Private Landlords and Letting and Managing Agents (Regulation) Bill

Debate between Andy Sawford and Andy Slaughter

Friday 25th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship for the first time, Madam Deputy Speaker. I hope to do so many more times and I congratulate you on your election.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield (Sir Alan Meale) on an excellent speech and an excellent Bill. I would like to extend the same courtesy to the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Corby (Andy Sawford). It is a pleasure to see him in his place. It is the first time I have heard him speak from the Front Bench and I hope to do so many more times, because he made a good speech that explained why this is a good Bill.

I am a rare contributor on Friday mornings, so I have not had the pleasure of hearing the regulars, as it were. With all due respect, the phrase “Never mind the quality, feel the width” comes to mind. I was not greatly persuaded by the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies). I am sorry he has had to leave us and host his luncheon party, but I felt that he simply took the anti-regulation speech off the shelf without any consideration of the Bill. He confessed, either because of the late publication of the Bill or because he did not have the time, that he had not looked at it in detail. If he had done so he would have seen that it is not a great addition to regulatory burden or an impediment imposed on the private rented sector, but a necessary and modest proposal. It would be effective in an area where more effective regulation is needed.

With all due respect to the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg), I am not persuaded by his Hobbesian vision of a private sector market where, to avoid Rachmanism, private tenants should sign away their rights and the only way for them to have any sort of protection would be by allowing landlords to evict them on a whim, which is effectively what shorthold tenancies do, without giving any reason. If private tenants insisted on some form of protection or regulation, they would stand in fear of the type of behaviour that Rachman and his ilk got up to in the 1950s—which led to the major expansion of social housing to counter such behaviour.

I look forward to hearing what the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Bristol West (Stephen Williams) has to say. It is a great pleasure to see him on the Front Bench—it is long overdue. He has been given a brief to which he is well suited and I am interested to hear how he will deal with this matter. During a longueur in the speech of the hon. Member for Shipley, I could not help but do a quick Google of the Minister’s views. I came across a video—I advise other hon. Members to watch it—that he made for Shelter. I do not want to embarrass him, but I think it is entirely to his credit. He talks about his own experience of growing up in the private rented sector—his experience of eviction and poor living conditions. He made the video in the context of the “Bristol Rotten Homes” campaign, which was

“calling on the new Mayor of Bristol to take action on poor housing conditions in the private rented sector.”

Shelter stated that

“1 in 5 homes in Bristol are rented out by a private landlord yet over a quarter of these homes do not meet the Decent Homes Standard. That means many renters in Bristol are being forced to live in unsafe and indecent conditions.”

The Minister visited the Bristol Rotten Homes shop, which was a spoof letting agent that was promoting the campaign and providing housing and debt advice.

Going by that, I suspect that the Minister’s experiences and views are rather closer to mine and those of my hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield than to the brief that he has been given to read out today. This will be the first test of whether he can stand at the Dispatch Box and read out something with which he disagrees entirely, but I am sure that it will not be the last, as long as the coalition lasts.

If anybody wants to know why further regulation and scrutiny of the private lettings market are needed, they need only watch the BBC programme on racial discrimination in lettings policy that was aired last week. I am sure that some Members saw that programme, but I will describe what happened for those who did not. Having been tipped off, the BBC reporters obtained a flat and purported to let it out through 10 letting agencies in north-west London. They asked each letting agent not to let Afro-Caribbean people view the property or have access to it. Every single letting agent agreed to do that without demur and with enthusiasm. That is not only clearly unlawful, but disreputable.

I would have thought that that behaviour would surprise hon. Members on both sides of the House, given that it is almost 50 years since such discrimination was outlawed. Clause 2 would attack such disgraceful behaviour, but there are more punitive criminal sanctions for it, which I hope will be sought. The fact that such behaviour is, on the evidence of the programme, endemic across private letting agencies should at least give us pause for thought.

I know that the Conservative party—although not the Liberal Democrat party any longer—believes that qualifications in the teaching profession should not be required for a job in a state school. However, in most areas of life where people are at risk or where people seek to gain a benefit, regulation is appropriate. One would not expect lawyers to be unqualified. One would not expect to be able simply to set up and run a business in any professional walk of life without any regard to qualifications. That is not possible for estate agents. I really do not know why it should be possible for private letting agencies.

It is true that the private rented sector declined substantially for most of the last century. It is also true that it has increased massively over the past 10 years. Although I support and believe in a strong private rented sector, most of the reasons for that expansion are not good ones. One reason is the decline of the social housing sector, which is due to fewer properties being built and to properties being sold or demolished. That sector generally provides decent, affordable homes for people on low and middle incomes. Another reason is that owner-occupation, particularly in London but in other parts of the country as well, has become unaffordable in a way that it was not 20 or 30 years ago.

The average rent levels in my constituency are £245 a week for a studio flat, £467 a week for a two-bedroom flat and £770 a week for a three-bedroom house. Those rents are four to five times as much as one would pay in the social housing sector, and yet it is the private rented sector that is expanding and the social housing sector that is contracting. Those prices are unaffordable to most people, even those on several times the average income.

There are also far worse problems with housing conditions in the private rented sector than in any other housing sector, and we know that people are being forced into that sector because there is no alternative. I am afraid I did not recognise the rather rosy view that the hon. Member for North East Somerset took of a free market in which the purchaser has as much discretion and power as the vendor. That is not the private rented market that operates in London. By the Government’s own criteria, some 35% of properties in the private rented sector are described as non-decent.

Conservative Members have made the point that we do not need regulation because there are other ways of obtaining redress. My hon. Friend the Member for Corby answered that point by saying that the cuts in Government spending have removed most of those avenues of redress. The most obvious one to me, although he did not mention it, is legal aid, which is no longer available for most areas of housing law. Many cases such as some that I have litigated—as often for the landlord as for the tenant, so I am not speaking with any vested interest—will not come to court now, simply because a tenant who is living in poor conditions, being discriminated against, not having their repairs done or subject to oppressive behaviour by their landlord can get no advice on their rights. If the state takes away the ability to self-help, it has a greater role to play in enforcing standards in the private rented sector.

[Andy Sawford]

My hon. Friend makes an important point about legal aid changes. Does he also find that his constituency is affected by cuts to citizens advice bureau services, welfare rights advice services and other such organisations that can help local people who are concerned about their rights? Mine certainly is.

[Mr Slaughter]

Of the four main advice agencies in my constituency, two have shut down in the past three years, one of which was a specialist housing advice agency. The others have had their work curtailed by budget cuts. They have either stopped taking new customers or, as in the case of the citizens advice bureau, become so overloaded that they can no longer provide the service that they would wish to provide. That is a real problem.

Conservative Members made the point that the Bill would have an impact on individual private landlords. I have great sympathy with small landlords, who provide opportunities for people and expand the market. Many of them, if not most, are very good, but that does not excuse them from providing proper services and decent conditions for their tenants. If the conditions that the Bill suggests imposing on them were onerous, Conservative Members might have a point, but they are not. One cannot excuse landlords on the basis that they are amateurs or have come into the property market by mistake or happenstance. That is not a reason for failing to ensure that they provide their tenants with decent living conditions. That responsibility must fall on them.

I am afraid that some of the worst landlords I have to deal with are private landlords who acquire a number of properties and deliberately run them to a poor standard. They usually get their referrals through local authorities. I have seen some utterly appalling housing conditions in the past two or three years, of a type that I had not seen for the previous 20 or 30 years. Often, the landlords benefit from a large amount of public money through housing benefit. The state has a legitimate interest in ensuring that it gets value for money.

I believe in a strong private rented sector, but a more professional one in which there is more investment by pension funds and larger organisations that have the capacity and management skills needed to provide longer-term tenancies and fairer rents. Such organisations could perhaps also manage with a lower turnover of people and with finance received over a longer period. As we have seen from the endorsements to proposals in the Bill by some of the more respectable landlord organisations, that would encourage a virtuous spiral in the private rented sector, rather than what we have at the moment, which is a free-for-all and downward spiral. It is a sellers’ market—particularly in London, but I am sure elsewhere too—and on that basis tenants have little choice and people are living in the sorts of conditions described by my hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield. It is appalling.

About one third of those in private rented accommodation are families with children. If one reads the Evening Standard or listens to the media, one would think we are talking simply about “generation rent” and young professionals who are waiting to get on the housing ladder and who are forced into private rented accommodation while they wait. That may be right—they are certainly an important group and more should be done to enable people to get into home ownership—but increasingly we are going back to those Rachmanesque days in which vulnerable people are forced to live in those conditions. Part of that involves the relationship between social housing and the private rented sector and it is now possible—this is an intended, rather than an unintended consequence of the Government’s attack on social rent—for a local authority permanently to discharge its obligation towards homeless families to the private rented sector. That means that vulnerable people are put into the hands of what are often very poor private landlords.

Even before one gets to that stage, because of the shortage of social housing many families are in temporary private rented accommodation for up to 10 years. I will give one example from my surgery from the past two weeks. A family of six who had been in overcrowded, private rented temporary accommodation for 10 years, were finally—very unusually in Hammersmith—made an offer of a permanent two-bedroom flat. That was clearly inadequate for six people, so they had to refuse it and therefore lose their right to housing. In the end—there is still an obligation—the family were told, “Yes, we will find you a property with four bedrooms in the private rented sector for £500 a week”. That four-bedroom property turned out to be a two-bedroom council flat that had been purchased and converted by the technique of putting a piece of plywood over the bath and making the bathroom into a bedroom, making the store cupboard into a bathroom, the kitchen into a bedroom, and putting the kitchen in the lounge. It was effectively a two-bedroom property for a family of six. That is anecdotal, but it is typical of the type of problems I see in my surgery every week. I have had hundreds, if not thousands, of such cases.

As local authorities have a shortage of social accommodation to let—in my local authority there is a deliberate policy of demolishing and selling off social housing—they are forced more and more to rely on substandard private rented accommodation. Owing to the benefit cap, the only type of accommodation likely to be available in London will be of very low quality; alternatively, it will be a long way outside London.

We have a responsibility to private tenants, particularly if they are vulnerable, such as the elderly or those with disabilities, and that responsibility is not being discharged. I will not go through the Bill clause by clause as other Members have done, but if the hon. Member for North East Somerset looks at it again, he will see that when the rhetoric is put aside, the measures proposed are straightforward and pragmatic. Greater regulation is undoubtedly needed in the sector.

Greater transparency is needed, too. I do not recognise this picture of the all-knowing tenant going into the letting agency and quizzing the agent carefully on the fee and charging issues. It is perfectly clear that many agencies—not just the rogue ones; I am afraid that this is almost the norm so far as letting agencies are concerned—are not transparent. I have heard complaints about some of the blue-chip letting agencies—I shall not name them here—that let out some of the most expensive properties in London and take every possible opportunity to extort money from their tenants.

That applies right through the tenancy from the time that the tenant first signs up to the time of leaving it. First asked for money as a deposit or for rent in advance, the tenant will then be asked to pay administration fees, holding fees, fees for renewal and finally fees on leaving. The tenant is over a barrel and not in a position to escape. If a tenant is in need of housing and there is only one agency that will accept him or offer something within his price range, there is little choice. In those circumstances, it is all very well saying “caveat emptor”; a wide choice does not apply. The landlord has the whip hand on every occasion. If measures can be brought in, not necessarily to regulate but to make the fees transparent, and if we can have greater scrutiny of the worst type of landlords such as those exposed by the BBC, that would be worth while.

Written tenancy agreements are standard agreements these days. It is possible to provide one’s own, but 99% of landlords will take out an assured shorthold tenancy agreement. Everybody will know what that is. Of course disputes can arise over written contracts—that can be taken as a given—but difficulties and confusion are far more likely if the terms of a tenancy are not clear. If it is an oral tenancy, we can bet our lives that the terms are not going to be clear.

We know that local authorities are under pressure, and nobody wants to put more pressure on them at this time. I think the scheme in the Bill is effectively the beginning of self-regulation. It asks good landlords to identify themselves and allows bad landlords and bad letting agents to be identified so that they can be dealt with in a way that prevents them from abusing their tenants any longer, as some of them have done for week after week.

I shall end my comments there. I do not want to delay the Bill’s Second Reading, but I suspect that other Members may well have that in mind. My hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield has done us a great service in bringing this Bill forward and in identifying what has often been a neglected area of public policy. Frankly, it has been neglected not just recently, but over 30 years or more. People are suffering silently. It is naive of the hon. Member for Shipley to say, “I do not get these people flooding into my surgery”, because people often do not know their rights. They may be transient tenants, migrant labourers or families who simply do not know what to do. They are prey all the time to poor landlord practices and are exploited by letting agencies on the way there. If we can do something, even through these modest proposals, to address that, it should be viewed as an obligation. I await the Minister’s speech to see whether my speech has persuaded him to throw his brief away and say what we know he probably feels.

NHS Funding

Debate between Andy Sawford and Andy Slaughter

Wednesday 12th December 2012 Commons Chamber

[Andy Sawford]

I will not give way; I want to make important points for my constituents. It is important that these things are put on record, so I shall not be giving way to the hon. Gentleman again. He has not done a great service to people in my constituency in the way that he has addressed these issues.

[Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

I had the pleasure of visiting my hon. Friend’s constituency earlier this year, and I am sorry to hear about Kettering. Both the accident and emergency departments and one 500-bed hospital in my constituency are due to close. Neither of those A and E departments is PFI, and none of the four A and Es closing in west London is PFI, so is that point not a complete red herring?