Renters’ Rights Bill

Baroness Lister of Burtersett Excerpts

Tuesday 4th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure and a privilege to follow my noble friend Lady Brown of Silvertown, both to welcome her to your Lordships’ House and to applaud her warm, passionate, insightful and compelling maiden speech—not at all dry, as she told me she feared it would be.

My noble friend says that she intends to continue working on the causes that have defined her career. That is good news because, as we have heard, these causes have been wide-ranging and important. They include culture, Africa, women in the criminal justice system, and children, including child poverty. I look forward to working with her on child poverty in particular, as the Government’s child poverty strategy takes shape. She rightly made the link between child poverty and housing insecurity and disrepair, thereby underlining the importance of the Bill, to which I now turn.

When we debated the Bill’s predecessor, I was able to give it only a very lukewarm welcome, as it contained so many flaws and holes. It is good to be able to welcome this Bill unequivocally, especially as it was approved in the Commons as a result of the Minister listening to and acting on some of the suggestions made. But there is still, of course, room for further improvement. I am grateful to the Renters’ Reform Coalition and others who have briefed us on the further changes needed

“if the legislation is to deliver on the government’s ambitions to address the ‘insecurity and injustice that too many renters experience’ and ‘decisively level the playing field between landlords and tenants’”.

Before turning to some of these changes, I will say a word about context. I do not pretend to have expertise in housing law, but I came to the issue from my long-standing concern about poverty and the insecurity it creates. As the Joseph Rowntree Foundation report published last week made clear, high housing costs are

“a major driver of poverty … leading to a risk of compromised living standards, insecurity and at worst, homelessness and rough sleeping”.

It explains that private renters in particular are pulled into poverty by high housing costs. Shockingly, around half of private renters are in poverty only after their housing costs are factored in. On average, private renters in poverty spend around 60% more on housing costs than social renters in poverty. The situation is made worse by the continued freezing of the local housing allowance and the impact of the benefit cap, which I hope the Government will eventually address.

It is thus not surprising that the latest Bristol University financial fairness tracker survey found that parents of children living in rented accommodation were especially likely to face serious financial difficulties or to be struggling. As well as having issues with damp, mould and condensation, around half had needed to borrow money just to meet their daily living expenses.

Given the poverty that results from high housing costs in the private rented sector, I am very sympathetic to the calls from the Renters’ Reform Coalition for more decisive action on affordability. As Shelter underlines, there is a real risk that the security that the welcome immediate abolition of Section 21 aims to provide will be undermined by unfair rent hikes designed to force tenants out. I believe that the coalition makes a good case for a cap on in-tenancy rent increases. I do not really understand why the Government are opposed to this. It is not the same as rent controls, although I admit that I think there is a case for them. Ministers suggest that the answer to an unreasonable rent hike is for the tenant to challenge it at a tribunal, but how realistic is this? After all, the Minister in the Commons himself described this as an “onerous process”. I hope this can be looked at again, together with the coalition’s suggestion of a national rental affordability commission to investigate effective methods to make renting more affordable.

The other main concern of the coalition that I want to take up is the need to strengthen the very welcome anti-discrimination provisions in the Bill that would outlaw any ban on renting to families with children and those in receipt of social security. There are two main issues here. The first concerns landlords’ right to demand a guarantor. The fear is that this could be used to circumvent the Bill’s anti-discrimination provisions. Although it is welcome that the Bill was changed in the Commons to prevent landlords demanding multiple months of rent up front, as a Shelter housing champion and long-standing private renter pointed out at a briefing last week, rent in advance and guarantors are two sides of the same coin. Some of those in the most vulnerable circumstances are least likely to be able to find a guarantor, so the coalition suggests limits on the situations in which a landlord can demand a guarantor, which seems reasonable to me.

Barnardo’s and others recommend that all English local authorities should be required to offer guarantor and rent deposit schemes to care leavers, and that care leavers should be added to the groups that are specifically protected from discrimination by landlords. I hope the Government might also be open to the addition of other groups to the list of those who must not be discriminated against, particularly disabled people, prison leavers, and refugees and other non-UK passport holders—this points to the abolition of right to rent, which can lead to racial discrimination. I ask my noble friend: will those with no recourse to public funds receive the same protection as social security recipients?

Although I welcome that the Bill does not include the change to the definition of anti-social behaviour contained in the previous Bill, it does make eviction on grounds of ASB easier. This would be to the detriment particularly of survivors of domestic abuse and disabled people, who are vulnerable to ASB complaints. Justice encourages us instead to press for better training and resources for the police and local authorities to investigate and fully respond to ASB complaints.

I will raise the question of Home Office accommodation, mentioned by the right reverend Prelate and raised with me by London Councils. It argues that the Bill should include such accommodation so as to ensure that asylum seekers and refugees benefit from the decent homes standard, also called for by Hibiscus on behalf of black and minoritised women; otherwise, London Councils argues, the Bill could give rise to a two-tier system in which a small minority of rogue landlords might be incentivised to procure poor-quality accommodation for use as asylum accommodation.

On the basis of the extensive evidence it received from London authorities about the poor standards of asylum accommodation, London Councils contests the Minister’s assertion in Committee in the Commons that extending the Bill’s provisions to asylum accommodation is unnecessary. This is an issue I hope to pursue in Committee, and I wonder whether my noble friend the Minister would be willing to meet London Councils’ parliamentary officer to discuss what is involved.

In conclusion, as I said earlier, the Minister in the Commons did act on some of the concerns raised there. I know that my noble friend the Minister is a good listener, so I hope we might be able to make further improvements to the Bill in this House. In this way, we can turn what is a good Bill into a potentially ground-breaking one that achieves the Government’s aims of decisively levelling the playing field between tenants and landlords, and providing much greater genuine security to tenants.

Council Tax

Baroness Lister of Burtersett Excerpts

Monday 3rd February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, the party opposite had 14 years to sort this out and did nothing about it. Council tax levels are decided by each council. We maintain the previous Government’s policy on the referendum levels. We are tackling the fair funding that was started off by the last Government but never finished. That will level the playing field for areas that need more funding support.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, local authority council tax support schemes are failing to provide adequate protection for many low-income council tax payers, either because of their restrictive nature or because of low take-up. Will the Government therefore consider increasing and ring-fencing the funding for these schemes, and look into introducing an automatic trigger for a council tax support application when a universal credit application is made?