Flood Defences
Debate between Lord Campbell-Savours and Lord Greaves(8 years, 1 month ago)
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Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Lord Campbell-Savours and Lord Greaves
Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)
My Lords, perhaps I can deal with the noble Baroness’s comment on what happens in the event that the landlord dies. This is an amendment moved by my colleague on the Front Bench, and if there is a difficulty with it there is no reason at all why the Government cannot come back with an amendment to deal with the thrust of the case laid in the amendments by my Front Bench but which includes a provision for those circumstances. That is what we are here to do: to legislate. These amendments have been proposed but Ministers could take them away and say, “Yes, there is a point here but if we build in a system of exemptions then these particular problems will not arise”.
I can also deal with the question of tenants in arrears, which the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, referred to. As I understand it, under Clause 55—in Part 3, which is headed “Recovering abandoned premises”—the Government’s position is actually to simplify the whole process of dealing with what happens where,
“the unpaid rent condition is met”.
That would cover where people are in arrears and where mortgages are being paid, as I presume that under that provision the landlord would then be entitled to secure possession of his property. That deals with one of the main objections in the contribution of the noble Earl, to which I listened carefully.
Finally, the noble Earl referred to people working at Gatwick Airport who did not necessarily need longer-term tenancies. The amendment says that,
“it is an implied term of such a tenancy that the tenant may terminate the tenancy by giving two months’ written notice to the landlord”.
The tenant is not locked into the agreement at all. The tenant can pull out of the agreement at a moment’s notice simply by saying, “I gave two months’ notice to the landlord”. What we are doing here is protecting tenants by not locking them in, in the sense that they can pull out. We are protecting landlords—or the Government are protecting them—under the provisions of Clause 55 in terms of arrears. In terms of landlords dying, as I said, that could be dealt with by further consideration by the Government.
However, what we are doing more than anything else is giving people who take on tenancies a sense of security as to where they live. From what I hear from tales brought to me by my sons’ friends, who have had different tenancies in London over a period of years, many tenants in London do not know where they are going to be. They do not know whether the landlord will want the property back at the end of 12 months. People are entitled to know that the weight is moving at least a little more in favour of the tenants to give them more rights. We are not granting people long-term security of tenure and indefinite tenancies. We are simply extending it from one to three years to give more balance to the way that tenancies operate in the United Kingdom.
Lord Greaves (LD)
My Lords, I want to put this problem in a slightly wider context. The noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, said that the present system of short tenancies was bad for tenants, bad for landlords and bad for housing. It is also bad for the local community. There are areas in the north of England of cheap, mainly terraced, housing and former council estates. The houses are cheap—as I will explain later—the rents are cheap, and keeping them in a decent condition is a constant struggle for owners, for the council and for people living in them. The result of the system is that there is a high churn—that is the technical word—of tenants. Many people live in a house for only a short period. That is clearly linked to the system of tenancies.
More than 10 years ago, I was chair of the governors of the local primary school. One problem the school had was the children who were living in that kind of property. It is a traditional area of working class owner -occupation. Some 50 or 100 years ago, people bought the houses from the mills that they worked for. When I first knew the area, owner-occupation was 80% or more, but private landlords have moved in very significantly and taken over many of the properties: one-third or more in the period I am talking about. Two-thirds of the children in the school spent most of their primary education there. In that respect, it was a very stable school: children went into the nursery or infants at the age of three or four and left at 11 when they went to secondary school. However, one-third of the children turned over every year. Every year, one-third of the children in each class were new and did not stay long enough to settle, to get a proper education and have the stability of being in the same school for some time.
That is just one example. When I first knew it 40 years ago, this was a pretty stable working class community of extended families. People who bought houses there as young couples had their parents living in the next street and their grandparents round the corner or in the sheltered housing just down the road. That has been broken down. There are lots of reasons for that, but the single most important one is the growth of private sector housing at the bottom end of the market. There are some good landlords. In that area, the best ones are those who live in the street and own one or two other properties in it. Other very good landlords are those who were left a house when their parents died, look after it well and live in the same town. However, there are absentee landlords who operate through housing agents. I have had people ringing up from Bognor Regis demanding to know why, as their councillor, I was not doing something about the rotten tenants in their house who had just done a moonlight flit and taken all the copper. I had to explain that I was not their councillor but that I was concerned about the house. But I also had to ask why they put those tenants in. I said, “Well, you know what the street is like. It is like that. We are desperately trying to hang on to the good residents there, but you know what it is like”. They said, “No, we have never been there, why should we?”. It is that kind of landlord in the private rented sector which is a disaster. That is why I would tend to support this amendment, which is just one of the things that might be done.
Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Lord Campbell-Savours and Lord Greaves
Lord Campbell-Savours
I will speak to the amendments moved and spoken to by the noble Baronesses, Lady Grender and Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville. We all know the reality. The reality is that local authorities will be picking up this responsibility because people will be advised by the homeless charities or whatever to go to the local authority, and the local authority will have to pay. The question is: who should ultimately pay?
It may be that the Government should take upon themselves the right to take a charge on the landlord’s property. I know it would be very controversial—I am sure the lawyers would have a field day—but it would mean that the local authorities would get their money back. I therefore put that as a suggestion, which the Minister might wish to pursue when we get to Report.
Government Amendment 4, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Trafford, deals with further offences by the person who committed a first offence. What about people who transfer their interest, so that the further offence is committed by the person to whom the interest has been transferred? Clause 26 deals with the “Prohibition of certain disposals”. Subsection (1) states:
“A person who is subject to a banning order that includes a ban on letting may not make an unauthorised transfer of an estate in land to a prohibited person”.
Subsection (4) describes a “prohibited person” as,
“a person associated with the landlord”,
or , under subsection (4)(f),
“a body corporate in which the landlord has a shareholding or other financial interest”.
Subsection (5) states that an,
“‘associated person’ is to be read in accordance with section 178 of the Housing Act 1996”.
In that section of the 1996 Act, I am told that an “associated person” is someone who is in a marriage to, or is a cohabitee of, or lives with, or is a relative of the landlord, or someone whom the landlord is about to marry, or who is a child of the landlord. Does this include relationships that have developed and are registered overseas? Many landlords will be operating from overseas, so we will have great difficulty identifying who the owner of a particular property is.
This brings me to the second point, which is about,
“a body corporate in which the landlord has a shareholding or has a financial interest”.
What about companies registered outside the United Kingdom? The landlord might be in some tax haven or in some other part of the world, which is perfectly respectable but where we do not have much access to information. I think these bodies need to be more clearly defined in the law, and I wondered whether the noble Baroness might wish to comment on that as a proposition.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, the amendments put forward give rise to a very simple, brutal question—I speak as somebody who is wrestling with trying to produce a council budget at the moment, in very difficult circumstances—and that is: how much is this going to cost local authorities? I have looked at the impact assessment, and basically it talks about the cost to the private housing sector—to the providers of private-landlord accommodation. Unless I have completely missed it, I cannot find any assessment of the cost to the local authorities, who will have the responsibility of doing all this. My first question is: have the Government made an assessment of this and, if so, will they tell us what it is?
The second thing I have been trying to apply my mind to is, in my own authority, how we will deal with this. The point about local authorities, of course, is that they are very different: there are large unitary counties, there are large metropolitan and other unitary urban authorities, and there are small districts. It is the housing authorities as a whole which will have to deal with this, including the small districts. The way the small districts may be able to cope is perhaps very different to that of a large authority that employs a lot more specialist staff, such as solicitors and property management people. I have, therefore, been trying to get my mind round how local authorities will actually make the decisions about applying to the tribunal for a banning order—who will make those decisions, how it will be done, how much it will cost, how much work will go into it—and dealing with appeals, because it is quite clear that there will be a lot of appeals, assuming that a lot of people go through the banning process.
Then there is the second decision. Apart from the people who have gone through the tribunal and automatically go on the database, there is a decision about whether to put the other people who have been convicted of banning offences on the database. How much time and resource will that decision take? Again, there is the question of appeals, which are never cheap for local authorities, and then there is the cost of maintaining the database itself: whether or not that is onerous depends on how many people there are on the database. My second question is really linked to how much the Government think this is going to cost local authorities—any answer to that must be based on an idea of how many cases there are going to be over the period of a year, or whatever it might be. Do the Government have any answer at all to those questions?
Lord Campbell-Savours
My Lords, I am not sure that the Whips’ Office has jurisdiction in these matters. The amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Flight, deals with a local authority’s arrangements for gathering council tax payments and business rates. However, there is another very important form of taxation when discussing these matters, which is taxes raised by the Inland Revenue—that is my explicit interest in Amendment 16, as spoken to by the noble Baroness. We now have a booming rental market in the United Kingdom, with programmes on television promoting buy to rent and organisations issuing leaflets and sending them to people’s homes explaining the benefits of buy-to-rent arrangements. A lot of people should be paying taxes on rental income.
Take a flat in London with two bedrooms, costing £500 a week or £25,000 a year. There will be many examples in London of people gathering in very substantial rents, even on just one property, who through some means or another are simply not declaring it to the Inland Revenue. Any system, including the system promoted by the noble Lord, Lord Flight, would be helpful in itself, but the system proposed by my noble friend, of a mandatory register of all private landlords, would certainly be very helpful in enabling the HMRC— which I keep referring to as the Inland Revenue, being a bit old-fashioned about these matters—to identify those people who should be paying tax on their rental income. The Inland Revenue are missing a trick here, because I suspect that there are probably billions in unpaid taxes on rentals which are not declared to the Revenue.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I have Amendment 33A in this group. I do not want to say too much but give general support to the two amendments spoken to by the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, which tackle the question of the register from opposite ends but which are mutually complementary, as far as I can see—there are two different purposes but both would be desirable. There are two points in this amendment.
First, it is our view that wherever possible, local authorities should have discretion over what they do, and therefore this question of whether a local register of private landlords should be set up and collected should be a matter for the local authority concerned. For all the reasons put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, and indeed to a degree by the noble Lord, Lord Flight—as well as those in the very interesting contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, which bring in a different dimension altogether—I suspect that most authorities would want to do it, because of the value there would be. However, the real reason we would like to see it is for local housing purposes, to enable a local authority to maintain proper scrutiny over the private rented sector in its area and to more easily take action when action is required. My amendment is a statement against “one size fits all”-ism to some extent, but if the Government were minded to set up the kind of register that the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, is proposing, and it were compulsory for all local authorities, I do not think we would squeal too much.
Secondly, it seems to us that a register ought to pay for itself. An ordinary register would not be terribly expensive to run, and it ought to pay for itself rather than requiring further contributions from local authorities. Those are the two reasons for my amendment.
I listened carefully to the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Flight. I am not sure that the council tax register as such would be a particularly efficient way to do this, since as I understand it, people only really register for council tax in the sort of sense he is talking about when they are new residents in a property. Over a period of time, they might well provide the information he wants, but in the short run I do not think they would, because people simply pay the bills they get each year rather than filling a form in to register again afresh each year. No doubt these are details which could be discussed.