Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Debate between Baroness Kennedy of Cradley and Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top

Committee stage
Wednesday 24th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kennedy of Cradley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 292H and declare my interest as director of Generation Rent. I also add my voice in support of Amendment 292J in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, and others. As my noble friend Lady Blake of Leeds said, it is a criminal offence under the Protection from Eviction Act 1977 for a landlord to try to evict a tenant themselves. Local authorities and police officers have a crucial role to play and have the powers to stop illegal eviction and to prosecute offenders. However, the law on illegal evictions is not enforced nearly as much as it should be. Generation Rent research has shown that less than 2% of cases result in a prosecution.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, said, there are too many instances where a tenant calls the police for help with an illegal eviction, only to find that the police officer dismisses the issue as a civil matter, despite it clearly being a criminal act. This was highlighted very well in a 2020 report by Safer Renting, a charity which helps tenants enforce their rights. If the Minister has not read it, I urge her to do so. In London in 2018, for example, there were 130 cases of homelessness due to an illegal eviction, but only 14 incidents were recorded by the police.

We need a stronger partnership between the police and local authorities to combat this serious crime. Requiring co-operation and sharing of relevant information by police forces is necessary. This amendment will help secure that co-operation. In addition, more needs to be done to reset police attitudes to illegal evictions, with better training of police officers and call handlers so that they know how to respond correctly when a renter is being illegally evicted. We need better data recording and the publishing of that data on incidents between landlords and tenants. Authorities need the powers that currently exist with regard to enforcing safety standards and licensing to demand documents from parties of interest to cover investigations into illegal evictions. The sentencing guidelines should also be addressed; only two of the 10 fines handed down in 2019 were of more than £1,000. Fines can even be lower than the £355 it costs to make a legal claim for possession through the courts. They are far too low to act as any real deterrent to the crime.

Illegally evicting someone is a grave offence, and it affects the most vulnerable renters. Amendment 292H is a step forward. It will improve enforcement of this crime through ensuring that closer working relationship between the police and local authorities which is necessary for proper enforcement and prosecution.

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

My Lords, I will intervene briefly to support my noble friend Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, who is a member of the Public Services Committee, which I chair. I am delighted to see other members of the committee in the Chamber this afternoon. We published our report only on Friday and I am sure the Minister will be relieved to know that I will not go through its recommendations in great detail. I am sorry the Chief Whip has gone; I was going to say that I hope we will get an opportunity to do that properly on the Floor of the House in the not- too-distant future.

The amendment, despite its length, is quite simple and straightforward. It arises from our report on vulnerable children, which was published last Friday. The report demonstrates very clearly that the country faces a crisis in the growing number of vulnerable children —or “children in need”, as the Government tend to say. The committee found that, since 2010, money at local level has been moved from early intervention and programmes of prevention to crisis intervention. I do not blame those at local level; they had to bear large cuts because of the austerity programme and, legally, they cannot avoid crisis intervention. If something goes wrong, they have a duty to remove a child from the home, exclude them from school or get them into the criminal justice system if they are in real trouble. We know that, as early support for families is reduced, there is evidence that children are more likely to end up in crisis and require being taken into care or excluded from school, or even ending up in the criminal justice system.

The amendment seeks to protect families and children through a duty on agencies at the local level to provide early intervention to help prevent that crisis and breakdown, and it encourages and puts within that duty collaboration between those local agencies. One of the quite shocking things we heard, given that this has been talked about for so many years, is that one agency would very often not know what was happening with the child or the family if they were directly involved with another agency. We think that that level of co-operation and collaboration at a local level is also essential.

This provision would protect what local agencies feel is necessary in order to have that early intervention, which, if it works well—and we know it can—will prevent necessary crisis intervention later on. In the long term, this would save us money as taxpayers and as a society. That is the problem: we never get to the long term, because since 2010, the money spent on early intervention has been slashed. In my own county of Durham, 66% of the funding they were spending on early intervention has now been switched to crisis intervention. In Sunderland that figure is 81%. We found in our inquiry that this had happened most in the areas of greatest need around the country. For us as a nation, that is unacceptable.

There are huge pressures on local authorities in relation to children, and even more have been flagged up since our report was published only last Friday. The County Councils Network report earlier this week predicted a rise in the number of children requiring care, and yesterday the Home Office said it was going to require more local authorities to accept unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. I approve of that responsibility being shared, but it tells us that the pressures at that heavy end are not going to lessen at this time. The only way to reduce those pressures is by giving families support at the time that will help them to avoid crisis down the line. I know that if a new duty is placed on a local authority, the Government have committed themselves to it and it is in legislation that they will fund—although certainly never as much as the local authority wants—that new responsibility. So, there is money attached to a new duty, and that is one of the reasons why we put this in the way we did.

As a nation, we cannot afford this continuing and escalating crisis in the number of children who are vulnerable and in need. This is spelled out in the amendment, so let us really back what we know can work in terms of early intervention. I ask the Government to signal that they understand what this amendment is about and that they are going to make sure that this sort of thing happens in the future.