Housing: Section 21 Evictions

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Tuesday 20th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, we are not only putting more money into the courts system but strengthening the rights of tenants and seeking to put in place a process that avoids the need to go to court altogether. That will be the best outcome for both tenants and landlords.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, language matters in politics and tendentious phraseology has consequences. How have we reached the point where the expiry of a contract, freely entered into by two parties, at the end of its term is now widely referred to as an eviction, let alone a no-fault eviction?

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, the vast majority of landlords do an excellent job, but we know that a small minority use the threat of Section 21 evictions to hike up rents or intimidate tenants into not challenging completely unfit conditions. That is why we have brought forward our proposal to abolish Section 21 evictions, but we have also brought forward a widening of the grounds for possession, so that the system works for both sides in this situation.

Worker Protection (Amendment of Equality Act 2010) Bill

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Committee stage
Friday 14th July 2023 Lords Chamber

Debate on whether Clause 1 should stand part of the Bill.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to oppose Clause 1 standing part of this Bill. It is the first time I have ever done anything like this, so I hope noble Lords will bear with me if I get anything wrong. My impression until now has been that when people oppose these clauses, they do so in a theatrical or perfunctory way. In other words, they declare their opposition as a prelude to them bellyaching about the various things they do not like in it, but in the expectation that the clause will eventually be included. But not on this occasion—as a result of constructive talks among interested parties on all sides, I rise in the expectation that Clause 1 will not be part of the final legislation.

In that spirit, I will take this opportunity to thank noble Lords on all sides for the generous and constructive way in which they have approached this, particularly the noble Baroness, Lady Burt of Solihull, colleagues on her Benches and on all Benches, and not least my noble friend Lady Scott of Bybrook, who with great delicacy and aplomb has had to find a solution that all sides can live with. I assure noble Lords on the Benches opposite that those of us who had problems with this Bill have moved considerably. I do not intend to rehearse all the arguments that we heard at Second Reading from my noble friends Lord Leicester, Lord Moylan, Lord Strathcarron, and others. Suffice to say that this is, in every sense, a solution which all sides have moved towards.

Speaking for myself, I would much rather have a world in which we had something closer to free contract, whereby if you want to employ me and I want to work for you, and we are both happy with the terms and conditions, the Government should not come between us and declare this or that clause of it to be illegal—but we are a long way away from that. So let me simply take this opportunity to thank all of those who have been involved. I look forward to hearing from noble Lords on all sides, particularly from the noble Baroness, Lady Burt, and from my noble friend the Minister. I beg to oppose this Clause.

[Baroness Noakes (Con)]

My Lords, I echo all that my noble friend Lord Hannan said, and I am delighted that we have reached agreement and a way forward on the Bill. I will just add a few words on why I added my name to opposing Clause 1 standing part of the Bill. This is not simply a free speech issue. Clause 1 amends Section 40 of the Equality Act 2010. A new subsection (1B) defines a third party as

“a person other than … A, or …an employee of A’s”,

which noble Lords will recognise as a double possessive. It has both “of” and “A’s”. While a double possessive can occasionally be used to avoid ambiguity, there is no ambiguity in Clause 1. Fowler’s Modern English Usage, which is my Bible, has it listed as a sturdy but indefensible “freak of idiom”. My own view is that when we legislate, we should use the best possible version of the King’s English that we can find. I tried to table a specific amendment on this, but the usually very helpful Bill Office refused to let me do so, even though there is no direct prohibition in the Companion. I have no idea how one is supposed to correct grammatical errors or poor use of language other than by an amendment—I shall have to fight that another day.

The wording is also found in the Equality Act 2010, in Sections 39 and 40, so I can celebrate that by removing Clause 1 from this Bill, the Bill has been saved from repeating that poor use of the English language. But the 2010 Act remains intact with its double possessives, and I hope that my small intervention today might someday lead to its rectification.

--- Later in debate ---

I welcome the signs of compromise and consensus breaking out on this issue. There appears to be agreement across the Committee that we should remove Clause 1. The Government will therefore seek to accept the amendments on Report and, before then, check that no further consequential or drafting amendments—and perhaps even revisions of grammatical errors—are required to implement the changes. I hope that removing Clause 1 and changing the concept of “all reasonable steps” to simply “reasonable steps” in Clause 2 will ensure that noble Lords support the Bill’s progress.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to noble Lords on all sides who contributed to this part of the debate. I echo the words of my noble friend Lord Leicester—this is what we are here for: finding compromises, and that is what we have done on this issue. This compromise goes too far for some of us and not far enough for others, but all sides can at least live with it. It seems to me that that is precisely why this Chamber exists as a revising and scrutinising body.

I repeat my thanks to all those who have made the compromise work: my noble friends Lady Noakes, the Minister and Lord Moylan, who is not present, and the noble Baroness, Lady Burt of Solihull. Confident that the Minister will ensure that these changes happen on Report, and conscious that I am all that stands between your Lordships and the weekend, I will not detain the Committee further.

Clause 1 disagreed.

Recall Petitions: Voter ID

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Monday 10th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, the Government are confident about the outcomes. The initial evidence shows that it was a very successful first step. We are pleased to see the Electoral Commission’s report, according to which there were continually high levels of satisfaction with our voting system; 89% of polling station voters said that they were fairly or very satisfied. That is good, and a higher figure than during similar elections in 2019.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, I was one of the earliest proponents of this recall mechanism, in 2008. The then leader of the Opposition, David Cameron, liked the idea and put it in the 2010 manifesto—but then the rats got at it. Instead of it being a mechanism through which ordinary constituents could demand a recall, we had to have an initial procedure whereby the Privileges Committee, in effect, picked out which of its numbers from the other place it did not want. Will my noble friend the Minister look again at returning to the principle of diffusing power from Parliament to the electorate, rather than concentrating it in the hands of parliamentary committees, so that we return to the idea that only the voters determine the composition of another House?

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend raises an interesting point. The Government have no plans to look back at the way in which recall petitions are done, but I am more than happy to talk to him further on this issue and take it back to the department.

Worker Protection (Amendment of Equality Act 2010) Bill

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 24th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, what was the freedom that we really felt the loss of during the pandemic and the associated lockdowns? I suggest that it was above all the freedom of association and assembly. We did not lose the right to speak out, to vote or to worship as we pleased, but we lost the right to congregate in whatever combinations pleased us. It seems to me that freedom of assembly rests fundamentally on freedom of contract. People should be allowed to come to freestanding agreements, one with another, without the state interpolating itself and declaring those agreements to be void.

This is a principle that, far from having been strengthened by our recent experience, appears to be abandoned the world over, in this country not least. We are subject, as so often, to trends from across the Atlantic. This is happening on both sides of the aisle, as they say on the other side.

There has always been a chunk of, let us say, the identitarian left that has subordinated the concept of free contract to the imperatives of identity politics, so all questions of freedom of association tend to be seen through the prism of whether some imaginary club would be allowed to exclude somebody on the grounds of ethnicity. I suppose it is conceivable that such a thing could happen today, but it seems an odd way to determine a general principle. Hard cases make bad law, and hard imaginary cases make particularly bad law.

However, I am more interested in the way the concept of free association and free contract is under attack from the right. I was very struck, for example, by the Governor of Florida, who is being talked up as a potential presidential candidate. He bases a lot of his campaign on having kept Florida open and having avoided the worst of the lockdowns, and yet, such is the nature of the culture war, he was passing laws in Florida outlawing vaccine mandates even on private property—and that seems to me a fundamentally illiberal thing to be doing.

For what it is worth, I thought vaccine mandates were difficult to justify. We now know that vaccines were very good at protecting you but actually very bad at preventing transmission and therefore the case for state intervention was weak. But be that as it may, surely an individual shopkeeper, cafe owner or whatever is allowed to require whatever terms he or she wants from his or her customers. If they say “You can’t come in here without wearing a mask” or indeed, “We won’t serve you without a tie” or “You can’t stay in this hotel with children or pets” or whatever, surely that should be fundamentally a question of freedom and property. Yet, like so many of these trends, it is crossing the Atlantic, and we now in this Bill are starting from the assumption that it is up to the Government to determine things.

I am going to leave the free-speech stuff as I see my noble friends Lord Strathcarron, Lord Leicester and Lord Moylan are speaking after me. I will leave it all to them. I have listened to my right honourable friend the Secretary of State in another place and she says that all these things have been anticipated, and I am sure she would agree with what the noble Baroness, Lady Burt of Solihull, said about the amendments to prevent conversations becoming a source of harassment. But I think there is a wider issue here. Should we not be starting from the proposition that, without a very good reason, it ought to be up to the employer and the employee to seek terms? I find it extraordinary, for example, that we are seriously discussing in this country at the moment whether there should be a statutory right to demand working from home or flexible work. You can do that now. What is to stop anyone saying to their employer, “These are the conditions I would like” and then negotiating them? The idea that we have to go to the Government and get a sort of licence to talk about these things strikes me as fundamentally incompatible with being an open society.

So I ask the Minister: are we certain that we have exhausted every other avenue before we reach for further legislation? It seems to me a fundamental principle of a free society that if I want to work for, let us say, my noble friend Lord Roberts of Belgravia, and he offers me a job, and I am happy with the terms of the contract and so is he, the Government should not come between us and declare our arrangement to be illegal. If, for example, I say, “D’you know, I don’t care about paid holiday, I’d rather have a lump sum”, that should be between us. Is that not fundamentally a question of what we mean by freedom and property?

So please will the Minister reassure us that we have exhausted our arsenal? We have perfectly good, old common-law provisions defending the individual against harassment. We have perfectly good laws against incitement. They do not cease to apply in the workplace. Are we certain that we need this additional legislation and that it is not the worst kind of declamatory legislation—virtue signalling by law—because those statutes invariably end up being the ones with the most unintended consequences?

Elections: Multiple Voting

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Tuesday 14th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

I do not accept that, unsurprisingly. The Elections Act was guided by the Government’s determination to ensure that our democracy is secure and transparent, and we have sought to place participation at the heart of our democracy. The Act was developed in collaboration with people within the electoral services, following on from the recommendations of my noble friend Lord Pickles.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, the United Kingdom is the only one of 47 European democracies that does not require some kind of photo ID to vote. It is not even the whole of the United Kingdom, as we have just heard—it is only Great Britain. Given that huge parts of the world in Asia and Africa deal with problems of poverty, illiteracy and remote voting stations and all manage to have some kind of ID without reducing turnout, is it not time that we joined the rest of the world?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

As part of the Elections Act, we have introduced a requirement that you have to present some form of ID in order to vote. That should give the public greater confidence, and we are joining Northern Ireland and following its lead.

England: Historic Counties

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Thursday 16th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, I point out that Greenhalgh is a Lancastrian name, so I dispute Lancashire being second to Yorkshire, but that is a matter for debate. Devolution has required a degree of local consultation and decision-making. We are seeking to reflect functional and economic areas in our devolution programme, so it is important that it continues to be locally led.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, the maiming of our historic counties in the Heath years, with the destruction of some of the oldest political units in the world, was one of many lamentable acts emanating from that ministry. It may be a bit much to restore completely the administrative status quo ante, but will the Minister at least undertake to align ceremonial counties with the 92 historic counties that make up England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My noble friend has called for that realignment, but we do not have any plans, so I cannot reassure him. But things in government change and he is making his case strongly.