Public Health (Coronavirus) (Protection from Eviction and Taking Control of Goods) (England) Regulations 2020

Lord Campbell-Savours Excerpts

Tuesday 8th December 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab) [V]]

The noble Baroness just raised a very interesting question.

Talk of eviction makes me feel uneasy. In the 1970s, 50 years ago, I ran, on a voluntary basis, an anti-eviction group in the Rossendale and Darwen and Blackburn areas of Lancashire. Our national campaign was a major contributor to the repeal of the Small Tenements Recovery Act 1838, a law that gave local councils almost unlimited powers to evict tenants. I learned an important lesson in that battle: backlogged arrears are problematic in themselves, and when you roll up arrears in packaged payments by retained tenants, in particular where tenants have a previously unblemished rental record, you more often than not aggravate the tenant-landlord relationship.

The best policy for landlords, if they are confident that the tenant’s difficulties are in the past and they are unsupported by benefits is, where possible, to write off the arrears and maintain a healthy tenancy. Some landlords, when the tenant has not been in receipt of sufficient benefit to cover the full rent, take a mature view and adopt this approach, despite the cost. They know that there is nothing worse than a resentful tenant. However, some landlords, insensitive to the suffering, do not give a damn, and that is why I am worried about rolled-up arrears post 11 January.

We are told that last year one-quarter of all tenancies nationally were in arrears. So there will be a lot more. For many tenants, the pandemic will have been a nightmare, with cases of acute depression, debt, domestic abuse, alcoholism and perhaps even loss of life—we do not know at this stage. So how can we respond? Yes, we can extend the ban in tier 2 and 3 areas. We can pass the promised rent reform Bill, which we have been briefed on by a number of people from outside. But we could also use the tax system to incentivise a landlord’s ability to write off pandemic-induced, rolled-up rent arrears. A system could be introduced similar to that for the self-employed. HMRC could look at the last three-year accounting period and then give partial grant aid, built on a percentage of the previous three years’ taxable profits base. We can be sure that it would lead to some very interesting conversations between tenants and landlords and, in particular, those landlords who are not too honest with the taxman.

I would like to make it clear that neither I nor any member of my family has an interest in rental property anywhere.