Private Rented Sector

Baroness Kennedy of Cradley Excerpts

Monday 20th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kennedy of Cradley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as director of Generation Rent. The White Paper is welcome. It is serious and ambitious. If the detail of the words follows through to the legislation in the end, it will make significant difference to renters’ lives.

As the Minister said, the centrepiece of the reform is to end Section 21 and give renters a secure and stable home. Insecurity of tenure is the biggest issue for renters, which is why I feel that when we look at the White Paper and the mandatory no-fault grounds, there is a need to strengthen those grounds. I would like to hear a little more from the Minister about how the Government will ensure that those mandatory no-fault grounds will be strengthened to ensure they are not abused by unscrupulous landlords and give renters the security that this legislation is designed to do.

Does the Minister agree that if you are given a no-fault ground for eviction, you have a family and your kids are at the local school, you do not want to move in term time, you do not want to move over the winter and you would need longer than two months in which to make that move under no-fault grounds? It is also expensive, as the Government have acknowledged in the White Paper, so compensation should be given to renters for no-fault grounds. It should be longer than a two-month notice period and increased to four months.

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness asks a difficult question. However, I have been encouraged, whenever I cannot directly answer a question, to say that my honourable friend the Minister in the other place will be conducting a drop-in session on 12 July between 11.30 am and 12.30 pm in Room W3, off Westminster Hall. Doing my best as someone who is not the lead Minister for private rental reform, as the noble Baroness realises, I can say that it is about the architecture. The important way of ensuring that landlords are not gaming the system around no-fault evictions is to have transparency through the property portal, so we collect all the available data rather than just relying on renters essentially having to get themselves legal representation and raise the issues themselves. Therefore the property portal is key. We also need to ensure that we get an ombudsman with teeth, with the right powers, and to ensure that the local authorities are resourced in the right way to step in if necessary as well. It is around getting that architecture which will turn the rhetoric into reality.