 day, 12 hours ago)
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Baroness Sherlock
That the Grand Committee do consider the Pneumoconiosis etc. (Workers’ Compensation) (Payment of Claims) (Amendment) (No. 2) Regulations 2026.
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Baroness Sherlock) (Lab)
My Lords, the Committee will also consider the draft Mesothelioma Lump Sum Payments (Conditions and Amounts) (Amendment) (No. 2) Regulations 2026.
The schemes we are debating today provide vital support to people who have developed certain dust-related diseases, often caused by occupational exposure to asbestos and other harmful dusts. This includes diseases such as pneumoconiosis and mesothelioma. We all recognise the devastating impact that these diseases can have on individuals and their families, so I am grateful for the opportunity to debate these schemes and the reforms we are making to ensure that they continue to provide effective support. I will begin by providing a brief overview of these two no-fault compensation schemes and what these regulations seek to amend.
The Pneumoconiosis etc. (Workers’ Compensation) Act 1979 scheme—henceforth “the 1979 Act scheme”—provides a single lump-sum compensation payment to eligible individuals who suffer from one of the diseases covered by the scheme. This includes diffuse mesothelioma, pneumoconiosis and three other dust-related respiratory diseases.
The scheme was designed to compensate people unable to claim damages from former employers that had gone out of business, and who had not brought any civil action against another party for damages. To be entitled to a lump-sum award, claimants must have an industrial injuries disablement benefit award for a disease covered by the 1979 Act scheme—or would have an award but for their percentage disablement.
The mesothelioma lump-sum payments scheme—or the “2008 Act scheme”—was introduced to provide compensation to people who contracted diffuse mesothelioma but were unable to claim compensation through the 1979 Act scheme. For example, they may be self-employed or their exposure to asbestos was not due to their work. The 2008 Act scheme provides support to people with diffuse mesothelioma, quickly, at their time of greatest need.
Although both schemes aim to provide compensation to sufferers within their lifetime, each scheme also allows for claims by dependants, if the person suffering from the disease sadly dies before they are able to make a claim. This is in recognition of the suffering these diseases can bring to whole families.
These regulations make changes to both schemes, the most significant of which relate to awards for dependants and the treatment of claims where a claimant dies before payment can be made. Under the current arrangements, awards payable to dependants are generally lower than those payable to sufferers. These regulations will align the rates payable to dependants with those payable to sufferers under both schemes. That means that dependants will receive compensation calculated using the same rates as eligible sufferers, providing a single payment structure under each scheme.
For families already coping with the loss of a loved one, these changes will provide greater financial support at an already difficult time. This is something the House has raised repeatedly with Ministers over the years. Indeed, when I was in opposition, I recall asking the then Ministers about it myself. I am delighted we are able to address this issue at last.
The regulations also make provision for circumstances where an individual dies after making a valid claim but before payment is made. In those cases, payment may be made to the claimant’s personal representatives. This will help ensure that compensation can still be paid where an individual has done everything required of them to make a claim but sadly dies before their award can be issued.
For the 1979 Act scheme, the regulations also make a number of consequential changes to support these reforms. These include introducing a clear statutory basis for determining the date used to calculate awards and removing payment provisions no longer required following the alignment of award rates.
Together, these changes will ensure that the schemes continue to provide meaningful support to those affected by these devastating diseases and their families. I am sure the Committee will want to join me in recognising the continued importance of the compensation offered by the 1979 and 2008 Act schemes.
Finally, I am required to confirm that these provisions are compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights, and I am happy to do so.
I commend these regulations, which align compensation rates for dependants with those of sufferers and improve the operation of both schemes, to the Grand Committee and ask for its approval to implement them. I beg to move.
Lord Palmer of Childs Hill (LD)
I thank the Minister for introducing these regulations. Be in no doubt that the Liberal Democrats support both instruments, so I hope to be brief. These regulations, as was said, deal with some of the most grievous consequences of working life in this country. Mesothelioma is incurable and usually fatal within a short time of diagnosis. Pneumoconiosis is a legacy of the coal mines, quarries and foundries that once upon a time powered our economy.
Those who developed these diseases did nothing wrong except go to work. Those who care for them and those left behind deserve a scheme that treats them fairly, which is what the Minister has helpfully outlined. For that reason, the central change in both instruments is right. At present, as we heard, dependants receive lower awards than the person disabled by the disease. The 1979 Act scheme layers on a complex set of top-ups. A widower or widow has no reason to receive less because their spouse died before a claim was made. Moving to a single-rate structure removes an anomaly that was hard to defend, as the Minister said in her opening remarks.
The other welcome change is the provision for payment to personal representatives where a claimant dies after a valid claim but before payment. Given the prognosis for mesothelioma, the scenario is far from hypothetical. It is cruel that a family could lose an award simply because the administrative process was slower than the disease. Even so, I should like to put some questions to the Minister.
First, the Government expect dependants to be “better off overall”. Can the Minister please confirm whether anyone will be worse off? The additional dependant top-up, the minimum payment and the tuberculosis-related top-up are all being removed. Has the department modelled the individual cases most likely to lose out? If so, what is the transitional protection? Secondly, these rules apply only when entitlement first arises on or after 31 October. Families whose entitlement arose just before that date will receive less, for some reason, for the same loss. I understand the legal logic, but what is the Government’s response to those families who no doubt will feel unhappy about that? Thirdly, on the clearer relevant date rules, I welcome the reduction in disputes. Can the Minister say how claimants will be told which date applies to them and whether the department will publish guidance before 31 October?
Fourthly, the instruments replace references to assessment bodies with medical practitioners appointed by the Secretary of State. What assurance can the Minister give us about capacity and waiting times for assessment? Delay is the enemy of anyone with a terminal diagnosis. Fifthly, on probate administration and confirmation documents, how will the department help bereaved families, who may be struggling to obtain them quickly? With those questions, the answers to which I think will add to the debate today, I am pleased from these Benches to support the regulations.
Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing these two instruments and setting out their purpose. I confirm at the outset that we on these Benches welcome these changes and are pleased to support both instruments.
Mesothelioma, pneumoconiosis and other dust-related diseases cause immense suffering to workers and their families, often emerging decades after the original exposure to asbestos or other harmful substances. Many of those affected spent their lives working in industries such as mining, shipbuilding and construction, contributing enormously to our country’s prosperity, only to face devastating illness later in life. It is important to remember that the effects of these conditions extend far beyond those diagnosed. Families are often left to contend not only with the emotional toll of serious illness and bereavement but with substantial financial pressures.
The compensation schemes established under the 1979 and 2008 Acts therefore provide an essential safety net, particularly where a former employer has ceased trading or those affected cannot obtain compensation through other means. The central change introduced by these two instruments is welcome. It is right that dependants should receive compensation calculated at the same rates as sufferers themselves. A family’s need for support does not diminish because their loved one died before making a claim. I also welcome the provisions enabling payments to be made through a claimant’s personal representatives, where an individual dies after submitting a valid claim but before receiving compensation.
I want briefly to take this opportunity to recognise the tireless work of charities, campaigners and victims’ organisations that have advocated for these changes over many years, including Mesothelioma UK and the Asbestos Victims Support Group Forum UK. We support the principles underpinning both instruments, but I should be grateful if the Minister can provide further clarification on their practical implementation.
First, on the administration of payments following a claimant’s death, the regulations provide for compensation to be paid to personal representatives once the necessary evidence of probate, letters of administration or confirmation as executor have been supplied. Although those requirements are understandable, obtaining the necessary documentation can be a lengthy process, particularly for families dealing with bereavement. Can the Minister therefore explain what steps the department is taking to ensure that these requirements do not cause unnecessary delays. Will the Government introduce a target processing time for payment once the relevant documentation has been received? What guidance and practical assistance will be provided to bereaved families?
Secondly, I turn to the removal of existing supplementary payments under the pneumoconiosis scheme. The regulations remove a number of existing top-up provisions, including the provision relating to sufferers whose pneumoconiosis is accompanied by tuberculosis. The Government have suggested that the higher basic awards mean that claimants will benefit overall from the new arrangements. Can the Minister nevertheless give a categorical assurance that no individual claimant will receive a lower award as a result of these changes, including anyone who had previously qualified for the tuberculosis-related payment. If that assurance cannot be given, how many claimants does the department estimate could receive less? What is the maximum potential reduction and what transitional protection has been considered?
Thirdly, I turn to the transitional arrangements. Both instruments are intended to come into force on 31 October but they use different tests to determine who benefits from the new provisions. Under the 1979 Act scheme, the amendments apply where a person first fulfils the conditions of entitlement on or after that date. Under the 2008 Act scheme, the increased dependant rate applies where the sufferer dies on or after that date. Can the Minister explain the reason for using these different tests? How will the department treat cases in which a person fulfils the entitlement conditions or dies shortly before 31 October but the claim has not been determined by that date? In particular, what consideration has been given to families who may receive a substantially lower payment solely because the relevant event occurred shortly before the commencement date?
Fourthly, I turn to the speed of payments and awareness of schemes. These schemes are intended, wherever possible, to provide compensation to sufferers during their own lifetimes. Given the often rapid progression of these diseases following diagnosis, it is essential that applications are processed without unnecessary delay. Can the Minister tell the Committee the current average and median processing times under both schemes? How many claimants have died after submitting a valid claim but before receiving payment, in each of the past five years?
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Palmer, and the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, for those responses, and I thank them for their clear support for these changes. I had every confidence that the Committee would appreciate the alignment of rates for dependants with those for sufferers.
As the noble Lord, Lord Palmer, pointed out and as was helpful to hear in the discussion, these diseases are products of our industrial heritage. The people suffering from them just went to work. That was a very poignant way to put it: they had simply gone to work and done the right thing; then, from no fault of their own, they ended up suffering these terrible diseases decades later. The least we can do is to support people by giving them this compensation in the late years of their life. With these changes, that can carry on; sometimes these diseases progress horrifically quickly and the claims cannot be processed in time. At least now the sufferers will know that their dependants will get the money due to them.
There were a couple of other questions. If the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, does not mind, as she was asking for quite a lot of specific detail about projections, I will write to her on those because it would be too much to go through them now.
There were two questions I want specifically to address. One was whether anyone will lose out. It is not possible to rule out that a small number of people may receive less than they otherwise would have, as a result of removing certain supplementary provisions. But the department expects the number affected to be very small. Taken together with the annual uprating and the wider package of reforms, the overall effect is expected to be positive for claimants and their dependants. At the moment, the gap between sufferers and dependants can be £7,000; it is that specific. If I have any more precise information about modelling, I will write to noble Lords.
Both noble Lords raised clearance times and why people are waiting for longer processing times, both for claims and related documentation. I reassure the Committee that reducing processing times is a clear priority for my department. Journey times vary depending on the complexity of individual cases and, in some instances, additional checks are needed to make sure that the entitlement criteria are properly met. That can take longer, but it is important to get the decisions right. We are working hard to reduce backlogs and speed up claims, including by modernising processes that have been around since before the pandemic and expanding the use, where appropriate, of paper-based or video assessments for IIDB.
For certain prescribed conditions, including diffuse mesothelioma and seven other specified conditions, disablement is automatically assessed at 100%, which means that a medical assessment may not be necessary. That would help ensure that those with the most serious conditions receive faster decisions. I reassure noble Lords that we are working hard on that.
There is no doubt that there has been an increase in processing times for mesothelioma claims, but officials are working hard to address that and to make sure that customers receive their awards as quickly as possible. I want to reassure the Committee that the department fully understands the implication of that and the impact on families and is working through understanding the reasons for that. I think those are the main questions that were asked, but I will go through Hansard and if I have missed anything else, I will write to noble Lords.
I thank noble Lords for their continued support for these schemes. The Government are committed to sharing the importance of them. I commend to the Committee the importance of these reforms, which align compensation payable to dependants with that payable to sufferers under both schemes, and the fact that they will also allow provision for payment to personal representatives. The schemes will continue to support people affected by some of the most serious occupational diseases and, where appropriate, their dependants.
The reforms before the Committee were prompted by an independent legal review of the schemes, and they provide an opportunity to address a number of long-standing issues relating to their operation. Taken together, these changes will align awards for dependants and sufferers. They will provide greater clarity. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, that I share her position and add my thanks to many charities who have worked in this area. As regards communications, we published a press notice on the reforms, endorsed by the Asbestos Victims Support Group Forum, to raise awareness of the changes, and we will always keep an eye out for ways to make sure people know what is there.
As for an estimation of awards, I am reflecting further. The dependant rate increase is estimated to cost between £2 million and £6 million annually and the relevant date changes are expected to cost under £1 million. Both were funded through the 2025 spending review.
On numbers, in 2025-26 there were 220 awards to dependants under the 1979 Act scheme, which is about 10% of the total caseload, with £2.5 million paid out. On the 2008 Act scheme there were around 70 awards to dependants in 2025-26, representing about 11% of the caseload, with £700,000 paid out to dependants. Going forward, the great news is that dependants under both schemes will benefit from equal payments to the sufferer.
That is probably most of the points, but as I said, if there is anything else, I will check the record and write to noble Lords. I commend these amendments to both schemes to the Committee and ask approval to implement them. I beg to move.
Mesothelioma Lump Sum Payments (Conditions and Amounts) (Amendment) (No. 2) Regulations 2026
(1 day, 12 hours ago)
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Baroness Sherlock
That the Grand Committee do consider the Mesothelioma Lump Sum Payments (Conditions and Amounts) (Amendment) (No. 2) Regulations 2026.
Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025 (Specified Purposes Related to Policing) Regulations 2026
(1 day, 12 hours ago)
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Lord Collins of Highbury
That the Grand Committee do consider the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025 (Specified Purposes Related to Policing) Regulations 2026.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Home Office, and Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Lord Collins of Highbury) (Lab)
My Lords, these draft regulations are made under Section 36(8) of the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025 and specify the meaning of “purposes related to policing”. They enable the Secretary of State for Transport—in practice the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, acting on her behalf—to share trailer registration information with the police for the use of those policing purposes. Where the Act permits, the regulations also enable the onward disclosure of trailer registration information by police and Home Office recipients to a person exercising public functions for use in connection with the same policing purposes. In short, the instrument gives full effect to the information-sharing framework established by Parliament, enabling trailer registration information to be shared and used for the full range of specified policing purposes.
It may assist the Committee if I briefly set out the background to these regulations before turning to their effect. These provisions form part of a wider framework established by Parliament to strengthen the use of data in support of policing and border security. In 2018, Parliament enacted the Haulage Permits and Trailer Registration Act, establishing the trailer registration scheme administered by the DVLA on behalf of the Secretary of State for Transport. For the avoidance of doubt, the trailer registration scheme does not collect biometric information.
Following the tragic deaths of 39 Vietnamese nationals, who were found in a lorry in Essex in October 2019, Parliament legislated through the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025 to create an information-sharing gateway for trailer registration information to be supplied to specified law enforcement bodies. The Act allows the DVLA to supply trailer registration information to the police for specified purposes related to policing and for its onward disclosure by the police and the Home Office for the same purposes. However, Parliament also required the meaning of “purposes related to policing” to be set out in regulations subject to the affirmative procedure. Without these regulations, the relevant provisions would not be fully operable. In practice, police use would remain confined to law enforcement and national security purposes, limiting the practical value of the information in day-to-day policing scenarios falling outside those purposes.
These regulations define purposes related to policing by reference to well-established policing functions. They specify that the purposes include protecting life and property, preserving order, preventing the commission of offences, bringing offenders to justice and any other police duty or responsibility arising from common or statute law. This ensures that the trailer registration information can be used where it is operationally necessary, including in safeguarding road policing and the response to serious incidents, as well as in criminal investigations.
Lord German (LD)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for that description of what appears to be a fairly technical set of regulations—one that closes a loophole in the operation of the system for trailer registration data. It is clear that this instrument will close that loophole so that data can be shared for the full range of operational policing activities. On that basis, we are pleased to support these regulations.
However, I have three questions to pose to the Minister; they relate to what he said about how these measures will be operational. I presume that, when we talk about them becoming operational, there will be operational guidance, instruction or advice—whatever is given to police forces and those who are responsible for the issues about which we are talking.
My first question is: how will access and onward disclosure be controlled and audited, so that we know what information is being passed and flowing one way or the other? My second question relates to the broad final category—the one the Minister stated just now—of any other police duty or responsibility arising from common or statute law. Clearly, I would describe that as a broad context, and it is a broad context. How will such a context be applied in practice if it becomes all-encompassing: is it designed so that there should be no areas that are out of bounds, as it were, in what it applies to? That of course is of particular importance as far as common law is concerned.
Finally, what assurance can we in Parliament have about implementation, given that the detailed operational guidance will not be published and there is no statutory review clause? If we wish to continue to understand in general terms how these regulations are being implemented now and what will happen, how will Parliament be able to deal with that matter? On that basis, I and the Liberal Democrats are prepared to support the regulations.
Lord Cameron of Lochiel (Con)
My Lords, I too thank the Minister for setting out the background and context of these regulations. The Opposition support the regulations, the principles behind them and the rationale for them. The only comment I will make briefly today is a procedural rather than a substantive one, given that the regulations are uncontroversial and fit into an existing framework, and the power exists in the Act to create them.
The procedural point I will make is purely to observe that it is quite a cumbersome process to use secondary legislation here for outlining specified purposes when the purposes could have been placed in the Act itself as primary legislation. As the Minister himself said, these are well-established policing functions and it seems cumbersome to spend a year consulting to produce a list that I think anyone could have come up with relatively briefly. I raise these points purely to make an observation about what appears to be a serious problem about current legislative practice and leaving too much to secondary legislation.
With those observations, there is nothing negative in these regulations and these Benches support the underlying sections of both the primary legislation and the regulations themselves.
Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)
I thank noble Lords for their questions and certainly I welcome the support for these regulations from noble Lords who have contributed this afternoon. Of course, the reason these regulations are here is that Parliament insisted on it, so I will not go into too much detail about that. But, in relation to the questions from the noble Lord, Lord German, I will say that we are very clear that these regulations do not lead to wider information sharing than Parliament insisted on. The categories of information that may be shared remain unchanged and the bodies with which information may be shared remain unchanged. The legal gateway established by the primary legislation remains unchanged. Let me just reassure the noble Lord about that.
There is an important issue about safeguards on proportionality and privacy. These are important considerations, whatever legislation a Government bring forward involving sharing information. The trailer registration information covered by these provisions contains no biometric information. The provisions also remain subject to the existing legal framework governing the handling of personal data and public authority decision-making. That includes the Data Protection Act 2018, the UK GDPR, the Human Rights Act 1998 and wider public law obligations. The regulations do not disapply or diminish any of those protections. Any use of onward disclosure of information must continue to be lawful, necessary and proportionate in all the circumstances.
The noble Lord also talked about the practical implementation. I can confirm that these regulations are intended to operate through existing operational and information-sharing arrangements. No new IT systems are required, no new databases are being created and no new registration obligations are being imposed on citizens. Instead, the instrument enables existing trailer registration information already held within the statutory registration system to be shared and used in the manner that Parliament intended when enacting the 2025 Act. I hope that that enables noble Lords to support the instrument.
Licensing Act 2003 (Permitted Temporary Activities) (Amendment) Order 2026
(1 day, 12 hours ago)
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Lord Collins of Highbury
That the Grand Committee do consider the Licensing Act 2003 (Permitted Temporary Activities) (Amendment) Order 2026.
Relevant document: 13th Report from the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee
The Deputy Leader of the House of Lords (Lord Collins of Highbury) (Lab)
My Lords, the draft order was laid before the House on 10 September. The purpose of this instrument is straightforward: it will increase the number of temporary event notices that may be given to a single premises from 15 to 20 in each calendar year. It also increases the maximum number of days on which temporary events may take place at those premises from 21 to 26 days. Subject to Parliament’s approval, these new limits will come into force on 1 January 2027, when the entitlements reset.
Under the Licensing Act 2003, temporary event notices—TENs—provide a light-touch mechanism through which licensable activities can take place on a temporary basis without the need for a full premises licence. These activities can include the sale or supply of alcohol, regulated entertainment and the provision of late-night refreshment. TENs may also be used by premises that already hold a licence where they wish temporarily to undertake activities or operate at times that are not covered by their existing authorisation.
The TENs regime is used by a wide variety of businesses and community organisations. It can enable a pub or restaurant to host an additional event, but it can equally support an event in a school, community centre or church hall. By increasing the premises-level limits, this instrument will provide greater flexibility for well-run local events and allow organisers to respond more effectively to demand within their communities.
The Government recognise the important contribution made by the hospitality sector to our economy, high streets and communities. The sector has faced challenging trading conditions, and although this targeted measure cannot address every pressure faced by the sector, it will remove an unnecessary constraint for responsible businesses that wish to hold additional events. It can support local economic activity and provide more opportunities for communities to come together.
These limits are not untested. The higher thresholds of 20 temporary event notices and 26 days applied on a temporary basis during 2022 and 2023 as part of the response to the economic effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. The Home Office has not identified evidence that points to adverse impacts arising from previous changes to TENs limits. That previous experience is one factor supporting this change.
Following a call for evidence on how to reform the licensing regime, this Government have carefully considered the differing views expressed. Hospitality, businesses and trade bodies generally supported increased flexibility, while some local authorities, public health organisations, residents and community groups raised concerns about public nuisance, crime and disorder, public health, and pressure on local authority resources. We have taken those concerns seriously.
Lord Hayward (Con)
My Lords, I was chief executive of the British Beer and Pub Association when the Licensing Act 2003 was passed. I spent many—I shall not say “happy”—hours debating TENs, and every other aspect of the then Licensing Bill. I should make clear that I have no specific link now with the industry, although obviously I retain many contacts; I am therefore speaking as an individual rather than as somebody with a direct association with the industry.
I agree completely with what the Minister said in his introductory comments. The hospitality industry is facing massive difficulties at the moment for a whole series of reasons, with pubs closing at a depressing rate. In fact, it not only affects pubs but restaurants as well. As the Minister said, when it comes to TENs, we are talking about responsibly run premises and taking a decision in relation to previous experience. I noted that, in the analysis provided, certain sectors had objected —the health authorities, for example—but their comments relate, I am sure, not to this group of businesses because, as the Minister has said quite specifically, the police and other organisations still retain their capacity to object, whether it is to the existing lower level of TENs or the proposed increased level.
In general, it is fair to say that what happens is that pubs or restaurants will chart the events that they will want to celebrate on special occasions. They will look at football World Cups, rugby World Cups and other major events and they will probably reach the limit. Therefore, a degree of flexibility is sensible. I can only imagine, as one is progressing towards the end of the calendar year, that, in light of Fleetwood’s great success last night in beating Arsenal, there may be a number of pubs and restaurants in Fleetwood that happen to be up against their TENs limit and may want to have another celebration this weekend—and many congratulations to Fleetwood.
So, overall, I welcome this proposal, having experienced the detail of the original Licensing Act and, as the Minister suggested, I think it is a sensible change to the current regime.
Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)
My Lords, I hope I am allowed to address a few remarks and questions to the Minister from this far away. I very much welcome the order. I was delighted to serve on the committee with my noble friend when we looked at the review of the Licensing Act 2003.
A number of concerns have been raised by the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, on which I should welcome the opportunity to press the Minister. In particular, is there any reason why the changes have been made at this late stage? Is it just administrative? Obviously, it is good that they going to be in place before matches take place, but it is a source of concern that, with any changes made, there is sufficient consultation with the licensed premises and the police in that regard. Has the Home Office considered whether a minimum notice period for the police might assist their planning and thereby reduce public safety risks? This approach may at the same time also help licensed venues themselves, for example in planning their staffing.
There is nothing too critical in what I am saying on the order, but I would welcome the Minister’s comments in regard to the timing and allowing sufficient preparation for all the parties concerned in the instrument before us.
Lord Cameron of Lochiel (Con)
My Lords, I again thank the Minister for setting out the rationale and purpose of this order. Somewhat unusually, I find myself in complete support of the Government’s policy in this regard. The overall impact of the order, as the Minister said, is to expand from 15 to 20 the number of events that licensed premises can hold each year under a temporary event notice. That continues the trajectory that began with the temporary expansion of TENs during the Covid pandemic, a policy implemented to help hospitality businesses that were struggling so much from the impact of lockdowns.
As my noble friend Lord Hayward said, the struggles experienced by the hospitality sector have not abated. Here, I fear I am more critical of the Government, because hospitality businesses are suffering under the collective weight of this Government’s hike in employers’ NI contributions, the increased minimum wage and the increase in business rates. Perhaps the most revealing fact about this statutory instrument is the Explanatory Memorandum, which admits that hospitality businesses continue to face
“challenging trading conditions, including high input costs, low margins and wider financial pressures”.
With the greatest respect to the Minister, the Government might want to ask themselves who is responsible for those pressures. If the Government are truly committed to easing the burden on the hospitality sector, they might consider scrapping business rates entirely for most high street hospitality and leisure businesses, as my party has advocated.
I note that the consultation undertaken by the Home Office saw 70% of public health stakeholders and 51% of local authorities strongly opposed to this measure. I find that deeply troubling. I ask the Minister which health stakeholders were consulted? For example, was it mostly NHS trusts and ICBs or was it the health sector more widely—health charities, NGOs et cetera?
It is concerning that we appear to have so many people opposed to measures that will not only help struggling businesses and boost the economy but allow a wider variety of events to go ahead, with all the social benefits they bring. I therefore welcome the fact that the Government have taken the decision to proceed with this measure none the less; I commend them for standing by their policy. The Explanatory Memorandum also sets out the benefits of this policy change, as envisaged by the Government, and establishes that the entire purpose is to try to help out struggling hospitality businesses.
To conclude, although we agree with this order and welcome the fact that the Government persisted with it, there is clearly much more to be done to help our struggling hospitality sector.
Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)
I thank noble Lords for their contributions. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, that we have seen in today’s Budget a clear focus on how we can support businesses—in particular, our high street businesses—and ensure that they can respond to decades of neglect from the previous Government.
I hear the compassion and understanding from the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, concerning last night’s result. I would say that, actually, Fleetwood has plenty of places where fans can celebrate. It is a fantastic town and I wish the team all the best for their future games in the League Cup.
I will echo the noble Lord’s point and address some of the issues that were raised by the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh. We have given careful consideration to the concerns, and this is a limited increase. It is a sensible approach, ensuring that the safeguards that govern the TENs regime remain effective, while supporting businesses and communities. Of course, as I said in my introduction, a licensing authority may issue a counter-notice to stop a TEN, and the recommendation for this change came last year from the licensing taskforce, which was led by the DBT. We held a call for evidence to understand a wide range of views, which took time, but the new limits will be in place in January. That addresses that point.
It is not unreasonable to consult, particularly on health issues. This Government recognise the significant harm that alcohol misuse can cause to individuals, families and communities. Those health responses are not surprising. Addressing alcohol-related health harms remains a key priority for this Government: in Fit for the Future: 10 Year Health Plan for England, we have committed to crucial first steps to support people in making healthier choices about alcohol, as well as setting out a multiyear funding settlement for drug and alcohol treatment through the public health grant.
There is, I think, a clear consensus on the importance of these relatively small changes, which will help and will contribute not only to our businesses, pubs and hospitality sector but to community activity, which the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, referred to. I welcome the support from noble Lords.
Renewables Obligation and Electricity Capacity (Amendment) (British Industrial Competitiveness Scheme Excluded Electricity) Regulations 2026
(1 day, 12 hours ago)
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Lord Leong
That the Grand Committee do consider the Renewables Obligation and Electricity Capacity (Amendment) (British Industrial Competitiveness Scheme Excluded Electricity) Regulations 2026.
Relevant document: 13th Report from the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business and Trade (Lord Leong) (Lab)
My Lords, this instrument was laid on 7 September 2026. I acknowledge and thank the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments and the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee for their work in scrutinising these regulations.
This instrument delivers one of the Government’s flagship commitments of the industrial strategy: the British industrial competitiveness scheme. BICS is a central part of our drive to engineer the reindustrialisation of Great Britain. BICS will address the persistent competitiveness challenges facing British manufacturers by reducing electricity costs for eligible businesses. It will drive investment and economic growth in strategically important sectors across Great Britain. BICS is expected to cut electricity costs by up to 25%, or £40 per megawatt hour, for over 10,000 manufacturing businesses. It will support frontier manufacturing industries within the IS-8 sectors and foundational manufacturing industries, which provide key inputs to their supply chains. This includes eligible businesses in the automotive, aerospace, clean energy industry, life sciences, chemicals and steel sectors and more.
For too long, British industries have faced some of the highest industrial electricity prices in Europe due to a combination of structural factors and policy costs. Eligible businesses will begin receiving support from April 2027, when they will be exempt from paying the indirect cost of the renewables obligation and the feed-in tariffs, and receive a further exemption on their capacity market costs from October 2027 onwards. Eligible businesses will also receive an additional payment in 2027 related to the amount they would have received had the scheme been in operation in 2026. The policy costs are paid for by the electricity suppliers, who typically charge them to their domestic and non-domestic customers via their electricity bills.
This instrument implements the renewable obligation and the capacity market exemptions, and it enables the renewable obligation level for the 2027-28 obligation period to be revised in light of BICS. It also provides for how the level of discount for the BICS eligibility criteria will be calculated and other elements of scheme design. An instrument to exempt eligible businesses from the indirect cost of the FIT—the feed-in tariffs—will also be made.
In conclusion, BICS will support British manufacturing businesses to be more internationally competitive by reducing electricity costs to support and drive investment and economic growth across Great Britain. I beg to move.
Lord Fuller (Con)
My Lords, we discussed this scheme in the Chamber some months ago, so I will not repeat all the points here or be so churlish not to recognise that any help for the materials economy that employs so many people—especially the chemical industry, which in turn produces the raw materials that other manufacturers can use for their output—is all to be welcomed.
However, the problem is that the sums of money we are talking about here are insufficient to make a real difference. They are no substitute for reducing energy costs, so that we at least stand a chance of competing in the global race. Of course, the industry is on its knees, suffering the highest energy costs in the western world. A relatively small number of businesses will benefit from BICS, leaving tens of thousands to fend for themselves and continue to pay for the feed-in tariffs, renewables obligations and capacity market obligations. If we just stopped all these well-meaning but counterproductive regulatory layers, we would not need BICS, which does not even start until next year.
With gas prices 12 times higher than the US NOLA benchmark, and TTF gas—upon which ammonia and other raw materials are produced—at €90 per megawatt hour, the need for help is now. Instead, only today, the Government announced a consultation on extending CBAM to refinery products, which will just drive up the cost of industrial raw materials even more. We will never get rich by erecting a high-tariff wall around our economy to keep everyone else out. We do not need more policy money-go-rounds like BICS; we just need energy costs that are comparable with those of our competitors. I hope only that the businesses that stand to benefit from this measure will be around to receive it on 1 April. Until then, we and they will just have to hold our breath.
Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to put a couple of questions to the Minister. I am also grateful to the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, which looked at this in a little detail. It gives a figure for the cost of energy per megawatt hour in Great Britain as £61, and compares that to the cost in France of only £2, if I have understood it correctly, and similarly only £10 in Germany. Curiously, we do not have the figures for the real beasts in the field, which are China, the US, Brazil and India. That would have been interesting.
My question relates to how this will be funded. The department said that cost reductions will be funded through a combination of Treasury funding and changes within the energy system, and that these changes include moving the annual adjustment for inflation under the renewables obligation scheme and the feed-in tariff schemes from the retail prices index to the consumer prices index; and, from April 2028, removing a tax on fossil fuels used in electricity generation. My concern is that, if we do not know what the rate of inflation is at any time, how will we know what the funds to cover this scheme are? With those few remarks, can the Minister satisfy me on that point of how this will be funded?
Earl Russell (LD)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing these regulations. On these Benches, we recognise the impact that high energy costs are having on businesses and we welcome government measures to provide further support. These regulations implement the British industrial competitiveness scheme which, as the Minister said, is the successor to the British industry supercharger, by exempting eligible manufacturing businesses from the indirect costs of the renewables obligation and the capacity market that suppliers pass on through energy bills. They also allow the Secretary of State once, and before the end of March, to revise the renewables obligation level for 2027-28.
The need for these is clear. The Government’s own impact assessment puts the policy cost for very large industrial users in Great Britain at around £61 per megawatt-hour against £2 in France and £10 in Germany. No manufacturer can compete on those terms. We have long called for more to be done in this space, so we welcome this scheme and its breadth. The supercharger supports around 550 of the most electricity-intensive businesses. This scheme is expected to support more than 10,000 with savings of £35 to £40 per megawatt-hour from 2027. I also welcome the commitment that it will not raise the bills for those who are not eligible.
I have a couple of questions. On timing, I note that applications opened on 1 October and close at the end of play on 30 November. This leaves about five weeks to gather evidence and submit an application that, as I understand it, cannot be amended. What happens to a firm that either misses that deadline or makes an error in its application? Do they need to wait a full year or is there the opportunity to amend, or is a later window available to businesses? What actions are the Government taking to reach the thousands of manufacturers who may not even know that this scheme exists?
Obviously, with any cut-off some businesses are included and by definition some are excluded. Firms must be registered at Companies House, so sole traders and unregistered partnerships fall outside. A site must use at least 33 megawatt-hours a year, and the relief itself is tiered. Those tiers are quite sharp as well, so any firm that falls just below that tier could receive substantially less support. Eligibility also depends on lists of industrial and commodity codes, and that, again, produces edges.
On funding, I note, as has been said, that it comes partly from moving the inflation adjustment on the renewables obligation from RPI to CPI and removing the tax on fossil fuels in generation from April 2028.
Although we welcome this support, we want to be clear that this cannot be the whole answer in terms of government support to industry with energy costs. This is only supporting a small section of our economy. For example, the hospitality sector and small and medium-sized enterprises face the same costs and they sit outside this scheme. Particularly for hospitality and small businesses, the cost of energy is having a real impact on their trade and turnover.
Policy costs are only one part of the problem. Gas still sets the wholesale price at least 60% of the time. Until we build faster, connect the grid sooner, help with energy efficiency or have energy market reform, these problems will persist. Do the Government accept that electricity cost support must reach beyond these sectors, and what work is under way to support SMEs and the hospitality sector outside of this cap?
The support mechanism is also complex to apply for and complex to administer, so I encourage the Government to do more to automate this system, as they are doing with residential electricity costs, so that the better use of data by government can help provide that support.
This is a sensible and long-overdue step. We welcome this regulation but I hope the Government are intending to do more in this space to support industry with the cost of energy.
Lord Blencathra (Con)
My Lords, I too thank the Minister for introducing today’s amendment. His Majesty’s loyal Opposition welcome this measure, which expands the scheme introduced by the now leader of the Conservative Party when she was Business and Trade Secretary. The British industry supercharger was set up to promote the international competitiveness of Britain’s strategically important industries, exempting industries such as steel and chemicals from certain costs linked to renewable energy policies, including the renewables obligation and the capacity market.
The scheme currently supports roughly 550 businesses and over 500,000 skilled workers. This expanded British industrial competitiveness scheme could reach up to 14,000 businesses and several times more employees. That is a welcome development, not least because it shows that the Government agree with the Conservative Party that the renewables obligation and similar net-zero policies are holding back business and will be better off scrapped. As my noble friend Lord Fuller said, we do not need lots of fancy schemes; we just need to cut the electricity costs and—Bob’s your uncle—the rest falls into place.
Lord Fuller (Con)
I declare an interest as I am in the fertiliser industry, and I agree with just about every word my noble friend has said. The consequences of the lack of ammonia production in this country are not just harming our farmers, bad though that is, but are reducing the ability for us to produce energetics, explosives and weapons, because as we face a dangerous world, we need to think about our national security as well as our food security. The energy security policies of the Government are making us more vulnerable in a dangerous world than we otherwise would have been.
Lord Blencathra (Con)
I thank my noble friend for his intervention. I am disappointed that he only agreed with nearly every word I said, not every word, but he is absolutely right. I merely cited farming as one example of an area which is suffering because of high energy costs and reducing our capacity to produce fertiliser. In order for the scheme to successfully remove costs and benefit these industries, it must provide help to firms large and small, wherever they fall in the supply chain.
There is scepticism as to whether the policy achieves that. Specifically, the fact that the BICS will be available only to eligible businesses that use at least 33 megawatts per hour of grid-supplied electricity a year raises concerns. Small businesses—firms with under 50 employees—use up to 25 megawatt hours annually. For microbusinesses, that number is only 15 megawatt hours. The Government acknowledge that the renewable obligation certificates and capacity market costs asymmetrically damage British companies’ competitiveness, but it is the smaller firms, which do not necessarily have the same margins to deal with that cost, that are relatively the most affected by these policies. There is a chance that the scheme misses these businesses entirely. Surely the Government should be focusing on protecting them and promoting their competitiveness as a priority. Will the Minister commit to keeping these smaller firms, which are just as important to supply chains, under review as well?
I want to make a more general point. Implicit in this expanded scheme is the Government’s recognition that certain net-zero policies are economically damaging. They recognise that we are lagging behind when it comes to global competitiveness, and that much of the costs are the result of the policy they themselves support. The impact assessment calls the BICS
“part of the Government’s package for reindustrialisation.”
I have criticised that already, but it is tantamount to acknowledging that reindustrialisation is impossible, or at least markedly difficult, when policy costs are piled on industry.
Lord Moynihan (Con)
On that subject, I declare my interest as chairman of Amey, Acteon and Buckthorn. Does my noble friend not at least recognise the importance of the point made by the noble Earl, Lord Russell, who talked about the cost of energy? Was he not as surprised as I was on that subject that, in the OBR report today, on page 93, there is the sentence:
“The projection includes production from currently producing fields (including Jackdaw), and the NSTA’s estimate of production from development of new fields, which includes Rosebank”?
Rosebank is specifically stated. Does my noble friend have the remotest idea why something of such magnitude was not announced today by the Chancellor himself?
Lord Blencathra (Con)
My noble friend makes a very good point. We seem to be getting a lot of duplicitous statements and comments about Rosebank. We have one of the biggest oil and gas fields in our history, sitting out there off the Shetland Islands. We should be using it. There is no moral sense in trying to import gas from around the world and not using our own supplies. It does not add any more to global warming whatever. We should be using it and I look forward soon to hearing what the Government’s decision on Rosebank will be. If we can announce a huge oilfield in the Falkland Islands, why is it morally wrong to announce an oilfield in our own territorial waters? No doubt one day we might be importing our own oil from the Falkland Islands.
The impact assessment, as I said, claims that it is part of the Government’s package for reindustrialisation. I am concerned that it is not reindustrialisation; it continues to stop it and it continues to be deindustrialisation. If these facts were recognised by the Government, why stop at businesses that fulfil a strategic criterion? Surely, competitiveness is a general good. Would not every business benefit from lower costs or higher efficiency? Would it not be more prudent, instead of arbitrarily determining which manufacturing businesses are worthy of being competitive, for the Government to allow free and fair competition for them all?
Given that the Government acknowledge that carbon taxes and subsidies add costs and reduce competitiveness, this instrument represents an opportunity for them to begin the process of removing them. They need not stop at renewables obligation contracts. The ETS, CBAM and the carbon price support all represent additional costs and a choice.
The United Kingdom represents 0.8% of world CO2 emissions. China produces 33%, USA 15%, India 8% and Russia 5%. So it is economic madness to sacrifice British industry and consumers on the altar of saving the world when the British contribution makes no difference whatever. The Conservative Party recognised this early on in this Parliament. It seems that the Government are now coming around. I hope they will now act speedily.
Lord Leong (Lab)
My Lords, first, let me say a big thank you to all noble Lords for their contributions. I am grateful for some support across the Committee on this instrument. BICS is designed to address Britain’s long-standing competitiveness challenges by reducing electricity prices for British manufacturing businesses.
Let me address some of the questions posed by noble Lords—first, that made by the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, about the scheme and funding. I can confirm that any residual costs not covered by the energy system savings will be funded by the Exchequer. At the same time, exchequer funding will be delivered via the Low Carbon Contracts Company, which will reduce contract for difference charges for all domestic and non-domestic electricity suppliers from April 2027 to offset the costs of BICS not already covered by the energy system savings.
Let me address the point that the noble Earl, Lord Russell, and the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, made about hospitality and SMEs. First, BICS is targeted at manufacturing in the IS-8 sectors and foundational manufacturing industries that provide key inputs to the IS-8 sectors. At this point, I remind the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, that it was this Government who published an industrial strategy to identify the eight sectors that are important for this country. Can I also remind the noble Lord that, when they were in government, I do not remember the last Conservative Government publishing any industrial strategy on this?
The eligibility criteria for BICS are designed to maximise impact against the objectives of the industrial strategy—namely, driving economic growth and investment benefits while keeping within the agreed cost envelope to avoid increasing costs for ineligible businesses and other energy users. We will continue to engage with those sectors that are currently not eligible for the scheme on any challenges that they face with higher energy costs. If firms miss the 30 November deadline, they will still be eligible to apply for the scheme next year; we have been engaging quite extensively with business to support its implementation.
Let me address the point from the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, on the various schemes. We have the supercharger scheme, which currently supports approximately 550 electricity-intensive industries, whereas BICS can support more than 10,000 businesses across a wider range of sectors that operate at a lower electricity intensity. So the supercharger is for high electricity-intensive industries, while BICS is for lower electricity-intensive industries. Business may benefit from both schemes where they meet the relevant eligibility criteria, but they cannot receive relief twice for the same activity.
BICS is designed to be accessible to all businesses. We expect a large proportion of the businesses that are eligible for BICS to be SMEs. BICS sits alongside our clean energy superpower mission. The long-term plan is to boost energy security and reduce our exposure to fossil fuel price shocks by building clean, home-grown energy. BICS supports businesses with immediate electricity costs and challenges by helping to free up investment that can be used to incentivise and enable the transition to electrification and decarbonisation in the long term.
Let me address the point about Jackdaw. I am sure that the noble Lord opposite will agree with and welcome the decision that we made on 21 October, when the North Sea Transition Authority granted consent for the Jackdaw project following the Energy Secretary’s agreement. This means that gas from the pre-existing North Sea project will start to supply homes and businesses across the country from the end of October 2026. As far as Rosebank is concerned, that decision is subject to a live regulatory process, and it would be inappropriate for me to comment on any individual cases at this stage. A decision on the granting —or not—of consent for the Rosebank project will be taken in due course, and there is no fixed timeline for a decision. It is imperative that all material is properly considered so that a robust decision can be taken.
BICS will benefit more than 10,000 manufacturing businesses in high-growth and strategic sectors, make them more internationally competitive, and drive investment and economic growth across Great Britain. The scheme will be reviewed in 2030 to assess its continued effectiveness in supporting the competitiveness of the British manufacturing industry.
Private Rented Sector Database Regulations 2026
(1 day, 12 hours ago)
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Baroness Taylor of Stevenage
That the Grand Committee do consider the Private Rented Sector Database Regulations 2026.
Relevant document: 13th Report from the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee (special attention drawn to the instrument)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Baroness Taylor of Stevenage) (Lab)
My Lords, the Government committed to reforming a private rented sector that has too often left renters facing insecurity and unfairness. The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 delivers that commitment, and the regulations before the Committee are an important step in implementing it.
This phase of reform includes the private rented sector database, which will begin to be rolled out regionally from 15 December 2026. The service will be publicly known as the Register Your Rental Property Service, but I will refer to it as “the database” for the purposes of this debate. The database will record information about private landlords and privately let properties in England. It will help landlords to understand their obligations, give tenants better information before entering into a tenancy and support local authorities in enforcement. The regulations before us are essential to enable the rollout of the database; they set out the registration framework for the database.
Primary legislation establishes the purpose of what the database is intended to do. These regulations provide the practical framework needed for registration: who can make entries, what information must be provided and how the database can be kept accurate over time and up to date. A landlord entry will contain information about the landlord, including their name and contact information. Where the landlord is not an individual, it will include information about the organisation and its management. Joint landlords will each need their own landlord entry, while sharing the dwelling entry for the property.
A dwelling entry will contain information about the rental property, including its address, ownership, property type, rent level and relevant management details. Once occupied, it will also include tenancy and health and safety information, including uploaded certificates and information relating to gas, electrical and energy performance.
The regulations also allow entries to be made or updated by others in specified circumstances. This primarily concerns letting agents, as well as, for example, those acting under a power of attorney, a deceased landlord’s estate or a mortgage company in repossession cases. Landlords may delegate the supply of certain information to an agent or property manager, reducing administrative burden. They will, however, remain legally responsible for registration, payment, renewal and compliance.
Entries will need to be kept up to date. Recorded information will be treated as out of date where the details no longer reflect the landlord, property, tenancy or relevant compliance position, and generally must be updated within 28 days. The database operator will be able to correct errors and remove entries that do not meet the requirements for inclusion. Further operational detail, including on verification of entries by local authorities, will be addressed through guidance.
The regulations require a fee to be paid to make or renew a dwelling entry. The fee is not set in this instrument but delegates the setting of the fee to the database operator, who is required to set it by reference to the relevant costs as specified in the Act. We have separately announced the fee as £65 per property per year, on a pro rata basis during initial rollout, to ensure that those registering first do not unfairly have to pay more.
Subject to parliamentary approval, these regulations put into motion the regional rollout that will begin on 15 December 2026. Landlords in each region will then have three months to register, in turn, with all relevant entries required to be made by 14 November 2027.
This is the first of two statutory instruments needed to implement this database. The second, to be commenced as soon as possible following completion of the initial rollout, will cover the public-facing side of the database, the addition of specified breaches and offences committed by landlords, and further data sharing. This will concern what information is made visible to the public and wider data-sharing arrangements. Those matters are therefore not in scope of this legislation.
To conclude, these regulations provide the operational framework needed to begin rolling out the PRS database and to make the registration duties in the Act take practical effect. They are the next necessary step towards a more transparent and enforceable system, supporting compliance while giving tenants better information about the homes they rent. I beg to move that the Committee do now consider the Private Rented Sector Database Regulations 2026.
Lord Fuller (Con)
My Lords, I suppose we should be used by now to a Government who say one thing and do another, expecting everybody else to play by one set of rules while they do something else. This week, in a move that surprised nobody, we learned that the annual costs of the football regulator were to be twice what the impact assessment suggested, and that there was a £45 million set-up charge to boot. In the same vein, here we are with this licensing database for rental properties. I declare an interest: I am the director of a firm that lets rental properties and I own a rental property in Norwich, in my own name, as appears on the register.
Nothing in what I want to say diminishes from the positive outcome that regulators and tenants should have confidence in landlords and their properties to weed out the rogues. But, when we debated the Renters’ Rights Bill, we took the impact assessment at face value and assumed that it would reflect reality. It was said that, once it was enacted, landlords would pay a modest fee of about £30 every three years to register their properties under the regulations. As we have just heard from the noble Baroness, these regulations contemplate a £65 charge per property every year. That is a material change. Why is there this 900% increase from inception to reality and why was there not more candour at the outset? Could it be that it was not thought through?
We know that the Government are trying to purge the accidental landlord from the system by regulating him out of existence. This of course reduces choice, reduces supply and drives up rents. We are seeing the near extinction of student accommodation, meaning that students are herded into ever more expensive, specialised service accommodation at ruinous cost. Elsewhere, those with the weakest covenant strength have been put to the back of the queue, and everyone is paying more for less, along with the 190,000 fewer homes that the OBR has assumed will be built in this Parliament.
So we are moving to a system where only the largest professional landlords have the scale, expertise and finance to operate rental properties in the market. We know that Grainger, the institutional landlord, has well in excess of 10,000 properties for rent. Lloyds Bank is chasing a number, alongside some pension funds. While not all landlords operate at that scale, a number of large national agents—Chestertons, Hamptons and Foxtons—sit alongside regional and smaller players that manage many hundreds of thousands of properties on behalf of the smaller-fry landlord.
They were promised a bulk upload system to streamline populating the national database, but that is not how it is turned out. Each property must be added one at a time, and paid for with a separate credit card transaction to boot. Although the Government assumed that it would take about 10 minutes per property, the professionals have still not completed an entry in less than 20 minutes. For the largest landlords or the most popular agents, it will take 200 working days—a whole working year, Monday to Friday, without a break, not a moment—just to register their hold. That is before each landlord has confirmed his agent’s draft entry and the rigmarole is repeated. That 28-day extension deadline is a nonsense that invites people to write their own offence, because they just cannot get it done for want of a system that was promised to do bulk uploads. We have seen the Government cobble together a system used by software remnants from other departments, having totally forgotten the specification, as well as the principles of software design, data and security.
There is to be no concept of a validated Government Gateway login to securely authenticate an entry to a real personal business registering a property. The way in which the agent may communicate with the landlord one at a time is by web permalink relating to an individual property, presumably emailed between the parties—a link that never changes from one year to the next. That process breaks every cyber security rule. It is the sort of behaviour by shady operators that we debated on Monday in the Cyber Security and Resilience (Network and Information Systems) Bill. That legislation is meant to prevent this sort of practice. This invites cyber criminals to hijack a critical system related to our fundamental national property rights. Can the Minister say which of the cyber experts at DCMS, or any of the other 17 cyber regulators, has certified this obvious non-compliance in an age of AI warfare? Only this Government could press legislation regarding everybody else to follow secure and encrypted data protocols while introducing a system, within a month, that does the opposite. I am surprised there has not been a legal challenge—perhaps there should be.
If that was not bad enough, there is a further aggravation. Some local authorities have decided to introduce selective licensing. Landlords face the prospect of entering the same data twice into two wholly incompatible and separate systems in a further insult to efficiency. I ask the Minister: on inception, why can the appropriate housing standards officers in local authorities not be trusted to access the national database to further their duties? The national scheme should be the death knell for the small schemes. As she knows, some in this sector have considered mining the data from their existing IT systems, formatting it appropriately and sending the printouts to the department in pursuance of their duties. The only person I am going to feel sorry for is the postman carrying those hundreds of thousands of forms into Marsham Street—at least once a year, with repeat visits for gas safety, electrical installation and other regulatory certificates on top of every single tenant change. The Minister might like to reflect on whether she has enough staff in the department to process all these letters, while pretending that a system that is insecure and incomplete, and that creates an extra huge administrative burden and reuses credentials over inherently insecure communication protocols, is good enough.
Put simply, the Government are foisting an unready system with four weeks to go that is simply not ready, documented or to specification. Why are the Government pressing ahead when all the dashboard lights are flashing red? Only a delay at this stage will do to maintain that long-term confidence in, and the integrity of, the database, which has worthy long-term objectives. I invite the Minister to withdraw this regulation and represent it on a later occasion when she can demonstrate that the system is compliant and meets the obligations and promises set out in the Bill. Otherwise, it will be dead on arrival.
Lord Best (CB)
My Lords, I declare an interest as my wife owns rented property. I also note that I have been active for several years promoting the regulation of property agents. I am delighted that the Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook last month announced legislation in the forthcoming parliamentary Session to introduce a regulator of property agents with requirements for licensing, qualifications and adherence to codes of practice.
On the PRS database regulations before us, I welcome the introduction of the database, but the Minister will know that there has been much concern, not least from letting agents who manage privately rented accommodation on behalf of landlords. It seems that there are a large number of outstanding issues around the smooth running of the database, many of which were adumbrated by the noble Lord, Lord Fuller. Some of these matters are of a technical, detailed nature, requiring more debate between the sector and the MHCLG.
I want to pick up on a relatively straightforward point. Agents and representatives of landlords are worried that the onus being placed on the individual landlord to start and end the registration process for the database, and to fill in the necessary forms within the required timescales, will create significant problems. This is a function which agents would expect to take on if the landlord asked them to do so on their behalf, just as they do for all other aspects of managing the property and just as an accountant would handle the tax affairs of a client on their behalf. Indeed, I understand the Government’s own impact assessment assumed that letting agents would be able to register on behalf of landlords, which seems entirely sensible.
Lord Howard of Rising (Con)
My Lords, I declare an interest as a landlord. I cannot see how this database will achieve anything more than create a bureaucratic nightmare. It will not improve the conditions of properties to let. It will not increase the numbers of them—indeed, it will reduce the number. What it will do is drive rogue landlords underground.
Furthermore, I understand the Government have been advised that the database, as it stands, runs the risk of being operationally unusable. The database will not, as currently designed, enable landlords and letting agents to view data to ensure the accuracy of information. Without this, it will become all but impossible for landlords and letting agents to check whether they are compliant and abiding by their legal obligations in relation to the database. It risks creating a system in which landlords are held accountable for compliance without being given the ability to verify registration details.
Larger landlords will not be able to bulk-upload property information on the database. This may mean writing individual letters for each property. Have the Government considered the ability to cope with approaching 5 million letters? Letting larger landlords bulk-upload would take some of this burden away.
Officials have said that the proposed model for the database would operate on a property-by-property basis, with agents receiving individual links for each property they help to register and manage. Surely the Government are competent enough to create a system which has a much greater degree of automation. As proposed, it will be time-consuming and cumbersome for letting agents to carry out registration on behalf of landlords. Why should this be any different from someone using a letting agent which already has a responsibility for complying with existing legislation? Agents should be able to comply with these regulations without going backwards and forwards to the principle.
The reason has been given that the system is created in such a way that landlords must bear the responsibility. As has already been said, in any other case of instructing professional advisers—for example, lawyers, accountants, stockbrokers et cetera—it is the person giving the instructions who has the ultimate responsibility. Is it different in this case or has it been created in order to add to the chaos?
A registration fee of £65 represents a substantial recurring cost. Many individual landlords will see income tax rates on rentals increase from April next year and the Government want landlords to pay up to £10,000 per property to meet their proposed energy efficiency standards. We should not see the fee to join the database in isolation from these other costs facing the sector—which, we have to remember, will ultimately be borne by the tenants in the form of higher rents. Can the Minister explain the breakdown of the £65 annual fee to join the database?
The impact assessment accompanying the then Renters’ Rights Bill assumed a database registration fee of £28.58 per property every three years. Now, £65 per property is proposed every year, as the property has to be reregistered every 12 months. How much will go to the local authorities and what will be ring-fenced to support enforcement activity? How much will be kept by central government and what will it be used for? What assurances are there that the funds will actually be used to support landlords and tenants?
I remind the Minister that there are approaching 5 million rented houses in this country, of which a very substantial number are owned by someone with no more than one or two properties. Many of them will find great difficulty in complying with the proposals. Larger landlords, as has already been commented, believe that the Government’s estimate of cost compliance is wildly underestimated.
Not wishing to burden your Lordships, I have not gone into as much detail and as many technical arguments as I would have liked to have done. Will the Minister consider meeting to explore in more detail how the database will operate in practice? Although I believe the whole exercise is pointless, we must at least make some attempt to make it work properly.
Finally, I draw the Minister’s attention to the adverse comments made by the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee.
Baroness Thornhill (LD)
My Lords, if the Minister allows me, I will just respond initially to a few comments that have been brought up already. Some good points have been made that I want to identify the Liberal Democrats with.
The double entry issue is really troubling councils and others, and that really needs addressing and answering. I think we all need some assurance on readiness. Perhaps my question is: was there a decision about piloting this initially to get out all the teething problems?
On property agents, my deep concern that I take from what the noble Lords, Lord Best and Lord Howard, just said is one that the Minister will not be surprised to hear me express: property agents are not regulated and they have no professional codes of conduct and so on, just simple guidance. To me, we are giving them an incredibly powerful tool, and I think this is a strong argument for moving on the professionalisation of property agents, which I think the noble Lord, Lord Best, first reported on in one of his reports. When was it?
Baroness Thornhill (LD)
Even the sector itself feels that it is overdue.
I supported the principle of a landlord database during the passage of the Renters’ Rights Bill. Looking back at some of my comments, I feel that I was a little messianic about it, because I genuinely believe that this could be a real tool to improve standards, inform tenants and bring rogue landlords to heel. Good enforcement needs good information, tenants deserve transparency, councils need effective tools and rogue landlords should not be able to hide from scrutiny.
So the principle is not the problem; interestingly, many of the briefings that we have received have stated that very clearly up front. That is important. For me, the question is: will this database actually do what it says on the tin and what it sets out to do? As a former elected mayor, I have seen plenty of databases. Creating one is usually the easy bit; keeping it accurate, useful and up to date is the hard bit and can be a real, onerous burden on an institution.
My first question is: are we collecting the right information—that is, the most helpful and informative? There is plenty in here about registration, certificates, licences and compliance documents—all of which is good stuff—but are we creating a genuinely useful tool or simply a very efficient filing cabinet? If I were a tenant looking for somewhere to live, I would want to know whether a landlord had received improvement notices, civil penalties or other enforcement action; frankly, that would tell me a lot more than whether somebody had uploaded a document on time. So my second question is: who is the database really for? Is it mainly a tool for councils and regulators, or is it supposed to help tenants make informed choices? If transparency is one of the objectives, what will the tenants actually be able to see?
My third concern is around compliance. There are worryingly varying estimates of the levels of awareness with regard to this. What assessment have the Government made of awareness in the sector of what has to be done? The landlord most likely to register is the landlord who is already trying to do the right thing. The landlord most likely to pay the fee is the landlord who is already trying to follow the rules. However, the one we all worry about is the one who ignores the system altogether. The noble Lord, Lord Howard, made a pertinent comment: there is a danger of us driving these people even further underground, because the problem is that they are already underground.
Regrettably, my real worry is that, due to the shortage of homes, the desperation of some tenants will always mean that these landlords find themselves suitable tenants. How will this scheme identify the landlord who simply chooses not to register? How will the information on the database be verified, rather than self-declared? As someone who has spent years in local government, like the Minister, I always get nervous when the answer to a problem seems to be another form. The reality is that we need more homes, more investment and, like it or not—as I discovered in my own council group—more larger, professionally managed housing providers that are investing in the sector.
One of the ways in which we are getting these things is through the growth of the build-to-rent sector. These developments often have one owner, one management structure and one set of compliance arrangements across an entire building. So I struggle with the logic here: if the same landlord is being asked, in essence, to submit the same information about the same building, over and over again, through hundreds of separate front doors, what problem is that solving? Does it make tenants safer? Does it give councils better intelligence? Does it improve enforcement? Or are we in danger of confusing more paperwork with better outcomes? Good regulation should be about outcomes, not processes, but this feels very process-driven at the moment. The aim should be better regulation, not simply more regulation.
As the Minister knows, I always approach these matters through the lens of delivery. Who will verify this information? Who will investigate non-compliance? Who will pursue the landlords who never register in the first place? What resources will local authorities receive to do so? How confident are the Government that councils are ready to go and have the capacity to do the job that we hope they will do? A database does not enforce itself, and a database on its own catches nobody.
My final questions are simple. How will the Government measure the success of this? How often will it be re-evaluated? Will it involve more records on the database, or will it lead—as I feel it should—to more rogue landlords being identified, more effective enforcement and, perhaps more importantly, better homes for tenants? Surely that is the test that will matter. Put simply, how will we know it has done the job that we all want it to do?
Lord Jamieson (Con)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing this SI. It follows the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 and establishes the detailed requirements for the Government’s new private rented sector database, as the Minister said. They also introduce fees for registering and renewing property entries with the amount to be determined by the database operator, although it has already been suggested that this will be £65.
On this side of the Committee, we fully support the principle that tenants should be able to tackle rogue landlords and have access to safe and decent accommodation, which is why the previous Conservative Government brought forward our own proposals for a private rented sector ombudsman. However, we were very clear, during the passage of the Bill, that this database needs to be user-friendly and light-touch; it needs to enable electronic data entry and minimise unnecessary bureaucracy. The Minister herself gave us assurances that this would be the case. This comes down to our fundamental request: we need a database that works. The noble Lords and the noble Baroness who have spoken have expressed a great deal of concern that the database does not work. These concerns were echoed in the submissions to the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, which has drawn the SI to the special attention of the House.
I welcome the fact that the department has committed to continuing to work with the sector to make continuous improvement. The question remains: can it get it working in the first place? Can the Minister tell us why the Government have not halted implementation of the system until it can be fully piloted, so that the recommendations can be implemented and the sector and tenants can have confidence that it works?
This SI comes at the time of a housing crisis. Are the Government aware that they are already driving landlords away? The latest Rightmove survey shows that there are 2% fewer properties for rent nationally—with a particular issue in London, where there are 9% fewer rental properties and where rents have risen by 3.2%. This is before today’s announcement of higher taxes on landlords. Even the OBR is forecasting long-term increases in rents.
It appears that the database is not fit for purpose. While it may work for a few individual landlords, insufficient consideration has been given to the practical requirements of large-scale, professionally managed rental businesses or the role of agents. As my noble friends Lord Fuller and Lord Howard of Rising said, large landlords will be required to register properties individually, entering up to 70 separate data points for each home. That may work for a landlord with one or two properties who knows what they are doing, but it does not work for a landlord managing, say, 3,000 properties. As my noble friend Lord Fuller suggested, we could be talking about 200 days of work just to register those properties; that is an extraordinary figure for a system that is supposed to simplify and modernise the regulation of the private renter sector.
Private landlords already face extensive regulatory obligations, including gas and electrical safety requirements, energy performance standards and, where applicable, property licensing. These regulations require much of the same information to be provided again through a central government database. Why are landlords being asked to enter information that the Government already hold on existing databases?
During the passage of the Bill, the issue of simplifying and consolidating was raised frequently by many noble Lords. The Government claimed that the system for bulk uploads will not offer time savings and that integration will better meet the needs of stakeholders as described. The purpose of digital government should be to reduce duplication, not institutionalise it. Can the Minister explain what appropriate integration with existing property management systems will look like? Can she assure the Committee that this will be fully implemented and trialled before the database is rolled out?
I am also concerned about the severely limited role that letting agents will be permitted to play in the registration process. As the noble Lord, Lord Best, mentioned, landlords rely on professional letting agents to manage both their properties and their regulatory obligations, and to ensure that they comply. Under the proposed system, landlords themselves must initiate and complete the registration process, with agents permitted to provide only certain information on their behalf. This is particularly difficult to understand, given that the Government’s impact assessment assumed that letting agents would register properties on behalf of the landlords. For agents managing thousands of properties, this will mean repeatedly returning to individual landlords to initiate registrations, obtain access and secure further information. Can the Minister explain why professional letting agents cannot be authorised to manage the entire registration process on behalf of their clients, as they do with many other regulatory requirements?
As my noble friend Lord Fuller mentioned, this whole plethora of passwords being shared between different people, properties and so forth raises significant cyber security issues. What happens, when a person at a large landlord or agent leaves, to the hundreds or thousands of passwords and databases that they have to share? Are they shared across businesses?
Can the Minister also assure the Committee that not every individual property under landlords and agents will require its own registration and password, as proposed? This is an obvious burden and a financial one too, and it is on top of the £65 registration fee that, as has already been mentioned, is not a one-off but an annual fee. These costs of additional bureaucracy, time and so forth will simply be passed on to tenants. Can the Minister tell the Committee to which metrics the fee will be pegged? What safeguards exist to prevent this becoming an unsustainable cost? The proposed system lacks the necessary integration to automate changes.
We also raised concerns regarding potentially significant fines. As has already been described, this is a bureaucratic nightmare. The risk of unintended, innocent, data-entry errors is significant, yet the landlord faces a potential £7,000 fine for each one of those errors. That is unreasonable. We need to get the database system working. As others have said, the whole aim of the Bill is to remove rogue landlords; it should not make the life and processes of genuine, good landlords so difficult that rogue landlords can hide in the background. This seems especially punitive considering that the Prime Minister has now introduced a system whereby parking fines can be appealed on the basis of an honest mistake.
As my noble friend Lord Howard of Rising raised, the current system provides an alternative for landlords, as they can create their own database, print out the necessary forms and send them on to the department. Many large landlords may find that simpler, because they are able to maintain their own database and assure themselves that it is up to date; they are able to update it electronically and provide their own reports, which they just fire off the printer. They send thousands of forms to Marsham Street, as my noble friend Lord Fuller said. That cannot be the right way of doing things.
In many parts of the country, there is a desperate shortage of private rental housing. Yet, whether an individual landlord or a large-scale corporate landlord, the Government continue to make being a landlord more difficult, thus reducing the incentive to become a private landlord. This is already having an impact on the market: not only are we seeing landlords exiting, but I am told by the development industry that the private build-to-rent sector has stalled. Ultimately, it will be tenants who will bear the consequences at a time when we urgently need more homes to rent.
It makes little sense to introduce a database that is not fit for purpose, driving up administrative costs, which will discourage the very investment that is needed to increase supply. I ask the Minister: why does the database not allow the bulk input of information? Why can apartment blocks not be registered where there is a single landlord? Why is there not API integration from day one? Why is the database not linked to other government databases? Why does the fee structure not reflect the different types of landlord? Why can agents not input information on behalf of their clients? Why is there not a longer transition period? Most importantly, has the database been piloted? If so, what were the lessons from those pilots? If not, when will it be piloted?
We support effective regulation, but regulation must also be proportionate, practical and properly implemented. The objective should not be to drive responsible landlords and investment out of the sector. When introducing a database, it must be practical, must work and must have been trialled. I hope that the Minister will consider these points.
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
My Lords, I thank all of the noble Lords who have contributed to the debate on this statutory instrument this afternoon.
First, I want to tackle an issue that has been raised many times: the testing of the database. In fact, we have been engaging with landlords, including organisational landlords, in user research and testing since 2023 on a database; as the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, said, that was because his Government had considered doing this before. We have been formally testing since May this year. In testing with organisational landlords, almost 90% reported the service as easy or very easy to use, and 80% rated the registration guidance clear or very clear. We have taken note of all the comments that have been made as we have gone through this testing process. We have made improvements to the database according to those comments and, of course, we continue our dialogue with the sector. We have not just jumped into this in the past two weeks, as has been suggested by some contributors.
It is very important that we have transparency for both tenants and councils; the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, referred to this. We need to keep the database accurate and up to date, which is why we have asked for annual updates: some databases fail where you update them only if you have a change. This is an annual prompt to change it. Noble Lords will be very familiar with their registration of interests, which we have to update; we get a prompt to update that regularly. That is the point of having an annual update.
I will go through some of the issues that noble Lords have raised, some of which were raised by more than one Peer. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Howard, that our department remains willing to discuss this with anybody who wants to how the database may operate, so, to pick up his question directly, we are of course willing to do that.
A number of noble Lords—in particular, the noble Lords, Lord Fuller, Lord Howard and Lord Jamieson—raised the fee and asked why it is higher than the initial £20 estimate that we gave. The £65 fee is needed to fund a national database that is fair, sustainable and capable of supporting effective enforcement. All landlords will be required to pay the annual £65 fee for each property they register on the database. The fee is charged per property, so landlords will need to pay the fee each time they register a different property.
The fee has been set at a level that balances fairness and sustainability for landlords with the cost of operating the database and tackling non-compliance in the private sector; that last point is equally important. The fees will support activity to identify and act on non-compliance with the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 reforms. That includes funding to help councils have the staff and skills they need to identify and tackle non-compliance and to drive landlords who persist in breaking the law out of the sector. When we talked to the many landlords to whom we spoke during the course of the then Renters’ Rights Bill, they were just as concerned as the rest of us about driving out those rogue landlords, because they do not do the sector any good at all and undercut some of the really decent and good landlords that we have.
Lord Fuller (Con)
Perhaps the Minister might allow me to intervene briefly. I do not speak for Grainger, but I have spoken to a large number of institutional landlords, and they have no objection to providing information one property at a time. They understand the point the Minister is making. It is just that they want to bulk upload them all at once so that they can upload a large number in one go and, just as importantly, pay for them in one transaction. That is the point these institutional people are making. We are talking at cross purposes. We understand what the Minister is saying; it is just that the software is not delivering on that simple outcome.
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
I am happy to take back that feedback. The point about paying in one go is fair. It was my understanding that that could happen, but I will take that back and respond to the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, in writing, if that is okay.
The noble Lords, Lord Fuller and Lord Jamieson, raised the security of the database. That is important. We are all concerned about cyber security. The database has been developed with security and privacy at its core, using established government and cyber security standards. The department is assessing the database against the National Cyber Security Centre’s cyber assessment framework, and the database will also be subject to penetration testing to identify and address vulnerabilities before and during operation. We are working with the department’s data protection officer on the necessary data protection work, including an impact assessment, data-sharing arrangements and privacy arrangements for landlords, local councils and agent users. The database will also use monitoring tools to help identify potential vulnerabilities and support ongoing security assurance.
The noble Lord, Lord Fuller, talked about the potential duplication with selective licensing. The database will not duplicate or replace selective licences, because the two systems have entirely different purposes. The national database will provide consistent information about private landlords and rental properties across England, supporting transparency, compliance and local authority enforcement.
Selective licensing remains a targeted local tool used by councils to address specific local issues through more intensive proactive enforcement—for example, anti-social behaviour and those types of issues. We recognise the important role that licensing can continue to play where it is used appropriately, and we will continue to review how licensing and the national service interact as implementation progresses. Organisational landlords will use the GOV.UK One Login service to log in and authenticate. This is a service widely used across government and is built in accordance with government technology standards.
The noble Lords, Lord Best, Lord Howard and Lord Jamieson, all asked why letting agents cannot register on behalf of landlords. One of the key goals of the database is to improve landlord awareness and capability, and requiring landlords to initiate registration directly supports that by ensuring that they engage with their legal responsibilities from the outset. Letting and property agents will still be able to support landlords by providing certain information once the landlord has started the registration process. Where an agent agrees, the landlord will be able to delegate the provision of specific tenancy health and safety information to them.
Responsibility for ensuring that the registration requirements are met will remain with the landlord throughout. Letting and property agents will not have a mandatory role in registration and will not be separately registered through this database. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Best, for his response on the regulation of property agents and I will feed that back to my right honourable colleague in the other House.
The noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, asked about what data will be published. This instrument does not decide what information will be published; the public-facing database will be brought forward through secondary legislation once the initial rollout period is complete. At that point, tenants will be able to access necessary and proportionate information about landlords and rental properties, including some of the issues that the noble Baroness referred to about landlord enforcement actions that have been taken. We will carefully balance the benefits of transparency with landlords’ privacy rights, safety concerns and data protection requirements.
The noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, also asked how to identify landlords who do not register. When the public-facing database is available, tenants and others will be able to tell the database that their rental property is not registered, as they will be able to check. That can be passed on to the local housing authority.
To conclude, this instrument is the practical next step in delivering the PRS database. It sets the registration framework that landlords, local authorities and the database operator will need as regional rollout begins. By doing so, these regulations will support landlord compliance, strengthen local authority enforcement and give tenants better information about the homes they rent. I beg to move.
Lord Jamieson (Con)
May I follow up on a couple of points that the Minister made? She talked about testing the database, and I appreciate the comments she made about how it was the Conservatives who started looking at a database. My point is to try to understand what testing has been done.
I know that a number of noble Lords on this side, and presumably the Minister herself, will have received a lot of emails from large landlords, various groupings of landlords and so forth, raising these sorts of issues. Clearly, they are not happy if they have been part of the testing system. Has this been testing where an individual person is trying to import a single property? I think that we largely acknowledge that the system could work reasonably well for that. It was different for multiple properties or for where a landlord was not very familiar with all the regulations and so forth and was reliant on their agents. It would be very interesting if the Minister could give a bit more information about whether this involved bulk-inputting of property.
The Minister slightly glossed over the key point here by saying, “You could cut and paste”. I know that we have all filled in forms by cutting and pasting, but that still means having to go individually into each form to cut and paste—and believe me, from past experience, that is where you get more errors.
Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Katz) (Lab)
For an intervention at the end of a speech, this is getting a bit long now, so perhaps the noble Lord could conclude.
Lord Jamieson (Con)
I am afraid that this is quite an important issue, and a number of issues have been raised. We are going to get a lot of data problems here.
My point about an apartment block, again, is that most of those apartments may not be the same or identical, and they have to be registered individually, but there needs to be an ability to provide bulk information and then have separate individual registrations. We do not disagree with that. Otherwise, as I have said before, the risk is that there will be hundreds of repeated entries. Could the Minister clarify that real question: why is this not being tested in the real world—not offline testing—where agents would have bulk entries and so forth?
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
There has been a lot of testing going on since 2023. If the noble Lord is happy with this, I will get some more information about how the testing has worked, what has been tested and so on. However, the figures were fairly outstanding —we had an 80% rating of “clear” or “very clear” on the registration guidance; and 90% reported that the service was “very easy” or “easy” to use—but I can give more detail about how this was tested, if that would help. I will get the noble Lord some more information on that.
It is not in the Government’s or landlords’ interest and certainly not in the tenant’s interest—at the heart of this is enabling tenants to have access to more transparent information—for this database not to work. So we have made sure that it works before its implementation in December, and we will continue to work with the sector to improve it as we go along.
Lord Jamieson (Con)
It may have had 90% acceptability among the people who used it, but my key point was: who?
Human Rights Act 1998 (Remedial) Order 2026
(1 day, 12 hours ago)
Grand CommitteeRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Lemos
That the Grand Committee do consider the Human Rights Act 1998 (Remedial) Order 2026.
Relevant document: 1st Report from the Joint Committee on Human Rights
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord Lemos) (Lab)
The draft remedial order was laid to implement the decision of the European Court of Human Rights in the case of SW v the United Kingdom. It amends Section 9(3) of the Human Rights Act 1998 to make damages available in relation to judicial acts done in good faith, where the judicial act breaches the requirements of procedural fairness under Article 8—the right to respect for private and family life—of the European Convention on Human Rights. The Government consider that amending Section 9(3) in this way is the appropriate approach to ensure that we meet our international obligations, while respecting the important principle of judicial immunity.
The applicant was a social worker who acted as a professional witness in childcare proceedings in the family court. The family court judge made adverse findings in his judgment on the professional conduct of SW, without giving the applicant adequate opportunity to respond, and directed that the judgment be sent to the local authority to which the applicant was then assigned. The applicant’s assignment with the local authority was subsequently terminated.
In 2016, the Court of Appeal found that the applicant’s Article 8 rights had been infringed and set aside the findings. However, the applicant was unable to obtain damages due to Section 9(3) of the Human Rights Act, which prevents the payment of damages for judicial acts done in good faith except in very limited circumstances. In 2021, the European Court of Human Rights subsequently found that there had been a breach of Article 13 of the convention—the right to an effective remedy—read together with Article 8. The breach arose because the applicant did not have access to an effective remedy at the national level capable of addressing the substance of her Article 8 complaint and by which she could obtain appropriate relief. The European Court of Human Rights awarded a sum in damages, which has been paid.
We are obliged, as a matter of international law, to implement this judgment which, in this case, requires legislative change to ensure that similar violations will not arise in the future. The Human Rights Act contains powers in Section 10 and Schedule 2 to make amendments to legislation via a remedial order to address the findings of the European Court of Human Rights. On 17 July 2025, the Government laid a proposal for a draft remedial order to make the necessary amendment to the Human Rights Act. The Government considered that this addressed the specific findings of the court.
In November 2025, the Joint Committee on Human Rights reported on the draft remedial order. We are grateful for the committee’s scrutiny and for accepting that this is a valid use of the power to make a remedial order, which addresses the specific breach of Article 13 identified by the court in SW. The Joint Committee on Human Rights was of the view that the proposed amendment was too narrowly drafted to prevent future breaches of Article 13 where judicial acts infringe upon convention rights. It recommended amending the order either by introducing principled exceptions to Section 9(3) or considering removing the provision entirely, alongside a number of recommendations to amend the drafting.
While we recognise the committee’s recommendation to go further, having examined these concerns carefully, the Government have decided to continue with the current approach for the order, and have implemented small drafting changes in response. The implementation of this judgment should not be delayed any further as it has been five years since the judgment became final. We have taken care to ensure that the draft remedial order appropriately addresses the incompatibility identified by the court in SW v UK while respecting the principle of judicial immunity.
Although the remedial order has not been amended as recommended by the Joint Committee on Human Rights, we have committed to undertaking a review of the operation of Section 9(3) separately to the implementation of this judgment, in consultation with the judiciary, the Joint Committee on Human Rights and other relevant parties. I am grateful to the Joint Committee on Human Rights for its scrutiny of the proposal and its careful consideration of the more recent draft order that has been laid. We welcome the Joint Committee’s recommendation that both Houses approve the order.
Noble Lords will have heard me mention the need to protect the principle of judicial immunity, which is a long-established common law principle. An independent and impartial judiciary is one of the cornerstones of a democracy, and judicial immunity is an important safeguard of that independence. Officials have had continued engagement with the judiciary during the drafting of the remedial order to ensure that it was fully sighted on our plans.
Finally, given that the Human Rights Act applies to the whole of the United Kingdom, this order would apply UK-wide. Officials have been in contact with the devolved Governments during the process of drafting this amendment.
This draft order ensures that damages may be awarded under the Human Rights Act in respect of a judicial act done in good faith where the judicial act is incompatible with Article 8, on the grounds that it was done in such a procedurally defective way as to amount to a breach of the requirements of procedural fairness under that article. I beg to move.
Lord Bellamy (Con)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for his introduction and, more importantly, place on record that I was the Minister in the previous Government who held the posts that the noble Lord now holds. This proposed statutory instrument—or an instrument along these lines—came before me at the time and I declined to allow the department to proceed with a statutory instrument, not on the basis that we should do nothing to implement the relevant judgment of the Court of Human Rights but on the basis that it should be done by primary legislation and that the statutory instrument rule is quite wrong for this kind of instrument.
I relied particularly on two things. In 2021, as noble Lords will recall, the then Government commissioned a review of the working of the Human Rights Act 1998, chaired by Sir Peter Gross, who had a distinguished panel in support and came out with an impressive report. A major recommendation of that report was that, although one can have remedial orders to amend various Acts of Parliament, that should never be done in relation to the Human Rights Act itself, because that is the foundation stone of the whole system and a foundational Act by Parliament, so amendments to the Human Rights Act itself should be done only by primary legislation. I was not, as the Minister, prepared to go against that very important recommendation and constitutional safeguard. That was the first reason.
The second reason was that this instrument has profound constitutional implications anyway. As the Minister has just said, the principle of judicial independence is a foundational principle of our constitution. In order to protect judicial independence, we have for centuries held that judicial acts made in good faith are immune from damages. That is also a foundational principle of the constitution, and again I took the view that if one was going to modify or weaken that principle, that should be done by Parliament and by primary legislation.
From the point of view of judicial independence, once one allows people to sue a judge or the court for acts done in a judicial capacity, there are two fundamental problems. One is that you are undermining the independence of the judiciary fairly self-evidently. The second is that you are opening up a second route of appeal from the decision in question, and that is a serious matter. I took the view, rightly or wrongly, that this should be done only with the full consent of both Houses of Parliament, properly and fully debated on the Floor of both Houses, following normal procedure for primary legislation.
I regret to say that by proceeding by this route, the Government have taken the wrong course. They have shown profound disrespect to Sir Peter Gross and his distinguished panel in this regard and have managed simultaneously to weaken both the foundational principles of our constitution: namely, the supremacy of Parliament and judicial independence.
I therefore respectfully ask the Minister, even at this late stage, to reflect on whether this really is the route that the Government should proceed with to make the necessary amendment to the Human Rights Act 1998, and I invite him to withdraw this order and to proceed by way of a one-line Act of Parliament which we can debate fully to explore these very important and difficult issues about judicial independence, the way courts operate, and whether in any circumstances parties or witnesses in court have rights against the judges or against courts for what is done in good faith judicially.
Lord German (LD)
My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble and learned Lord, Lord Bellamy, who raises matters that, if you are not a lawyer, give you thought and give you interesting contributions that need to be addressed. I do not make a judgment on what he said, save that the Joint Committee—our Joint Committee on Human Rights, which I will come on to in a moment—reported, both the first time and the second time, on the singular point that, at some stage, this matter should be dealt with by primary legislation. Of course, the Government’s response at the time—and it continues to be the response; I am sure that the Minister opposite me now is going to have to defend this position—was that there was no time for such a small piece of primary legislation. I look forward to the Minister’s answer on that.
First, however, I absolutely agree that these pieces of legislation are foundation stones throughout our continent. For those of us who have spent, and are spending, a considerable amount of time working on the European Convention on Human Rights and the body that was set up to protect it—the Council of Europe—it is quite clear that all the legislatures in Europe bear this one thing and would say that all this is built on that foundation stone.
I carry that foundation stone with me, because it is not a huge document. I have it here: that is it. When people complain about the European Convention on Human Rights, I ought to have a selection and give them a copy. If you read the actual decision of the European court, you will see that it concerned Article 13 on the right to an effective remedy. I will read this into the record because it is only one sentence. It says:
“Everyone whose rights and freedoms as set forth in this Convention are violated shall have an effective remedy before a national authority notwithstanding that the violation has been committed by persons acting in an official capacity”.
You can see that, if you want to talk about foundations, that that is the foundation on which our Human Rights Act, which is being changed, was made.
My questions are related to the fact that we are justifiably proud of our Joint Committee on Human Rights. It is precisely its work that has been able to look at all these issues in great detail through taking evidence over a two-stage process, which has now taken nearly two years—and that is on top of the three years before that, when the case was first heard. This is very serious legislation and we need to be proud of the fact that we have a body of both Houses that lays out that the conditions that are being put before us today must be approved by both Houses; that is what we are here to do today.
I know that a solution has been put forward and the committee has agreed it—but not without a caveat. The committee’s primary caveat was that the amendment that has been brought forward is very tight and not broad. In the document that the Joint Committee on Human Rights produced, it sought to ask the Government to explain the rationale for being tight. This touches on one of the points made just now by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Bellamy, on judicial independence.
Lord Keen of Elie (Con)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing this order, but I immediately say that I align myself entirely with the observations made by my noble and learned friend Lord Bellamy. We are dealing, on the surface, with what appears to be a very simple and straightforward order, but below that simple surface there is a raging sea of contention and debate. It is one that should be addressed by Parliament in the form of primary legislation, not by Ministers in the form of remedial orders.
When the Human Rights Act was passed, Parliament ensured that all aspects of the principle of judicial independence and immunity—what the Minister, rightly, referred to as a long-established common-law principle and a foundational constitutional issue—were preserved by Section 9 of the Act. There is a minor exception with regard to where someone has been detained, but that does not impact directly on the issue. The concept of judicial independence is central to our common-law system of justice.
I will come back to this point, but I make the observation that this is less easily identified in many continental legal systems. Many of those legal systems make up the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, so there is, if you like, a potential divergence in the view taken on judicial immunity and judicial independence between common-law systems such as our own and continental systems.
Five years ago, in 2021—I emphasise 2021—in the case of SW v the United Kingdom, the European Court of Human Rights intruded on the issue of the immunity and independence of the judiciary by determining that a remedy in the form of damages should be available where there was potentially a breach of Article 8 of the convention. It is in that context that we are now presented with the remedial order.
When the Human Rights Act was being debated nearly 30 years ago, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine of Lairg, set out that the power in Section 10 to make a remedial order was to be conferred only in exceptional circumstances. It was a power to be exercised lightly. It is a point reinforced by the terms of Section 10 itself. Noble Lords may wish to refer to the Explanatory Memorandum at paragraph 6.3, which emphasises this. Section 10(2) of the Human Rights Act requires that a Minister must consider there to be “compelling reasons” for making an amendment by way of a remedial order. I emphasise “compelling reasons”.
Five years after the judgment, Sir Peter Gross and his board determined that there could never or should never be compelling reasons to amend the Human Rights Act itself—the foundational document—by means of a remedial order. There may be cases with regard to other primary legislation where such a remedial order would be appropriate but, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine of Lairg, pointed out, it is a power to be conferred or exercised lightly and not one to be deployed with regard to the foundational principles of human rights as expressed in the Human Rights Act.
In attempting to meet the requirement for compelling reasons, we are told:
“We consider there is little prospect of finding suitable primary legislation to make an amendment in the near future. We consider that the nature of the incompatibility contributes to there being compelling reasons for making the necessary legislative change swiftly”.
Is this swiftly? The European Court of Human Rights opined on this matter more than five years ago. As regards compelling reasons, when the Minister presented this order, he did so under the non-urgent procedure. There is nothing compelling about any of this. This is an issue that should properly be brought before Parliament in the form of primary legislation, and the absence of a suitable vehicle is of little moment. Indeed, I happen to notice that we are at present debating the Courts and Tribunals Bill. Will the Minister confirm to me that he has checked whether this provision would fall within the competence of that Bill? No doubt he has addressed that issue, given the way in which the Explanatory Memorandum is set out, but other legislation could be made available.
In these circumstances, what we are actually seeing is the developing jurisprudence of the court in Strasbourg intruding upon the primary legislation of our sovereign Parliament in an area of fundamental constitutional importance and, five years later, a Minister laying an order under the non-urgent procedure seeking to maintain that somehow there is an issue of urgency and a compelling reason to intrude upon a fundamental constitutional right and protection. The time has come for the Government and Parliament to consider the increasing intrusion into our parliamentary sovereignty of an ever-evolving jurisprudence from the European Court of Human Rights, particularly when the jurisprudence is significantly and materially influenced by continental lawyers unfamiliar with our common-law based system. I suggest that the remedial order sets not only a very bad but a very sad precedent.
Lord Lemos (Lab)
I thank noble Lords for their contributions. I am sorry we got to this rather late, because it clearly raises some interesting issues. I am getting, if I may say so, conflicting advice from the parties opposite. Let me try to deal with the points that were raised by the noble and learned Lords, Lord Bellamy and Lord Keen, and the noble Lord, Lord German.
On the question of primary legislation, which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Bellamy, raised, supported by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen, we considered this a proportional and appropriate use of the power in Section 10 of the Human Rights Act, which was referenced: it does not prevent the amending of the Act itself. This is exactly the type of situation that the Section 10 power was created for.
I take the point that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen, made about Lord Irvine’s comment that it should be used lightly, which is in part why we are approaching this with a very narrow and targeted amendment to address the incompatibilities that have been identified by the courts. The scrutiny report of the JCHR was mentioned. I join with the noble Lord, Lord German, and very much associate myself with his sentiments about being proud of the work of the JCHR: it is a very distinguished part of your Lordships’ House. It was satisfied that the power to make a remedial order under Section 10 of the Human Rights Act can be relied on in these circumstances.
The Joint Committee on Human Rights also accepted that the conditions for compelling reasons—a point that has been raised—to use the power under Section 10(2) of the Human Rights Act were met. The committee also considered this question in the previous Hammerton remedial order and reached the conclusion that the Government do have the power to amend the HRA in this way.
On the question of finding suitable primary legislation, I do not think it is frivolous to observe that, in the short time I have been in this job, I have frequently been told that we should find time for one-line Bills to achieve something important. But we consider that there is little prospect of finding suitable primary legislation to make such amendment in the new year. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen, and I have discussed this before. I think he described waiting for parliamentary time as a “quagmire” in that debate. We consider that the nature of the incompatibility contributes to there being a compelling reason to make the necessary legislative change swiftly via a remedial order.
The noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen, is right that this has been going on since 2021, but of course he knows what I am going to say: we were not in power until 2024 and I understand from my officials that there was a search for a primary legislation vehicle before this Government came to power and none was found.
I turn now to the points made by the noble Lord, Lord German. I think I should address the question of judicial immunity, because it is so central to the discussion we are having. As I have said, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen, also said, judicial immunity is a long-established common-law principle. An independent and impartial judiciary is one of the cornerstones of a democracy and judicial immunity is an important safeguard of that independence. The Government of course support that and commit themselves to protecting it. The immunity protects judges from personal liability arising from acts carried out in the exercise of their judicial functions. Officials have had—I want to reassure the Committee on this—continuous engagement with the judiciary during the drafting of the remedial order to ensure that they were fully sighted on our plans.
I will just make some remarks specific to this remedial order. When the Human Rights Act 1998 was passed, the purpose of Section 9(3) was to preserve the principle of judicial immunity and to limit the extent of damages for judicial acts done in good faith to the extent necessary to comply with Article 5(5) of the convention. A further exception, as I have noted, was added via the Hammerton remedial order to allow damages to be awarded in the case of judicial acts that are incompatible with Article 6 in circumstances where the person is detained and, but for the incompatibility, the person would not have been detained for so long. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen, mentioned that.
This order preserves the approach of the original legislation. I note the comments of the noble Lord, Lord German, on the views of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, but we want to take the narrow approach so that we can preserve the approach of the original legislation by setting out a further limited exception related to a judicial act done in good faith where the judicial act breaches the requirements of procedural fairness under Article 8. There clearly is a difference of view between the Government and the Opposition about the whole question of the European Convention on Human Rights, and this debate is a small part of that. I wish to put on the record the Government’s support for the European Convention on Human Rights, as I have done before, but I am very happy to reiterate that.
I am grateful for the contributions to this debate, and I am sure that issues that surround the European Convention on Human Rights will return to our debates many times in the future. We believe this order is the right way to implement the judgment. It ensures that we meet the obligation to implement the judgment while upholding the important principle of judicial immunity. I therefore commend this order to the Committee.