Housing and Planning Bill

Baroness Maddock Excerpts

Wednesday 20th April 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Gardner of Parkes]

My Lords, this is an issue about which I feel quite strongly. I cannot understand why in order to get the right to manage, which is set out in statute, you require 50% of the leaseholders to agree, but having got the right to manage, you cannot do anything very significant to deal with any problems in a building unless you have 100%. I have tabled Questions about this and at least four different Ministers have conceded that 100% is totally impossible to obtain. I welcomed my noble friend Lady Hanham earlier; she was one of the Ministers who said that to me. It is good to see her here and means that I do not have to prove my point about the statements, although the Library came up with these quotes for me, and I can certainly prove the point.

I am pleased to see the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy. When I raised the issue about people who fail to respond in any way and said that they should be deemed to have supported a proposal, he said—I am not using his words; I cannot quote Hansard exactly—that that might not be a bad way of dealing with what is certainly a growing problem, particularly in central London. In a number of blocks, perhaps not a majority but certainly a significant minority of the flats are in foreign ownership or owned by people who simply do not want to know whether the building is falling down around them. In rare cases, a rather ill-intentioned landlord may be hoping to make the place unliveable so that he can get all the tenants out and sell the skeleton building on for a lot of money. I have encountered that.

It is therefore very important that we find a way of dealing with this, and one way would be to reduce the percentage required for it. I suggested a simple majority; I appreciate that that may be too simple but there must be somewhere between the simple majority and the impossible total. The Government must agree to look at that. I will not be satisfied unless they agree to look at it, because this issue is getting worse.

Amendment 102 is grouped with this, but it is on quite a different subject. Would the Front Bench like me to speak to both now? The Whip nods his head. Amendment 102 is on the totally different issue about sinking funds for repairs, and it probably also applies to the type of block I was speaking about before. It has come to my attention through people who bought their council flats in the days of Margaret Thatcher; they have therefore owned them for a long time, and they find that their income has got less as they have got older. I can quote the case of a woman who wrote to me, whose total income is £10,000 a year. She has just had a bill for the roof repair, and her contribution as a leaseholder is £12,500. I followed this case up with the Hastoe Housing Association, which now has the property—it was originally local authority-controlled—and it said, “We’d like to be able to help, but this case is one of 26 cases where people are in exactly the same position”.

Where people buy their leasehold in a block where most people are tenants, whatever the tenants have to pay should be built into their rent and therefore at a level which is possible for them to manage. Instead, people can suddenly find themselves with only the old age pension and they get a whacking great bill for something to be done to the property. I have known other cases where the payment required was much higher than £12,000; sometimes the contribution to the roof or to replacing all the windows is £30,000.

People need to have a sinking fund from the time they buy the leasehold or, if not from that time, at least from the present time so that they will be gradually building up at least a little something towards the costs. I hope that the housing association or the local authority would then be able to exercise a degree of judgment and try to retain those people who have already lived in those flats for so many years. It is therefore very important that the Government are willing to look at these two quite different issues in Amendments 101 and 102. I beg to move.

[Baroness Maddock (LD)]

My Lords, I have spoken only about twice on this Bill but I must declare an interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association.

I support the noble Baroness, Lady Gardner of Parkes. She has been a doughty campaigner on leasehold. Over the years several of us in the Chamber, including the noble Baroness who has returned to us today and, I think, the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, have tried to grapple with the issue of leasehold. The legality of it is incredibly complex and the Labour Government tried to do something about it. I remember spending hours on the last leasehold reform Bill, and some of the things that the noble Baroness, Lady Gardner, has talked about today came forward in that Bill. At the time, we said that we were not happy about some aspects of it but we really needed to look at what was happening and review it over time.

I appreciate that a review of leasehold legislation is probably something that the Government do not want to go near. It is incredibly complex but, given that a lot of building has gone on in London and a lot of the new flats are leasehold, this is an area that we need to look at. Because it is so complex, some leasehold landlords can use the legislation to disadvantage leaseholders—sometimes financially and sometimes making them powerless to do anything about what goes on in their building. This is an important area and, as I said, I support the noble Baroness, Lady Gardner, because she has been a doughty campaigner on it over the years. I recognise that these amendments relate to matters that the Government probably do not want to look at, but I share her view that they really need to look at least at the issues that she has raised today. They need to be reviewed and revisited.

[Baroness Andrews (Lab)]

My Lords, how lovely it is to see the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, back in her place. It is really great to see her.

I was indeed one of the Ministers who, on a previous occasion, had to deal with the subject matter of Amendment 102. It is a difficult issue and I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Gardner, on her resilience in raising it. It is extremely important, not least as regards those blocks of flats where the owners have either bought their flats outright or have bought them under the right-to-buy scheme and then suddenly, to their total surprise, find themselves landed with enormous bills. It was not unusual for there to be a charge of £30,000—for example, for putting in a lift. It was an extremely difficult issue and the noble Baroness is absolutely right that we wrestled with it and discussed it with all manner of agencies, leasehold organisations and so on. It was very difficult to find an equitable and affordable solution. The fact that it is still hanging around is a tragedy and I hope that the Minister and her team can show us some ingenuity. The proposition in Amendment 102 is very sensible. If people anticipated these sorts of bills, they might well be able to afford them.

With Amendment 101, again, the noble Baroness is absolutely right. This is an absurd situation and the problem is growing. Most people living in leasehold blocks do not know that this is the situation and are therefore completely baffled as to why it is impossible to get anything done. So, if we are to have regard to the reality of the housing situation in London, this is something that has to be addressed. It may not be possible to do so in this Bill but maybe there are other Bills in the pipeline, and maybe it will be possible for the department to come back with something creative on both these issues. I hope so.