Energy Efficiency (Houses in Multiple Occupation)

Alan Whitehead Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Dr Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That leave be given to bring in a Bill to amend the Energy Act 2011 to enable residents of houses in multiple occupation to benefit from the provisions in the Act designed to increase energy efficiency; and for connected purposes.

As a press release from the Department of Energy and Climate Change told us in 2010, from 2018 people will be able to become tenants of privately rented homes in the knowledge that their properties have a minimal decent standard of energy efficiency, and it will no longer be possible to let any homes that are on the lowest energy efficiency levels, F and G. An article headed “Huhne gets tough on landlords of draughty homes” included the statement that

“the government will make it unlawful to rent out”

a home

“which has less than an “E”… rating”.

Indeed, that is what appears, one presumes, in the Energy Act 2011, along with a new right, to be provided by 2016, for tenants to request energy improvements in their homes to be carried out by their landlords, perhaps through the new green deal arguments. It is a welcome step for tenants: action to deal with landlords who let cold homes, the prospect of a saving of as much as £400 a year on energy bills by comparison with the worst-rated properties, and, if tenants opt for it, an earlier right to ensure that the energy efficiency of their homes is improved. However, although welcome, that is only partly true.

In fact, the 2011 Act states that only tenants of whole houses are eligible to request landlords to improve their homes, and that only landlords of houses in which there is only one tenancy will have a duty to improve properties before letting them. As Members representing constituencies in many parts of the country will recognise, that means that rather a lot of tenants will be left out. They are tenants of houses in multiple occupation—those with homes in properties containing several lettings. Although the number of HMOs varies across the United Kingdom, that potentially applies to some 300,000 of the 3.4 million or so rented homes in the UK. Not all multiply occupied homes are excluded. Houses—student properties, where, typically, unrelated people live under one tenancy—will be covered by the legislation, but hundreds of thousands of other properties will not. Southampton has at least 7,000 houses in multiple occupation, perhaps half of which will be multiply let and therefore excluded from the ambition of getting tough on landlords with draughty homes, as set out under the Energy Act 2011. We will have the same landlords and the same draughty homes, with the new rights and requirements completely passing those tenants by.

I do not think that is right, not just because tenants in HMOs are more likely than most to be in fuel poverty yet will be paying more in bills than anyone else on this basis after 2018 or because much needed improvements in our housing stock will completely miss an important and known energy-inefficient housing sector, but because the new rights should be in place for all tenants, regardless of the exact nature of their tenancies. My Bill simply seeks to put those rights in place.

My Bill seeks to amend the 2011 Act in a straightforward way so that its detailed and welcome provisions extend to all tenancies and to all properties that are tenanted. It will mean that a tenant occupying part of a house with have the same right as one occupying a whole house to request those energy improvements. After 2018, the prospective tenant will have the same expectation of a reasonably warm and liveable property when they sign up to rent a floor of a house as when they sign up to rent the whole of a house. The Bill does not put a particular onus on landlords, who should be improving their homes in any case. They will still have available to them the landlord’s energy saving allowance, which is generally unrecognised—I hope it will be taken up more in the future—and which allows them to improve their properties.

I also do not think the Government should resist the Bill, because it is clear from the record of the proceedings of the Bill that became the 2011 Act that the Minister dealing with it—I see that the right hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Gregory Barker) is in his place again today—clearly believed that the legislation would cover all landlords and all rented properties. It would therefore be relatively easy to put my Bill on the statute books simply by not objecting to it as it proceeds and putting right a serious omission from the 2011 Act. I would have cause to thank the Government were that to happen, but, most important, so would the hundreds of thousands of tenants who would come in from the cold in their properties of the future.

Question put and agreed to.

Ordered,

That Dr Alan Whitehead, Joan Walley, Mr John Denham, Martin Horwood, Peter Aldous, Albert Owen, Ian Lavery and Yasmin Qureshi present the Bill.

Dr Alan Whitehead accordingly presented the Bill.

Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time on Friday 1 March, and to be printed (Bill 124).