Homelessness Reduction Bill (Seventh sitting)

Andy Slaughter Excerpts

Committee Debate: 7th sitting: House of Commons
Wednesday 18th January 2017 Public Bill Committees

[Mr Jones]

My hon. Friend is as perceptive as ever and makes an excellent point. Clearly, amendments will be tabled on Report. I assure him that anything in those amendments that constitutes a new burden on local authorities will be dealt with in the same way. There is nothing in the statement that we have already made that is not in the Bill today. If there are any additional costs as a result of amendments tabled on Report, they will quite correctly be dealt with separately from the £48 million that we announced in our statement. I hope that gives him some reassurance.

Amendments 16 and 17 represent the best balance between the interests of tenants, landlords and local housing authorities. I believe that the schedule of new burdens costs that we have set out for the Bill is fair and we did our homework in relation to the calculation of those costs. The clause is part of the excellent package that my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East has brought together with the support of the Select Committee, the Government, housing charities, and in the main local authorities. I am pleased to propose that the Committee supports the amendments and clause 1 as amended.

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

If I understood you this morning, Mr Chope, you would like single speeches addressing both the amendments and clause stand part. That is a sensible way to proceed. I observe in parenthesis that I would be the first person to be accused of being a hypocrite if I was to deprecate a filibuster. The only thing that I say is that in my experience, one usually does that when one does not care for the legislation one is talking over. I say to the promoter, the hon. Member for Harrow East, that I would hate, for the sake of posterity, for this debate to be one of rather more quantity than quality. I will try to set a good example by being clear, precise and concise while I hope covering the relevant points.

It would be churlish to say that the Government or the promoter have laboured mightily and brought forth a mouse by spending several weeks mulling over what we should do with clause 1 and then deleting 95% of it. I also asked those advising us to have a look at it and they could not come up with much better than deleting most of clause 1. So there it is; that is where we are. There is broad agreement that the new slimline version of clause 1 is better than the old version, so I concede that point. There were technical and policy difficulties with the original version and the more that everyone looked into them, the more irreconcilable and unresolvable they became. Although the revised version is better, there are still problems. I will not ask the Minister to respond to those problems today, but do ask him at least to look at some of the concerns and to consider, perhaps before the Bill emerges in the other place, whether clause 1 does the entire job.

Rather than spend a long time outlining the problems, let me just give two examples. The Association of Housing Advice Services said:

“There is government guidance that requires councils to make a decision on a homelessness application within 33 working days (about 42 days). As an applicant is now threatened with homelessness as soon as they receive a section 21 notice, we must take the homelessness application at that point. Which means we will need to determine the application…before the S21 notice has expired and often whilst prevention work is still being undertaken. If we succeed in preventing”—

that is the local authorities—

“homelessness after the application has been decided, we have to formally end it with an offer of accommodation; which is unnecessarily bureaucratic as they (still) have somewhere to live. Currently if we are negotiating with a landlord, we can delay starting the homelessness application (as they are not yet threatened with homelessness) until that fails.”

However, Shelter says that

“in cases where the prevention assistance does not prevent proceedings or help find an alternative home, the amendment to Clause 1 would allow the local housing authority say that the applicant was not actually homeless right up to the date of eviction. Only homeless applicants in priority need are entitled to interim accommodation, so authorities would not be obliged to provide interim accommodation until the applicant actually became homeless, which could still be interpreted by local authorities as the date of the eviction.”

I am not saying that I entirely agree with either of those points, but they are worthy of consideration and are caveats to how the amended clause would run. They are not necessarily consistent with each other; indeed, in some respects they contradict each other. I just feel that we may not have resolved the fundamental issue with clause 1, although we have gone some way towards that.

My other concern relates to Government amendment 17 to clause 1, which refers to a “valid” section 21 notice having been served. What is a valid section 21 notice? I earned quite a lot of money arguing over that for a number of years, but in the end it was not my decision—it was the judge’s decision as to what would be valid. In this case, I assume it will be the view of the local authority, but will it be correct and does it have the full facts on which to determine what is a valid section 21 notice? These things can be quite technical and complicated, and there is a body of case law, not surprisingly, as a no-fault eviction, which is what the section 21 notice is all about, behoves representatives and courts to look even more closely at the technical side of the matter.

Notwithstanding what the Minister said about section 8 notices, the new version of the clause does deal with section 21 notices. Again, these are technical legal points, so rather than the Minister responding today, he might want to go away and reconsider them before Report or even before the Bill goes through the other place. I was not entirely persuaded as to whether there is some inequality between the serving of a section 21 notice—a no-fault process—and a section 8 notice. Of course, there are other types of tenancy as well, some of which are less secure than assured shorthold tenancies, which can be terminated by a notice to quit. Where do they stand? Given that the Bill does not deal with the myriad tenancies under housing law, but with anyone who is made homeless, we need to able to deal with those matters comprehensively. I entirely understand the problem of trying to draft something that deals with section 8 notices as well as section 21 notices, but nevertheless we need to hear a little more at some stage about how the clause will impact on those tenancies—a minority, probably—that are terminated other than by a section 21 notice.

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[Will Quince]

Having seen the announcement from the Government for the £48 million, I was surprised to see the response from the LGA. I expected its response to be, “It’s not enough. It’s never enough. It cannot possibly be enough.” In fact, its response was the opposite. It agreed fully with the Department’s methodology, which is a huge credit to the Minister and his departmental officials. Why does the hon. Member for Hammersmith suggest it is not enough? The LGA has only said that the measure should be reviewed in two years’ time, two thirds of the way into the three-year funding formula.

[Andy Slaughter]

We can all read the statements in the way that we wish to. Everybody wants the Bill to succeed. In the statements made not just by the LGA but by London councils and non-governmental organisations, I detected a sigh and a comment that seemed to suggest, “We hope this will succeed”. I did not see anything in the LGA’s statement or any other statement that said the funding was sufficient. The LGA’s statement welcomed the Minister’s comments in Committee that the Government wish to fully fund the Bill. I do not think it specifically said—hence the comment on review—that that was necessarily going to be the case. Let me rely on my own counsel rather than the LGA’s in this matter. I am simply raising our concerns.

It is difficult—I will concede this to the Government—to come up with a figure, because we are in new territory. I appreciate that. That should be an absolute reason why the Government should adopt the view of the LGA and agree to a review. Perhaps the Minister will say whether we will get a review. If it is right that none of us can be absolutely certain, we need to know, within the time that the money is still being paid out, which is effectively one to two years, whether the money will be sufficient.

[David Mackintosh]

It is fair to point out to the hon. Gentleman that the Department for Communities and Local Government yesterday circulated to local authorities and us the background behind the funding of the new burdens for this Bill, which includes quite a lot of information about the assumptions. It talks in great detail about Wales, where there was a 28% increase in cases, and works out a sensible assumption for England. It is helpful to point that out to the Committee. I wonder whether he has seen it.

[Andy Slaughter]

Of course I have seen it and read it. I was slightly surprised that it appears to have come personally from the DCLG statistician, rather than the Minister. I do not know whether that is to allow the Minister, if it all turns to dust, to say, “Oh, it was just some functionary who produced that”—[Interruption.] Let me take the points one at a time.

First, there is the matter of quantum. Although we do not have absolute figures, because we are in new territory, all the indications so far—I quoted some of them earlier—suggest that £48 million is not going to touch the sides. I am sure the responsible Minister saw the article in “Inside Housing” on 21 December, in which a number of councils volunteered what they think it will cost them. Lewisham, for example, said it would cost £2.38 million per year and Ealing said it would cost £2.55 million per year. AHAS estimated, and I think the figure has increased since then, that the 32 London boroughs will have a combined bill of £161 million in the first year, which is substantially in excess of £35 million.

I appreciate that even in the two pages of methodology there has been no attempt yet to divvy the sum up among authorities, and I think one can anticipate that London authorities are going to get a larger share than some rural or district authorities. Nevertheless, there is such a disparity between what the professional bodies and local authorities have estimated and what the Minister has provided. It is, shall we say, unlikely that it is going to fully fund, even in the first year, the local authorities’ new responsibilities.

[Mr Jones]

We do not recognise some of the very high figures that have been quoted. There is a lot of misunderstanding about what is within the scope of the Bill and what will be within the new burdens. There is also the question whether the savings that will offset the costs have been taken into account. Has the hon. Gentleman done any homework and asked the local authorities in question whether they have considered those issues?

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[Andy Slaughter]

The Minister is getting ahead of me. I am dealing simply with quantum now. I will come on to the methodology next and the savings as a third point.

There is an estimated gap of nearly £200 million by the end of the decade in local authorities’ current homelessness provision. If one looks at the fact that London boroughs spent £633 million in the last year for which figures were available—2014-15—on temporary accommodation, including £170 million of their own funds, and the fact that they are already subject to substantial reductions in funding, I am not surprised that they are very concerned about that. That is purely on the issue of quantum.

On the issue of methodology, I am not sure how far it takes us. Although something is better than nothing, I found it a slightly odd way of presenting the background information. I would like to see a full impact assessment. I appreciate that we may need to wait until we know exactly what the Bill is going to do. There may need to be a review of provision—the methodology concedes that—but once we know how the sum is going to be broken down, I would like to know exactly how the Government can justify their claim that this will be new burdens funding and that it will be fully funded.

On the issue of savings, of course we all hope for savings, not only cash savings but savings in human misery, bureaucracy and unnecessary action. I am, however, less sanguine than the Minister about the fact that that will all be resolved in one to two years. In part I say that because much of what the Bill will do is to encourage what we have often heard called a culture, a culture of local authorities doing more by way of prevention. Yet in a lot of the busiest authorities, prevention work is done—in 80% of cases in Camden, for example—so quite a lot is going on, and I am not persuaded that we will see an immediate culture change, or that that culture change will produce savings.

Savings are likely to come by averting homelessness for priority need cases, because that is where the substantial burden of cost comes. At the moment part of the point of the Bill is that a lot of local authorities are not taking their responsibilities seriously in relation to non-priority need cases. Thereby, if we simply see an increased focus on those cases on which there is not current expenditure, or people being turned away, I do not quite see where the savings are coming from or where the supposition comes that within two years there will be nil cost to local government. To be perfectly honest, I just do not believe it.

We could sit here all afternoon saying, “We think it is”, or, “We think it isn’t”, but surely the sensible course is to have an early review to see whether the LGA’s caution or the Minister’s option is justified.

[Mr Burrowes]

I want to encourage an optimistic view, perhaps even a realistic one. The Welsh choice led to that 69% decrease in the first year. I understand that the assumption in the figures we are discussing is for a 30% decrease in homelessness, but is that not seeking simply to follow the Welsh model, which is a great success? The shadow Minister, however, says that there will be hardly any reduction or savings. He cannot say that. What is his concern with 30%? Is 30% too optimistic? Where would he say there will be reduction?

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[Andy Slaughter]

The principal way in which a case could be resolved in Wales was by finding accommodation. We have been talking about Westminster for half a day, and we know that for the authorities with the most pressing housing need, finding accommodation is virtually impossible. It is not impossible in Wales; it is virtually impossible in many London boroughs. Resolving those issues will be expensive in any event—there is a higher cost attached, whether it is to mediation, landlord incentive, deposit schemes or whatever—but there is also less ability to do anything, so it will take more time and be more difficult to do. So yes, I am pessimistic about it compared with the situation in Wales.

If we do not know the answer, let us make sure that we build in a mechanism to ensure that we do know. I am sure that the Scots will agree with this, even if Conservative Members do not, but we do not want the initiative to fail, and certainly not for lack of resources. I will be delighted to make a public statement of having been totally wrongheaded about this if it turns out that within 18 months there is no additional cost to local authorities under the provisions of the Bill. At the moment, however, I am somewhat dubious about that. The Minister may call my bluff simply by agreeing to what the LGA wants.

[Mr Jones]

The hon. Gentleman talks about 18 months’ time. Does he accept that the chances are that, in 18 months’ time, we will have only a matter of months’ worth of evidence on the effect of the policy and the costs and savings from it? It needs to be looked at over a longer period. The LGA is saying two years, but that is not 18 months.

[Andy Slaughter]

I said 18 months because the money runs out in two years, as a maximum, but if the Minister wants to say two years, let us say two years.

My final point is one that I suspect the Minister has heard before. It is difficult to look at the Bill, especially the funding element of it, in a vacuum. There is a supply crisis, which is why my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey) urged the Government before Christmas to make additional properties available that were dedicated to relieving rough sleeping. Supply is a many-headed issue, but there is a specific issue about rehousing those who are in a particularly vulnerable position.

[Mr Jones]

The right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne may talk a good game, but the Government are playing one. We are putting in place move-on accommodation, and we are going to spend £100 million on providing 2,000 places for the very people that the hon. Member for Hammersmith is talking about. Does he welcome that?

[Andy Slaughter]

I gave way to the Minister because he was so insistent that I thought he had something new to say.

Supply is an issue, and so is security. We know—Government Members have said it today—that the biggest cause of homelessness is ending private sector tenancies, because of the opportunity for “no fault” possession and because of rising rents and landlord attitudes. Our very sensible and moderate proposals for longer tenancies and for controlling rents would be a major way of controlling homelessness. The Government cannot ignore their own actions in relation to local housing allowance, the benefit cap and all the measures that we have heard mentioned today. I pray in aid Westminster City Council and other Conservative authorities, which are saying that they cannot cope because of the additional pressures that the Government are putting on them. Those pressures go right across the board for local authorities.

I will not labour the point. I simply say that the Government need to take a holistic approach and say, “Yes, of course we want the Bill’s provisions to work and we want to fund them properly.” However, we cannot do only that. We have to look at where the accommodation is going to be, at why people are increasingly coming to local authorities—there has been a substantial, 40% increase in the use of temporary accommodation over the last four years—and at the effects of other policies that are directly contrary to the intentions behind the Bill. I put that on the record. The question of money relates not just to the specific matters raised in the Bill, but to how the system works as a whole. At the moment the system is creaking incredibly. It is not getting better; it is getting worse.

[Michael Tomlinson]

I begin by picking up on one or two points from the hon. Member for Hammersmith. On a positive, optimistic note, let me start by saying what I agree with in his analysis of clause 1. He mentioned several other forms of tenancies, such as less secure tenancies; perhaps he could also have mentioned licences or those that are subject to a notice to quit rather than the more strict section 21 notice or court procedure. I agree with his analysis on that point. There are a wide range of tenancies that could have been encompassed within the clause but are not. I suspect that his analysis is right: that that is because of the sheer difficulty of juggling all the different potential tenancies. Look at the different Acts that we have to deal with, and that he had to deal with when in practice: the 1980, 1985, 1988 and 1996 Acts, all with varying levels and layers of interplay. I suspect that is why we find clause 1 drafted as it is.

I agree, to that extent, that as drafted and certainly as amended, the clause does not encompass a wide range of different forms of tenancy, especially those less secure. I will come back to section 8 and its interplay with section 21. However, I take issue with the hon. Gentleman and other Opposition Members on criticising and being too antagonistic towards no-fault notices and that regime. I agree that it is desirable to have as long-form tenancies as possible and I was heartened by the Minister’s submission that confirmed that the average tenancy is four years. The Minister is nodding, so I heard that correctly.

Of course, that is not the whole picture but four years is a significant period. My concern, if no-fault tenancies are simply swept aside or undermined, is that landlords and potential landlords will be put off purchasing and letting out properties, so we would be in a worse position. That is a concern that the hon. Member for Hammersmith and his colleagues should look out for if they seek to undermine no-fault tenancies and those who are, on the whole, perfectly good, decent landlords, as we heard this morning. I will pick up later the points the hon. Gentleman raised on finances and his self-professed pessimistic view on life. I will encourage him to have a slightly rosier view by the time my speech finishes. Whether I succeed is another story. I see he is busy looking at his papers.

I start with sounding alarm bells on what the Minister mentioned in relation to finance of further potential burdens on local authorities. I mentioned earlier that I had had meetings with East Dorset District Council. My constituency covers three local authorities—East Dorset, Purbeck and Poole—and each will be concerned about additional burdens if additional resources do not match them.

I want to come back to finances but I was heartened by the reassurance that, if there are to be further amendments—as we understand there will be on Report—there will be an opportunity for additional funding. I simply ask that the Minister, as he has done at this stage, gives an early indication when the new clause is considered on Report of the level of funding he assesses as necessary.

I support the principle of clause 1 but my concern relates to notices given under section 8 of the Housing Act 1988. Although amendment 17 looks like it offers a neat proposal, in fact it sweeps away any reference to a valid notice being given under section 8. The Minister began to give an explanation of why notices given under section 8 are to be swept away, but I fear he did not give us as complete an answer as he may or should have done.

Section 8 notices are important. As the hon. Member for Hammersmith noted, section 21 notices are no-fault notices, whereas section 8 notices are given where there has been fault, where there has been a breach of a tenancy agreement. Section 8 notices are divided into two parts: mandatory and discretionary. If an allegation that a tenant has breached a mandatory obligation is proved, a judge as of right will give a possession order. That is the mandatory part of the notices given under section 8. If it is an allegation under the discretionary part, there is discretion as to whether a judge would make an order for possession. I therefore fear that throwing all section 8 notices out might not have been as wise a move as it looked, because what section 8 and section 21 notices have in common—at least partly—is that they may inevitably lead to a possession order.

Although I note the reasons that the Minister gave for keeping section 21 notices in—they are mandatory, and it is all but likely that they will lead to a possession order in any event—those reasons also apply to the mandatory part of notices given under section 8. Take arrears of rent: if there are two months’ worth of arrears, both when the notice is issued and when the matter arrives at court, a possession order is mandatory, as it is in a no-fault procedure in relation to section 21.

However, I take on board what the hon. Member for Hammersmith said: there might still be a dispute about whether the correct notice has been given under section 21. I have stopped practising—I understand he has, too—but since October 2015, there has been a new regime for section 21 notices. They now have to be done on a mandatory form, whereas under the old system, when I was practising, there was no prescribed form for what a section 21 notice looked like.

I fear that throwing out all section 8 notices narrows things down too much, which is potentially unhelpful for those who inevitably will end up homeless. That is the thrust of clause 1 and why it has been devised: to help those who inevitably will end up homeless by inserting into section 175 of the Housing Act 1996 a change to the definition of homelessness. If it is inevitable that an individual—a tenant—will end up homeless, it is worth looking again at whether the mandatory parts of notices under section 8 should still fall into clause 1 as well.

We all want as many people helped as possible. I said I will come back to finance, but it is relevant in this instance as well. The more people who are helped earlier, the more it will help with the costs to them, local authorities, and housing associations or anyone who needs to take proceedings in court. It will also help in respect of the human cost. My understanding is that the clause’s intention is to help people who are inevitably going to end up homeless, so I ask the Minister and my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East, the Bill’s promoter, to address this point: why have all section 8 notices been taken out, instead of retaining just the mandatory ones, where it is all but inevitable that a possession order will be granted?

I want to make a related point that shows the complexity of the Housing Acts. Perhaps at some stage a Government will be bold enough to look at a consolidation Bill—or perhaps not. Section 89 of the Housing Act 1980 is still in force. It relates to pleas of exceptional hardship, but that would only delay possession and not stop it. It is not a defence; it is only a mechanism to delay the inevitable. Even with that in place, it is still inevitable that people will be made homeless, and therefore help should be provided at the earliest opportunity.

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[Bob Blackman]

On a point of order, Mr Chope. As we have reached the end of the proceedings, I would like to thank you for your patient, good-natured and flexible chairing of the Committee. I thank hon. Members on both sides of the Committee both for attending these sittings and for their contributions, which have added to the Bill and to our consideration of the amendments. The discussion has been consistently conducted in a consensual spirit. We have had the odd point of disagreement, which is healthy, but I believe we have worked well together to scrutinise the Bill and ensure it is returned to the House in a good state. That follows the excellent work of the Select Committee that preceded the Bill’s coming to us.

I also thank my hon. Friend the Minister for marshalling the full resources of the Department to ensure that the Government support the Bill, and for allowing his officials, lawyers and the Bill team to help to draft the Bill and address issues as and when they have been identified. Finally, I thank the Clerks and the Doorkeepers for managing the Committee.

I look forward to seeing all Committee members when we next debate the Bill on Report on the Floor of the House. I feel confident that Members on both sides of the House will be able to support it in good conscience. The Report stage will take place on Friday 27 January, and the administrative arrangements for anyone who wishes to table amendments will be circulated to give them proper notice. With that, I thank you, Mr Chope, all members of the Committee and everyone who has been involved in reaching this stage of the process.

[Andy Slaughter]

Further to that point of order, Mr Chope. I echo the thanks expressed by the Bill’s promoter to everyone involved thus far. We all agree that the sittings have been conducted with civility and, where possible, consensus. I will leave it there, other than to thank you particularly, Mr Chope, for your forbearance. Perhaps the proceedings have been a little more helter-skelter than is common in such Committees; you may have been reminded of the national lottery by the random manner in which the clauses were drawn for debate. None the less, with your usual sang froid you have kept us in order, so thank you very much.

[Mr Jones]

Further to that point of order, Mr Chope. I add my thanks to those expressed by my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East and the hon. Member for Hammersmith for your chairmanship of the Committee; you kept us in order throughout. I thank colleagues on both sides for their contributions on this important measure.

I particularly thank the Opposition Front Benchers for the spirit in which they have approached the Bill so far. It is a rare experience to be on a Committee where there is such a consensus, and I shall probably have to wait a little while before I experience another that operates in the same way. The hon. Member for Hammersmith said that there had been a bit of a lottery for the clauses, but as someone who does the lottery now and again I feel we have probably had more success with the Bill than I ever do with that—although it has not always been all that easy.

I must also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East for the energy and determination, and at times patience, that he has shown during the Committee sittings. It is not easy to negotiate one’s way through a Bill when there are so many different interests that we understandably want to work with on getting things right.

I also thank the officials who have worked so hard on the Bill. Parliamentary counsel worked extremely hard, especially during the many periods of recess, Christmas holidays and so on. Finally, I thank the Clerks and Doorkeepers, who have done a sterling job.