Housing and Planning Bill

Baroness Gardner of Parkes Excerpts

Tuesday 1st March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

My Lords, in that situation I would expect there to be an agreement. Where a landlord is seeking to regain possession for their personal use—as their own home—that, in my understanding, has always been recognised in law as a different situation from someone being a permanent landlord and seeking merely to churn their tenants.

[Baroness Gardner of Parkes (Con)]

My Lords, I am very interested in this subject—noble Lords know my interests as declared—and I am interested in what is being said today. I think the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, deals with a market that he clearly understands well, and that is interesting. However, I have had many different comments and reports sent to me by different people. My own personal experience is that, when I offer people two years, they say they do not want that; they do not want to be tied to that and would like only a year. Is the landlord obliged to offer them renewals for three years, even if the person wants it for only a year?

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

My Lords, the proposal is that the landlord should be required to offer it, but that does not in any sense preclude the tenant and the landlord deciding that they want a different tenure.

[Baroness Gardner of Parkes]

All the agreements for letting residential properties in this country are extremely complicated. In Australia, there is just one in New South Wales. I do not know about other states because there is not a federal law. In New South Wales, you just go into the local paper shop and pay $7.50. That is your letting agreement and everyone—big and small, rich and poor—abides by those. There is about an inch and a half in which you could type quite a lot of special agreed clauses but the rest of the format is a basic thing. It is so simple.

The point made by the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, that this amendment is rather overbalanced against the landlord is relevant and important. Are you going to create a different type of tenancy from the assured shorthold? What will you do in cases where the landlord dies and his family is obliged to pay all death duties in advance of getting probate? What will happen under those circumstances? If you must sell the property with a sitting tenant, of course you will not get anything like the full value. Will the Exchequer allow for that and value the property down accordingly, or will it be done on the open-market value of the vacant property? What would be the special provision where the tenant was not paying the rent and that had built up? Would that all be covered by a new type of tenancy agreement? There are so many complexities that we need to look at here, so this is rather badly balanced.

I think the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, described people as being at the whim of bad landlords. I am sure that anyone who has a bad landlord is pretty unfortunate but there are so many honest, reliable landlords and, likewise, many good tenants who are happy. I know many people who have rented for years and are still in the same property after well over a decade, as was mentioned. There is a difference between that and the fact that the landlord is obliged to offer three years while the tenant can go any time at two months’ notice. That seems a bit extreme, one way or the other.

[Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)]

My Lords, perhaps I can deal with the noble Baroness’s comment on what happens in the event that the landlord dies. This is an amendment moved by my colleague on the Front Bench, and if there is a difficulty with it there is no reason at all why the Government cannot come back with an amendment to deal with the thrust of the case laid in the amendments by my Front Bench but which includes a provision for those circumstances. That is what we are here to do: to legislate. These amendments have been proposed but Ministers could take them away and say, “Yes, there is a point here but if we build in a system of exemptions then these particular problems will not arise”.

I can also deal with the question of tenants in arrears, which the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, referred to. As I understand it, under Clause 55—in Part 3, which is headed “Recovering abandoned premises”—the Government’s position is actually to simplify the whole process of dealing with what happens where,

“the unpaid rent condition is met”.

That would cover where people are in arrears and where mortgages are being paid, as I presume that under that provision the landlord would then be entitled to secure possession of his property. That deals with one of the main objections in the contribution of the noble Earl, to which I listened carefully.

Finally, the noble Earl referred to people working at Gatwick Airport who did not necessarily need longer-term tenancies. The amendment says that,

“it is an implied term of such a tenancy that the tenant may terminate the tenancy by giving two months’ written notice to the landlord”.

The tenant is not locked into the agreement at all. The tenant can pull out of the agreement at a moment’s notice simply by saying, “I gave two months’ notice to the landlord”. What we are doing here is protecting tenants by not locking them in, in the sense that they can pull out. We are protecting landlords—or the Government are protecting them—under the provisions of Clause 55 in terms of arrears. In terms of landlords dying, as I said, that could be dealt with by further consideration by the Government.

However, what we are doing more than anything else is giving people who take on tenancies a sense of security as to where they live. From what I hear from tales brought to me by my sons’ friends, who have had different tenancies in London over a period of years, many tenants in London do not know where they are going to be. They do not know whether the landlord will want the property back at the end of 12 months. People are entitled to know that the weight is moving at least a little more in favour of the tenants to give them more rights. We are not granting people long-term security of tenure and indefinite tenancies. We are simply extending it from one to three years to give more balance to the way that tenancies operate in the United Kingdom.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Gardner of Parkes]

May I ask for some clarification? When I sat as a magistrate, we had a case of a tenant whose landlord stopped taking the rent; it was never collected. After some years he was able to come to the court and get the right to buy the property, because, technically, it was abandoned. At the time this seemed to me quite a complex procedure and I wonder where it fits in—whether the tenant is disadvantaged by this amendment, or the owner of the property. I am not sure what the amendment means.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

There should, of course, be no problem over landlords repossessing genuinely abandoned property. As I was saying, Crisis estimates that there are 1,750 such cases every year. We want a procedure to ensure that the property has genuinely been abandoned, rather than the process being exploited by rogue landlords to cut corners to regain possession when they should not.