Immigration Act 2014 (Commencement No. 6) Order 2016

Baroness Gardner of Parkes Excerpts

Wednesday 24th February 2016 Lords Chamber

I would just add that, if this proposal had come from the European Union, there would have been uproar, at the idea that this amount of bureaucracy and red tape was being put on landlords, with the potential for discrimination. Everybody in this House would have fallen on it, torn it apart and, hopefully, voted against it.

[Baroness Gardner of Parkes (Con)]

My Lords, my interest as a small landlord is on the register. Like the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, I have let properties in a small way for a very long time, probably 40 to 50 years, starting with the basement of a house that I lived in. It is unfortunate that this clause comes in an immigration rather than a housing Bill, where so many of these issues are addressed and more is known about the real problems involved.

A pilot evaluation as proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, is at least desirable and even essential. Like others on this side of the House, I shall not vote in favour of her Motion, but I want to make an input on the subject. Checks on tenants all sound very desirable, and I have always had checks on them, but I cannot tell noble Lords how difficult it is becoming. Nowadays people either want to hide their identity for some illegal reason of their own or they simply do not even know how to produce identification. I have had a very charming and completely reliable girl take a small flat that I had. The previous tenants were expecting a child and needed more space, so they moved out. She wanted to come, but to try to get any suitable identification and proof that she was actually going to the university here that she claimed to be going to took over six weeks. As the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, said, six weeks’ loss of rent to a landlord is quite a lot of money and certainly pushes the rent up for the next person who comes along, because you have to compensate for the money that you have lost in that period. In the end, we had to get a letter from her embassy to prove that she really was legitimate.

I was quite fussy about this because we had at least six people presenting themselves to take that flat who were definitely not what they said they were and wanted it for illegal purposes. Other flats in the block have been let out on an Airbnb basis; the council used to be able at least to find out who was living in those flats. They were bussing in 10 people at a time for two weeks’ holiday. They came into a one-bedroom flat, which was not allowed to be sublet. In the end, the whole thing was sorted out in terms of those units, but the same people who had successfully run that—the court demanded that they give up that illegal subletting—were putting up front men to ask for my flat so they could do the same thing there. It is so very hard to detect these cases, and it takes a lot of time and consideration.

When residential landlords are given the responsibility to check immigration things, it will be a bit like the National Health Service. We are meant to check on who is entitled to national health treatment, but people do not have the time or ability to access the information and a tremendous lot of health tourists come here for that reason.

What are reasonable requirements? I can understand that it would be easy if we had national identity cards, although I have never really been in favour of them. Then, at least we would know whether someone was genuinely in the country, and that would cover one little thing, but that is not enough. For us to have passed the Deregulation Act, taking away the controls on people subletting or letting on short tenancies, at a time when New York and Paris were introducing such regulations was insane, but there is nothing we can do about it.

The point that this does not address at all is illegal landlords. Legal landlords are doing their best to abide by whatever the law is, but I know so many people who have a room in a house that is divided into six or eight rooms. You are meant to have a certificate if it is a house in multiple occupation and to know who is in it. Instead, these people are let rooms with no rent book or security, with nothing at all. In one case, someone has asked me to help. She is very concerned because someone has a key to her door and comes in and steals her things, yet she is told by the landlord that if she goes to the police, he will put her out instantly. That sounds unbelievable, but it is absolutely true. There will be at least six people living in a house where the landlord does not declare that he has anyone. I do not think he pays any income tax or anything else. The more we put greater and greater demands on legitimate landlords which are almost impossible to satisfy, the more we are going to push the enterprise underground. That is a very undesirable situation, and we do not want to see it.

I understand that the question of discrimination might be why this provision has been put into the Immigration Bill, but I am not involved in that Bill and I had not realised that it had housing implications. I am very impressed by the work being done by a lot of people, such as the noble Lord, Lord Best, who is a real expert on this matter. The noble Lord, Lord Rosser, said that there should be no further action before there has been a full consultation and evaluation, and the Liberal Members said the same thing.

It must be remembered that this is making it a criminal offence for landlords. It is not turning it into some light-hearted thing that will be dismissed. They say that you will be able to ring a helpline but, from my national health experience, I do not have a huge amount of faith in helplines. Every day in the paper there is a story about something that has gone wrong with a helpline. Why do we think a helpline would be any better manned or more efficient in this field than in other fields? Human nature is able to copewith only a certain amount, and most people staffing helplines have a list of questions and answers beside them. If you do not fit into that pattern, they might not be able to give you the appropriate answer because the question is not one that they have been given an answer to.

The Government need to make the situation much clearer to landlords. I think it is true that people have not had any notice about this—I certainly have not. The same applied over carbon monoxide monitors; the measure was introduced with two weeks’ notice and no one was told anything about it. It is no good asking people to follow a law without them having any idea that it is coming in. It is only through the National Landlords Association that I have come about this knowledge at all.

This is an important issue. I feel that it could go disastrously wrong, and it would be far better for it to be fully evaluated and dealt with perhaps in the housing Bill rather than in the Immigration Bill.

[The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Bates) (Con)]

My Lords, I thank all those who have spoken in this debate. I begin by putting on record that my wife is a small-scale private sector landlord; I want to draw that to the attention of the House.

In considering these matters, I draw your Lordships’ attention to the fact that we had a substantial debate on this issue on 20 January on Amendment 148 to Clause 13, which was from, as I recall, the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee. That went on for some time and raised many of the issues that have been raised today. If, because of the hour, I touch on a number of the issues lightly as we go through, I think it will be helpful for those who have genuine concerns about this to look again at the Official Report for the second day of Committee, and I am sure we will have the opportunity to revisit this on day one of Report on 9 March. For those reasons, I trust that the House will bear with me if I try to deal with some of the headline issues that perhaps have not been raised before.

First, I shall deal with the context of this measure. The context to legislation is very important. This is a commencement order, Commencement Order No. 6, for a piece of legislation that was passed by the coalition Government. The changes about which many concerns have been raised relate to the Immigration Bill currently going through your Lordships’ House but this relates firmly to the Act that was passed by the coalition Government.

It has to be said that the notion that landlords should have a duty to check that those to whom they rent properties are legally entitled to be here was first introduced by the then Labour Government in the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999, which introduced a duty on social landlords to undertake checks to ensure that they were letting properties only to people who had a legal right to be here. This measure simply extends that further across.

We are of course talking here about human beings and I think that we all recognise the humanity of this, but we are also talking about real problems that are faced in this country. We talk constantly about pressures in the housing market, and it could be that part of that pressure is because a number of properties in the private rented sector are currently rented out to people who have no legal right to be here, which means that they are here illegally and therefore breaking our laws. The question is: should we as a Government, and indeed as a Parliament, be endorsing and basically offering protection to people with no legal right to be here, who are breaking our laws and abusing our hospitality and should leave, to the potential disadvantage of people who are legally here and entitled to rent a property? That is the first point.

The second point, to which a number of issues relate, is on the timing, and I recognise that that is a key point. The original announcement about the pilot exercise was in September 2014—I am looking at the noble Lord, Lord Best—and the original pilot or phased introduction was undertaken some time ago. I readily accept that it was undertaken as a concession to arguments made, not least by the noble Lord, Lord Best, at various stages during the passage of the Immigration Bill through your Lordships’ House. The pilot was set up in the West Midlands, which is the second largest conurbation in the UK and quite an ethnically diverse area. It was therefore deemed to be an appropriate setting in which to test out how this would work. On top of that, an independent panel was set up, which of course the noble Lord, Lord Best, co-chairs. The panel includes representatives from the British Property Federation, the Residential Landlords Association, which has been referred to, the National Approved Letting Scheme, the UK Association of Letting Agents, the Association of Residential Letting Agents, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors and the National Housing Federation. It also includes Shelter, Crisis, Universities UK and, crucially, on the element of discrimination, the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

Why, then, was the decision taken to do this—a point which the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, rightly sought clarification on? The answer is that it was in the Conservative Party manifesto. We stood at the election and our manifesto said that we would clamp down on people who are here illegally to stop them being able to work, rent properties, open bank accounts and obtain driving licences. We said that we would do all those things. Therefore, when we were elected by the people to do that, we announced that we would get on and do it. This is not happening across the country, to take the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Lister. We introduced it in the West Midlands and that pilot has now been running for over a year, during which we have been gathering the evidence of how it has been operating and evaluating it. This order will enable it to be rolled out to the rest of England but of course further orders will be required for it to be rolled out into Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

On the timing, I took on board the points that were made by my noble friends Lady Gardiner, Lord Hailsham and Lord Cathcart, among others, who were concerned about the time it takes to get documents. That is why a lot of this information can be checked online: there is an online checking service, which is not a premium service, as we said the previous time we discussed this, but a local-rate number that people can ring up. At the moment, that government service delivers 100% as regards its target time, turning work around in 48 hours. When people obtain references at present when a landlord lets out a property, surely they want to establish whom they are letting out the property to. They require some identification and may require proof of employment, with a reference from the employer or from previous landlords. All of that takes time. This part simply checks that the person who is there is legally entitled to be in the UK, and I would have thought that that would be a standard part of due diligence that should be happening in most cases. Therefore that element is there.

I recognise that we all have a deep concern about discrimination in the housing market. That was one of the reasons why the mystery shopping exercise happened there. That sounds like a trivial thing, but it is an established procedure used by all retailers around the country. We used an external firm to undertake the exercise and half the visits were undertaken by BME couples, who were seeking accommodation. What they identified was, sadly, that there is still discrimination— that we know—but that the discrimination levels experienced in the West Midlands control area or pilot area were similar to those in the other areas being used as a comparator. We have to make sure that landlords are more aware of the duties that they already have under the Equalities Act 2010 and the racial discrimination Act of 1965 to ensure that there is no discrimination.

The discrimination point is a key area. We are determined to go much further on this and I know that the independent panel is keen to do that as well. We are updating the code of practice to ensure that landlords know their duties and obligations to ensure that properties are fairly let to people, irrespective of their background. We have done that with great assistance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which of course is part of that panel.

A number of noble Lords referred to asylum seekers and refugees. The legislation exempts refuges, hostels and student accommodation, and, where there are vulnerable people who may have lost documents and what have you, there are special procedures to ensure that they are protected.

The target of this legislation is two groups of people. The first group is those who have no right to be here and should leave, and therefore should not be occupying premises that should be made available to people who have a legal right to be here. The second group, as the noble Lord, Lord Best, was right to point out, are the unscrupulous landlords who charge extortionate rents for appalling accommodation—I have seen reports on that type of accommodation that people are actually living in. These are the people we have in our sights. All a landlord needs to do is undertake a basic check of the documents and keep a copy of them. They then have a statutory defence that they have complied with the law.

A number of very specific points were raised. Perhaps, if the House will allow me, I can undertake to cover those in communications. We are having ongoing conversations about this: we have had several meetings at the Home Office and other meetings. We are going to come back to this. There are some areas where I think we can get some movement to make sure that there is greater reassurance. However, this particular element relates to legislation from 2014 for which there has been a pilot and a phased introduction. We are confident that the safeguards are in place, but it will continue to be kept under review. Therefore, I commend the commencement order to the House and urge the noble Baroness to reconsider pressing her fatal Motion.