Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Andy Sawford and Stephen Williams

Monday 20th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Williams]

The Government will make the referendum criteria clear shortly, but council tax bills are a major part of every household’s budget—often far more significant than utility bills—and it is right that, rather than mandating local authorities or imposing caps as previous Governments did, this Government should give those in local government the discretion to raise council tax if they wish while expecting them to go to the people to get endorsement of that decision.

[Andy Sawford (Corby) (Lab/Co-op)]

Of the 30 areas in England with the highest black and minority ethnic populations, 29 face cuts above the national average and eight are dealing with cuts that are double that average. Will the Minister explain why BME communities are being hit so hard and will he agree to look at that?

[Stephen Williams]

I am the Minister responsible for race equality and I take the issues that the hon. Gentleman raises seriously. Perhaps we can have a separate discussion about it. Local authority settlements are not predicated on that basis, as a whole basket of factors goes into them. The Government are still putting substantial amounts of money into our integration budget to ensure that communities cohere, through measures such as specific funding for English language.

Private Landlords and Letting and Managing Agents (Regulation) Bill

Debate between Andy Sawford and Stephen Williams

Friday 25th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Andy Sawford]

As I said at the outset of my remarks, and as my hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield has acknowledged, there is, of course, substantial regulation. The issue is that there is too much confusing regulation and we need better, simpler regulation. I hope the hon. Gentleman and I can agree on that.

Both the Association of Residential Letting Agents and the National Landlords Association agree that rogue and criminal landlords undermine the reputation of the many responsible landlords and they want action taken. I am pleased to say that action is being taken by good Labour local authorities around the country such as Newham, Oxford, Blackpool and now Liverpool, which are using the powers granted to them by the Labour Government to tackle appalling abuse by some of the worst landlords in England.

On the problem of poor standards, the private rented sector has more non-decent homes as a proportion of its total stock than any other housing tenure. In 2011 a full 35% of all privately rented homes were estimated to be non-decent. On issues of repair, damp and heating, nearly 10% of all private rented homes fall below the minimum standard of repairs and more than 15% of private rented homes lack minimal heat in the winter. Private rented sector homes have the worst damp problems of any homes in England.

Poor housing has wider costs, including to the taxpayer. It has been estimated that the annual costs of poor housing to health could be up to £2.5 billion. There are also estimated costs of £1.8 billion to the criminal justice system, and the lost earnings that result from the current group of young people is estimated at £14.8 billion, as a consequence of the impact of poor housing on their educational attainment and opportunities to get on in the world of work.

Let me say why the proposals are to be welcomed and why I hope that the House will support them. Clause 1 would introduce a simple and light-touch—those are important terms—national register of landlords. That will assist in the improvement of private renting in two ways. First, it will help local authorities to manage the housing market in their area. Greater transparency and information will enable local authorities to target enforcement action on areas that most need it.

I was out and about on the Kingswood estate in my constituency last Saturday morning. I went into a particular square and found the standard of housing, and the evidence of antisocial behaviour, incredibly disappointing. I took the matter up straight away, as I am sure any hon. Member would seek to do, with the local councillors. They sympathised and said that they had sought to address the problems, but—this is one of the sad consequences of the right to buy—all the houses in the square were now privately rented. It was very difficult for them to find out who the landlords were and contact them. Unfortunately, the tenants in those houses, many of whom were migrant workers, were being exploited. The local authority felt powerless, and so did I, as a Member of Parliament. That is why I think it is incredibly important to help local authorities by ensuring greater transparency, and arming them with information, so that they can target enforcement action.

Secondly, the light-touch register will enable the Government and local authorities to communicate with the majority of well-meaning landlords, including amateur or accidental landlords, as they are sometimes called, who want to know that they are doing the right thing, and want to know what support or advice is available to them. That way, the local authority can keep in touch with them. That could be about such simple things as measures to prevent crime or fire, which are, in some cases—because, frankly, it is a saving to the taxpayer in the end—provided for free. Landlords might welcome that information or advice.

The proposals for the register envisage no hurdles to entry other than the need to supply a few basic pieces of information, and I think that is absolutely right; it is to be welcomed that the measure is deliberately simple and not burdensome. It is a deliberate contrast with a licence-based approach, and it reinforces the view that, as the Rugg review found, the vast majority of landlords are well intentioned and offer a good service to tenants. An important point that has been touched on is that there is rightly concern about the cost.

[Stephen Williams]

The hon. Gentleman mentions the Rugg review, which I believe was commissioned by the shadow Home Secretary when she was Housing Minister, and which reported to the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey). It rejected a national register of landlords, and that was a recommendation that the last Government accepted.

[Andy Sawford]

Of course, measures were being taken forward to address some of the problems, both following the Rugg review and in 2010, but the 2010 election intervened. I am pleased that my hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield has included such measures in a private Member’s Bill and shown leadership from the Opposition Benches. I want to bring my remarks to a conclusion—

[Stephen Williams]

rose—

[Andy Sawford]

If the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I will bring my remarks to a conclusion, as I want to hear from him. The other measures—on more extensive regulation for letting and management agencies in clause 2; on the transparency of the fees of private sector letting agents and managing agents in clause 3; on the very important requirement for written tenancy agreements in clause 4; on the designation of selective licensing schemes in clause 5; on consultation, which is also very important, in clause 6; and the thoughtful clauses on financial provisions, orders and regulations, offences and interpretation—have been well thought through. Of course, as always, they would benefit from further consideration and exploration in Committee.

I urge all hon. Members to see the intention behind the Bill, which addresses, rightly, a huge problem in many constituencies around the country. I hope that we can make real progress with the Bill today. I end by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield on bringing this private Member’s Bill forward.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stephen Williams]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that. We have heard that there are many estimates, and indeed ranges of estimates, available to Departments from various providers and people who survey the housing market, but the firm figure that is often quoted is that 3.8 million households are in the sector.

The hon. Gentleman referred to selective licensing, a power that is already available to local authorities. When Bristol city council was controlled by Liberal Democrats, it initiated selective licensing in Easton in my constituency, so I know that authorities are making use of that power. He said that it was being strangled by red tape; I am not sure what the evidence base is for that, because he did not expand on that point, but back in the summer, when my predecessor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Bath (Mr Foster), was in office, he initiated a survey of all housing authorities. We are still gathering in the responses, but thus far we have had 194. Given that there are about 300 housing authorities, obviously quite a lot have not yet responded, or did not feel that there was an issue with selective licensing that merited a response. From the 194 that did respond, we know that 16 selective licensing schemes have been introduced in different parts of the country. Obviously, there are still data to be crunched, and I am sure that we will be able to say more about that in due course.

The hon. Gentleman also mentioned the issue of rogue landlords—as did other speakers, perhaps to counter what he said—as if there was nothing that local authorities could do about the minority of private sector landlords who can be described in that way. Of course, local authorities already have powers that they can use; certainly, as regards health and safety, there are powers to do with the safety and sanitary condition of houses, flats and bedsits in the private rented market. I think that somebody—possibly the hon. Member for Hammersmith or the shadow Minister—mentioned that local authorities face budgetary pressures. I certainly acknowledge that, but the Department has made available a £3 million fund for district, unitary or metropolitan authorities that feel that they have particular issues with tackling poor standards in private sector accommodation. They can bid for resources to deal with those issues.

[Andy Sawford]

That £3 million seems a very small amount, but we should welcome it. Will the Minister tell us how much of it has been allocated to date, when allocations will be made, and how Corby borough council might bid for some of it?

[Stephen Williams]

On the last point, I imagine that the Department has invited all housing authorities to bid for money from the fund, and has published the criteria. Hopefully Corby council knows what it needs to do. On take-up, if the hon. Gentleman puts his question in a written form, I am sure that I can give him a full answer, but I am afraid that I cannot give him an oral answer at this moment.

As I listened to the hon. Member for Mansfield and others, I thought: what problem is his Bill seeking to address? Obviously, there are problems in the sector. I looked at some tenant satisfaction statistics from the English housing survey, from which we get our most recent, comprehensive data. There are some interesting comparisons between the private rented and local authority sectors.

In the private sector, the English housing survey found that 83.6% of tenants were fairly or very satisfied with their landlord, compared to 76.6% who had the local authority as their landlord. Some 9.7% of private sector tenants were dissatisfied, compared with almost 17% of people in local authority housing. That might back up the point made by the hon. Member for Shipley that his constituency surgeries quite often see complaints about a sector that is already heavily regulated and has democratic accountability—that is, local authorities. Although there are clearly problems in the private rented sector, they are smaller than in the sector that is under the direct control of housing authorities.

[Stephen Williams]

Those are not my figures. As I said, they are from English housing survey data, which are available for all of us to look at. I have acknowledged several times that there are problems in the sector. The hon. Member for Hammersmith mentioned the Shelter pop-up shop. When that was in Bristol, people cited extreme cases of exposed electrical wiring, poor plumbing and awful sanitation. Local authorities already have powers to deal with those transgressions. That is what we want to see them tackling, and the £3 million fund that the Department has opened should help them.

On the tenant satisfaction data, repairs are often an issue about which people come to see us as constituency MPs. The housing survey data show that 72% of tenants in the private sector are satisfied that their landlord deals with repairs in a satisfactory way, compared with 66% in local authorities. I am not in any way trying to diminish the fact that there may well be problems in the private rented sector; I am trying to put those into context. Even in a regulated environment, and even in an environment where each of the three main parties in the Chamber controls housing authorities and councillors have oversight of what they are doing, there is a certain amount of tenant dissatisfaction. No matter what the regulation, we can never make that dissatisfaction go away.

[Andy Sawford]

The Minister has clearly studied the English housing survey in some detail. It is interesting to hear his take on that survey, but it would be helpful and relevant to get his take on the trends that that survey shows. It clearly shows a rise in the number of people in private rented accommodation and a trend in dissatisfaction with private rented accommodation.

[Stephen Williams]

I will look at the survey in even more detail to deal with the points that the shadow Minister raises, but he is right. The private sector is growing, and that is something that we wish to encourage. That is why we have the policies in place to get people investing in the private sector in order to provide extra accommodation, which is needed in general, but is needed also to provide the flexibility that many of our constituents would want.

Let me turn to the Bill and its four clauses, the first of which establishes a mandatory national register of private landlords. When the shadow Minister was speaking, he allowed me to intervene once about the Rugg review. I tried to put it to him that that review was commissioned by the Labour Government. One issue that it considered was whether there should be a national register of landlords. It rejected that and the then Labour Government, as represented either by the present shadow Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), or by the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey), both of whom were Housing Ministers in the period of the Rugg review, accepted that recommendation. The hon. Member for Corby said to me, but would not allow me to intervene in response, that the general election got in the way of implementation. The Rugg review was in 2008. A lot of things happened between 2008 and May 2010, but clearly a decision was made by predecessors in my Department not to introduce a mandatory national register of private landlords.

The range of benefits that a register might provide was not clear, but one was that tenants would be able to find out who their landlord was. Under the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985, a tenant can ask the collector of the rent, which in many cases may well be a letting agent, to disclose the identity of the ultimate landlord. That information has to be provided within 21 days and failure to do so is an offence. If as constituency Members we find that people do not know who their landlord is, or the local authority does not know and may want to encourage the tenant to find out, perhaps we should publicise that provision, which has been on the statute book for quite a long time.

It is unclear what a national register would achieve. We certainly believe that it would create an unnecessary burden on all landlords, whereas what has been acknowledged in the debate is that there is a small minority of potentially rogue landlords whom we should be concerned about, rather than the vast majority who provide a good service to their tenants. None the less, many private landlords are already in industry accreditation schemes.

One concern is that the introduction of any new compulsory burden of regulation involves a cost. The hon. Member for Mansfield said that there would be no compliance costs, but I would be surprised if a national register of anything was introduced without some compliance costs. People in the private rented sector are looking to make a profit and like any private enterprise or individual in business they will pass costs visited on them on to their customers, who in this case are tenants.

Finance (No. 2) Bill

Debate between Andy Sawford and Stephen Williams

Wednesday 17th April 2013 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Williams]

Thank you for calling me, Mr Hoyle. I am being called rather sooner than I imagined; indeed, I did not even necessarily imagine that I would be making a speech in full detail, but making use of my House of Commons Library notes I have hastily prepared something, particularly on new clause 5, which is a welcome innovation in many ways.

[Andy Sawford]

As the hon. Gentleman is not quite prepared to speak at the moment, perhaps I could help to give him some material for his response to the new clauses. Will he enlighten us on whether the Liberal Democrats might take this opportunity to support us in pushing forward a mansion tax, given that they did not do so last time?

[Stephen Williams]

I am happy to enlighten the hon. Gentleman, whose intervention falls into the category of a nice try. I think he is referring to the Opposition motion on this issue that we debated five or so weeks ago. The Government amendment to that motion made it crystal clear that, in the context of the coalition, my Conservative Front-Bench colleagues do not support the introduction of a mansion tax in this Parliament; indeed, it is not in the coalition agreement because we could not agree on it at that point. However, the Liberal Democrat part of the coalition does believe that a mansion tax should be introduced. We are happy to do the workings on it and happy to espouse it at every opportunity. It will be in our manifesto at the next general election, and subject to what happens in that election, when I am sure that negotiations may well take place again, perhaps we will have a different outcome. I welcome the fact that the Labour party, which emphatically rejected the principle of a mansion tax in the negotiations in 2010, now seems to be on the way towards conversion to the long-term Liberal Democrat train of thought on this issue.

I also hope that Conservative coalition colleagues might have a conversion between now and 2015. Some of them—in fact, a lot of them; we talk to each other rather more than we used to—whisper in my ear that they wished the Conservative party that embraced this policy. That applies particularly to Conservative MPs from the north of England—north of the line from the Severn to the Wash. Perhaps there are not very many £2 million properties in those constituencies. Nevertheless, a lot of Conservative MPs from outside the south-east of England have privately said to me that they wish the coalition would adopt this principle.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stephen Williams]

The hon. Gentleman, whom I quite like and respect—a feeling not shared universally among his colleagues—tempts me to comment on what might happen in the 2015 general election, on what discussions might take place in its aftermath and on what we might say during it. In 2015, the Liberal Democrats will say that we favour a mansion tax, with all the details we have already put on the table. I intend to publish a short paper that might help—it might do the Treasury’s job for it, making the new clause unnecessary—and which will flesh out what I am talking about. He said that Labour might benefit from taking more policies from the Liberal Democrats. We are all in politics to see our ideals, principles and policies put into practice, and if Labour wants to adopt more Liberal Democrat positions, instead of always saying we are wrong, the public might welcome that more grown-up attempt at consensus politics.

[Andy Sawford]

I do not understand something about the hon. Gentleman’s remarks. He has justified not voting for his own policy five weeks ago on the basis of an artfully crafted—I think he used those words—Government amendment that allowed the Liberal Democrats to wriggle out of it. But today there is no such amendment. He has challenged, very assertively, the depth of our new clause. If he is so confident in the depth of his own policies, why have the Liberal Democrats not tabled a new clause that he could vote for today?

[Stephen Williams]

I am happy to reveal now that I will not be supporting new clause 5 in the Division Lobby. That should not surprise the hon. Gentleman. I will not be supporting it, because it is not about the principle of introducing a mansion tax. It asks for a study. It asks the Treasury to do some work. These are busy people, with important work to do, and I do not want to waste their time. We do not want them to waste their time finessing badly thought-through Labour party proposals.