Tenant Fees Bill

Earl of Lytton Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 20th November 2018 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Lytton (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 29. I entirely understand the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Grender. A number of individuals collectively forming “tenant” particularly occurs in London and other metropolitan areas. Those of us who inhabit the countryside tend to have single tenants in a building, rather than a system of sharing.

I have absolutely no problem with the idea of ensuring that landlords are not overcharging beyond reasonable cost. My concern is that this is beginning to look like micromanagement of the letting process. The question is, “reasonable” by whose standards? For instance, a group of tenants—perhaps four of them—decides to take on a property on a two-year term. Let us suppose they collectively decide that they want to finish the tenancy after one year and want to move out in the run-up to Christmas, which is known to be a difficult time for the letting market because things tend not to get going again until into the new year. By whose standards would “reasonableness” be measured? Would it be by reference to the tenants, who, after all, have agreed to take on the property on a two-year basis and wish to terminate after one year; or by reference to the reasonable costs the landlord would run up in that process? All sorts of things hang on that—for example, rent voids and running costs such as heating and security while the place is unoccupied, were that to happen.

I appreciate that things get more difficult when you have a number of tenants and one wants to go, because that creates a dynamic which, as the noble Baroness rightly said—and has said previously—affects the other occupants. It would be really undesirable if landlords responded by simply deciding not to agree to early termination. That would be the worst of all possible worlds. As a private sector landlord, I have never used that other than when someone wants to terminate at short notice and before the property can reasonably be re-let. That tends not to happen in the high-pressure circumstances of inner-London shared residential, but with a freestanding property in the countryside, where things are quite different. The Bill will apply across the nation.

I counsel a little caution here, and perhaps the Minister would care to comment. If the culture creeps in whereby no early termination of a lease is possible or will be agreed, we will be back here later with another measure to say that landlords must provide that facility. I do not see this as necessarily being the endpoint, and I should like to tease out that issue to give some closure on what we are doing with residential landlord and tenant. Hopefully, the situation can stabilise so that everyone will know where they are for, at any rate, the reasonably foreseeable future.

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, it is worth underlining that this part of the Bill is an important measure to prevent what is a pretty common abuse, which is, when there is a change of tenancy, at little or no cost to the landlord, the agents involved making serious amounts of money, which the Bill would prevent them doing in future.

At Second Reading, I cited an illustration from my last intern, whose sister was taking her place in a flat share of three. Each of them, on entering the flat, needed to pay the agent a fee of £275 for the privilege of signing up. When one of the occupiers left and was replaced by her sister, the outgoing one was charged £250 for termination of the tenancy agreement and her sister, who was moving in on the same day with her packed suitcase, was charged £275 as a new tenant. The agents got £525 for this transfer from one sister to another. The landlord received exactly the same amount of rent, because there was no discontinuity in the rent paid.

In such circumstances, paying £50 as a takeover fee for the privilege of signing a photocopied document when one person moves in in place of another sounds quite enough. The guidance may be the best place to put this, but the test must be whether the landlord has suffered a loss of rent. If there is no such loss, surely the £50 should kick in as the maximum which the agents can take. One can understand the need to compensate if there has been a loss of rent because of a gap when one tenant has moved out and no new one has arrived. Otherwise, £50 sounds like a maximum not a floor.

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[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I support the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, in these two amendments, which would help to tighten up the Bill. As he said, paragraph 8 of Schedule 1 is very open-ended, and he referred to a loophole potentially lying within it as it is worded. I think his amendment will tighten it and will do so partly because it is in the interests of the tenant, who may secure a cash saving in the amount they pay for a utility even though they may have to pay a fee to achieve it. I therefore hope the Minister might be willing to look at that carefully. As paragraph 8 of Schedule 1 is currently drafted, it simply refers to the fact that the tenancy agreement may require the payment to be made, but it does not define why it would have to be made. That is why the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, is so helpful.

[The Earl of Lytton]

My Lords, I have great sympathy with this amendment but I would have more were it possible to ensure that utility providers themselves acted reasonably. While I will not name any names, one particular well-known supplier of electricity, with what is generally regarded as an extremely cheap and competitive tariff, has gained for itself an extremely poor reputation because of what happens when one wants to change to another supplier. Indeed, so tortuous are its processes—of which I have had direct experience—that many landlords specify in their agreements that the tenant may not change to that supplier, and with good reason.

I had a situation myself concerning the commercial supply of electricity to an agricultural building. My wife and I were faced with a demand from this company for over £30,000 for a period of some 15 months, when the only thing that happens in this shed is that for a period of about three weeks a series of low-wattage lights are used to assist with lambing, and for a period of about 10 days in another part of the year they are used for a sheep-shearing operation. By no stretch of the imagination could the fee have totalled that amount. When, finally, the company rang up my wife and said, “We’re going to take you to court”, her answer was, “Make my day”. It was not until the matter was referred to its lawyers that it became apparent that there had been a complete muck-up. It had simply not got an initial reading and was trying to steamroller that payment through in the hope that we would crack and pay it. I know that other landlords in the private rented sector are sometimes faced with the same situation.

These people run up the most appalling costs. While I have great sympathy that this should not be laid solely at the door of tenants, it is none the less an occupational hazard that afflicts both parties to this arrangement. That is the only reason why I have a reservation about the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy—because there is another dimension to this, where certain suppliers are acting utterly unreasonably and unconscionably.

[Lord Young of Cookham]

My Lords, the Countess of Lytton is clearly even more formidable than the noble Earl.

I too have a lot of sympathy with these amendments, but I believe there are already sufficient existing protections—not in this Bill but in other legislation—which address the concerns raised by noble Lords. Landlords who resell energy to their tenants for domestic use are governed by maximum resale price provisions set by Ofgem under Section 44 of the Electricity Act 1989 and Section 37 of the Gas Act 1986. This prevents landlords from overcharging tenants; they cannot charge the tenant more than the landlord has paid. If the landlord does overcharge, the tenant is entitled to have the charge lowered and overpayments refunded. The tenant can also bring a claim against their landlord to the small claims court for the amount that has been overcharged plus interest. In addition, on other utilities, landlords are prohibited from overcharging tenants for the resale of water under the maximum resale price provisions set out in the Water Resale Order 2006. If the landlord does overcharge, the tenant can take legal action through the small claims court to recover any overpayment and the tenant is eligible to recover interest at a rate of twice the average base interest rate of the Bank of England for the period they have been overcharged.

Amendment 31 would specifically require landlords to review any contract held for the provision of utilities and to consider switching provider if this would be beneficial to the tenant. In the majority of cases, tenants will be responsible for paying their own energy bills; they will pay them direct to the supplier and not to the landlord. So in most cases, tenants will already have the right to choose their own supplier. The tenancy agreement will set out who is responsible for paying these charges. Where the landlord is responsible for paying the bills, they may seek to recover these costs through the rent or directly from the tenant but, as I have already explained, they are already prevented from overcharging for this for energy and water.

Through, for example, the How to Rent guide, we encourage tenants to speak to their landlord or agent if they think their utilities payments are too high or if they want to request a change of supplier. In many cases, it may be in the interest of the landlord to move to a more competitive supplier as that may help to market their property in the future.

In addition, the Government’s Domestic Gas and Electricity (Tariff Cap) Bill received Royal Assent on 19 July. This requires Ofgem to implement a price cap on standard variable and default tariffs, which will guarantee protection for the 11 million households currently on the highest energy tariffs.

Against that background, I hope the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw his amendments.

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[Baroness Gardner of Parkes (Con)]

My Lords, I have moved this amendment simply because it is essential for people to know what they can be charged and what they cannot. The noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, commented at the end of his speech on just that fact: that people need to know. If something was in the guidance that would indeed be very valuable, but at the present time people have no idea what they will be charged.

A lot of people have no idea that they have to prove they have a right to be in this country. I am sure most of us remember the embarrassing start of this whole problem, when a very impressive member of the Government at the time found that she had not checked on someone she employed. That is where all this started. As I understand the situation, there is now a fixed amount that people would be asked to pay for such an official designation of their nationality and the rights they have here. People are often totally unaware of this.

I understand that overcharging should not take place—I am not for a minute suggesting that—but people will need to know that, to rent a property, they have to prove that they are an ordinary person entitled to live here and not limited in what tenancy they can undertake. That is the purpose of this amendment. I claim no expertise in the wording of it, as the Public Bill Office very kindly helped me. I would be interested if people have comments on that. The principle behind it is to enable people to know what is and is not legitimate. Whether it is the agent, the prospective tenant or anyone else who provides that necessary information, it costs. You do not get it for nothing; that is the problem. I feel that the Bill is rather restrictive at the moment. I beg to move.

[The Earl of Lytton]

My Lords, the noble Baroness has made a valid point. I recall some years ago having to check the identity of an applicant for a business tenancy, who produced a passport from a Commonwealth country which was in date but did not contain the crucial words in the out-of-date one, also presented, which described the bearer as having the right to remain in the United Kingdom. I have always felt very nervous about trying to sift through this, because of the penalties that can be visited on one professionally—in this case, it would have been on a client landlord—in connection with letting. Getting these things right and carrying out identity and immigration status checks cannot be left to the tea boy. They need to be done by somebody who knows what they are doing and can take responsibility.

This takes us back to the question of where the two-way street between landlord and prospective tenant should lie and whether it is right that the landlord provides a property that he has warranted as clean and tidy, fit for purpose, not unsafe and so on, and the tenant is responsible for the cost of verifying their bona fides, as the noble Baroness says in her amendment. It seems that that is fairly unarguable, particularly in London where there are people of so many different nationalities. A further issue that needs to be addressed, assuming that eventually this country will leave the European Union, is European citizens’ right to remain here. The noble Baroness raises a valuable point, and I look forward to hearing what the Minister says.