Public Health (Coronavirus) (Protection from Eviction) (England) (No. 2) (Amendment) Regulations 2021

Baroness Grender Excerpts

Monday 19th April 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Grender (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his explanation of the welcome extension until 31 May 2021 of the ban on bailiff enforcement, as described by him in the previous debate on this statutory instrument on 18 March. We recognise the work he has put in, particularly over the past few months, to ensure that this extension was already in place, but if we look over the past year of this pandemic, I think he would agree that to say that this approach has been piecemeal is an understatement. As ever, it is an honour to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Gardner of Parkes, who made the same point.

Last Friday marked the second anniversary of a promise made by this Government to scrap Section 21 no-fault evictions. Gemma Marshall, who has spoken out, with the support of the Renters Reform Coalition, works in a school providing pastoral support. She, her husband and her children have been served with two Section 21s over the past two years and as a result have had to move four times. Her family is now in the middle of their second Section 21 and is facing the serious prospect of homelessness. Her son Jacob is autistic and finds change extremely stressful. I think all noble Lords would agree that the threat of eviction during a global pandemic is extremely stressful anyway, let alone for a nine year-old child.

I hope all noble Lords will support the newly formed Renters Reform Coalition, which includes Generation Rent, Crisis, Shelter, Citizens Advice and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. As my noble friend Lord Shipley pointed out, the historical lack of the safety net of a good supply of social housing has resulted in people relying too often on a private rented sector that is not built to replace the welfare state. Gemma’s case is not an isolated one. Some 700,000 renters have been served with no-fault eviction notices during this pandemic year, despite a government promise to scrap the practice. That estimate is based on polling of a cross-section of private renters in a Survation survey commissioned by Shelter and published last week. Some 8% of them have received a Section 21 notice from their landlord since March 2020—that represents 694,000 private renters across England. A further 32% were worried that they would be asked to move out this year.

While 8% sounds small, the size and growth of the private rented sector over the past 10 years means that even 8% is nearly 700,000 cases—cases like Gemma’s, which I have described: often families who, through no fault of their own, have been served with an eviction notice without reason or explanation.

This SI stops bailiffs, but only at the final stage of an eviction. Your landlord may still serve an eviction notice and you may still have to go to a hearing. From the minute the eviction notice is served there is limited ability for discretion in the legal process. I asked this question last time and I am not sure I quite got an answer to it. Will the Minister undertake to re-examine allowing judges to have discretion to prevent an eviction if rent arrears are due to the Covid pandemic? The Government might argue with the methodology Shelter has used. If so, will they agree to establish a way to identify who is currently losing their home?

Tim Farron, who speaks on Housing issues for the Liberal Democrats in the Commons, asked the Minister, Chris Pincher, whether he had made any assessment of the merits of requiring landlords to register eviction notices at the point of delivery, so that his department could have a more accurate picture. I asked in the previous debate whether the Minister could share with us what evidence he has that landlords are serving notice in only the most egregious of cases. I not sure there was a clear answer to my question and the Minister, Chris Pincher, said there are currently no plans to collect this data.

I hope that the promise to reform Section 21 will soon be delivered. I thank the National Residential Landlords Association for its helpful briefing on this issue. As it points out, the Housing Secretary’s promise that

“no renter who has lost income due to coronavirus will be forced out of their home”

is simply not being met. Indeed, I believe that the recent change to include six months of arrears is a direct contradiction to that promise. The fact that we know that there are 700,000 such renters means that people get evicted all the time without it necessarily reaching the knowledge of the Government via the courts. Along with many other organisations, the NRLA is asking that a financial package be put in place to help tenants to clear arrears—this was described by the noble Lord, Lord Bourne, who is highly knowledgeable on this issue, and the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, who also has long-time experience in this area—or there is Generation Rent’s proposed Covid rent debt fund.

It is particularly important to note that the NRLA is saying that most tenants now in arrears do not qualify for discretionary housing payments. It is vital to remember that the people we are talking about are ones who, Citizens Advice tells us, are tenants who would take seven years to pay off the arrears that they have accrued during this period. I still find shocking the disparity in subsidies to home owners—even more of them were announced today—in comparison to the subsidies necessary, which do not represent a vast sum of money.

So, there have been two broken promises, which have an impact on hundreds of thousands of people like Gemma and Jacob. They deserve better.