Social Housing (Regulation) Bill [HL]

Baroness Wilcox of Newport Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 27th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome the noble Viscount, Lord Camrose, and look forward to hearing his maiden speech shortly.

Before that, Labour welcomes the Social Housing (Regulation) Bill, which introduces long-overdue changes to the social housing regulation regime, five years on from the Grenfell Tower tragedy. However, we regret that what is essentially narrow and largely uncontroversial legislation has taken so long to materialise. Fire safety concerns raised by Grenfell residents had been ignored by their landlord. Residents complained of not being heard and of being treated with indifference. Therefore, we call from this side of the Chamber for higher standards for social tenants. We are extremely disappointed that the Bill does not go far enough in putting tenants at the heart of regulation and governance. The Grenfell tragedy shows that tenants can never again have so little power over their homes.

However, we must set the context in arriving at a judgment on the Bill. There are many social landlords who routinely fall well short on repairs and maintenance and could do far better. However, social landlords do not operate in a vacuum. Years of funding cuts to local authority budgets, as well as the four years during which a Conservative Government imposed a 1% social rent cut on them, have inevitably taken their toll, with the pandemic adding to the problems of housing revenue accounts.

Another major factor is the lack of affordable social housing, which has been exacerbated during 12 years of Tory rule. Successive Governments have not only singularly failed to build the social homes we need over that period but have overseen their loss on an unprecedented scale; 134,483 social homes for rent were either sold or demolished without direct replacement between 2010 and 2021. That is an average net loss of over 12,000 desperately needed, genuinely affordable homes a year.

Unfortunately, the Government’s headline proposals of rating your landlord and allowing a 250-person panel to meet three times a year with Ministers are not the powers residents need. The panel will exist only to scrutinise the measures being proposed in the legislation and will not be able to consider other pertinent issues, such as waiting lists, stigma, rent increases, allocation and housing supply. We need the Government instead to bring forward proper proposals to give tenants more power to take action in both social and private rented sectors. They should look towards the work of the last Labour Government, who introduced the decent homes standard, making available £22 billion of public investment in decent homes and improving the housing conditions of over 1.4 million council homes. By 2009, 86% of all council and housing association homes were brought up to a decent standard.

I reiterate that we support many of the measures in the Bill. However, given the scale of the problem that we know exists in regulating social housing, we want the Government to go further in key respects so that standards in social housing can markedly and rapidly improve and tenants’ complaints can be dealt with quickly and efficiently.

We have concerns about the ability of the Regulator of Social Housing to respond in practice to the volume of individual tenant complaints it is likely to receive and whether it will be inadequately resourced to perform its new role vis-à-vis inspections. We will therefore seek to amend the Bill to allow the regulator to retain the proceeds of any fines levied to help fund its work. We want to see the regulator given more teeth than the Bill currently proposes. We will seek to give it a range of wider powers, including the ability to order compensation for tenants.

Even with an enhanced role, armed with greater powers to regulate consumer standards in social housing, the regulator cannot be the sole redress for tenants. We will seek to have the Bill do more for tenants to enforce repairs themselves. We believe it does not go far enough on a national voice for tenants. At a minimum, the work of the residents’ panel could be shaped more directly by tenants themselves. We will seek to ensure that it can be—for example, by enabling its agenda and terms to be developed via tenant input.

An advisory panel with tenants represented on it will be established by the Bill, but to consider only

“information and advice to the regulator about, or on matters connected with, the regulator’s functions”.

This is not a new idea. In the aftermath of Grenfell, the Government and tenants drew up plans to set up A Voice for Tenants, a national tenant group to work with government on issues affecting those in social housing. To the frustration of tenant bodies involved, it never progressed.

Another possible issue is that the Regulator of Social Housing relies on registered providers to let their tenants know of ways to complain, which means that the worst providers are likely to be the ones to inform their tenants of their rights, and therefore potentially reduce complaints. The White Paper committed to routine inspections only for the largest registered providers—those of more than 1,000 homes—every four years.

Beyond this, there is nothing in the Bill on how tenant voice and engagement will work in practice at the local level. It would allow, but not force, the regulator to set standards relating to the information landlords provide to tenants. Examples are mentioned in the draft regulations.

Safety is the greatest of concerns. The Bill would add generic safety to the regulator’s fundamental objectives. This means that the regulator can now set a standard on safety and enforce against it. The Bill further introduces a new requirement for social landlords to appoint a named individual responsible for health and safety. A separate regulator, the Health and Safety Executive, will also regulate all buildings’ safety when the new regime comes into force.

Currently, fines for non-compliance are capped at £5,000. The Bill proposes giving the regulator the power to issue unlimited fines. Larger fines could be a crucial deterrent to bad practice, enforcing the law against poorly performing landlords and disincentivising the poor treatment of tenants, but questions remain about what the fines would mean in practice, particularly in terms of housing associations passing the cost back to tenants.

The Bill also proposes enabling the regulator to enter and inspect properties with only 48 hours’ notice, down from 28 days, which is a significant change. However, short notice inspections need to be carefully thought through. Finally, the Bill proposes enabling the regulator to make emergency repairs where there is a serious risk. The White Paper stated that the Government were

“determined to increase the supply of new and beautiful social homes”,

yet the Bill is silent on the issues of supply.

I leave my final comments to echo those of David Renard, the Conservative leader of Swindon Borough Council and housing spokesperson for the Local Government Association:

“As well as improving existing homes, the social housing supply is not sufficient to meeting the current housing demand, which is why we want to see long-term plans to give councils powers to build 100,000 high-quality, climate-friendly social homes a year, including reform of the Right to Buy scheme, which has made it difficult for councils to build replacement homes at the rate at which they are sold.”

Social Housing (Regulation) Bill [HL]

Baroness Wilcox of Newport Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 6th September 2022 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Wilcox of Newport]

3: Clause 1, page 1, line 10, at end insert—
“(d) after paragraph (d) insert—“(e) to make recommendations to the Secretary of State in relation to compensation for tenants of social housing.””Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would allow the regulator to make recommendations about compensation for tenants.

[Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)]

My Lords, I draw the Committee’s attention to my interest in the register as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. This group of amendments relates to monitoring and enforcement of what will become this Act, with three of the four amendments tabled by the Labour Front Bench.

Amendment 3, in the name of my noble friend Lady Hayman of Ullock, would allow the regulator to make recommendations about compensation for tenants. I would like to ask the Minister about government guidance on compensation and how the Government view the future relationship between the regulator and compensation working in practice.

Amendment 28, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, relates to the powers for the regulator to arrange surveys of the condition of social housing properties. The amendment notes that tenants must be given only 24 hours’ notice, whereas providers are given 48 hours’ notice. This amendment rightly draws attention to the need for social housing tenants to feel safe and secure in their homes—the basis of that hierarchy of needs that so many of us learned about at university. It seems completely unnecessary that they are given such short notice, so, again, I ask the Minister about the discrepancies in this area.

Amendment 32, in the name of my noble friend Lady Hayman of Ullock, would mean that emergency remedial action “must” take place, rather than “may”, if those conditions are met. Words are powerful things, and the implications behind “must” and “may” are equally important. The intention is to highlight the importance of emergency action to fix problems in social housing and to raise areas of concern about poor housing conditions. Emergency remedial action removes the risk of serious harm. As I know only too well, a local authority has an immediate right of access if it decides to take emergency action. If this happens, the tenant and landlord are served with a notice, and the local authority can claim back the cost of any work from the landlord. Unfortunately, unscrupulous landlords have used such actions to evict tenants, as those with limited security of tenure can be evicted fairly easily. Some landlords may choose to evict a tenant following a complaint from that tenant about the condition of the property, rather than carrying out the necessary work. This amendment would go some way to further support the rights of tenants to live in decent homes.

Amendment 48, also in the name of my noble friend Lady Hayman of Ullock, would mean that the Secretary of State must publish an annual statement to include the number of successful and unsuccessful appeals in any given year.

This amendment seeks more information about the appeal procedure and urges the Government to be transparent about its operation. I beg to move.

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, I want to speak to Amendment 28 in my name. Clause 22(3) sets out the powers to carry out a survey of a property without a warrant. The authorised person, who would be named by the regulator, is given these powers by this clause, as long as the registered provider has been given 48 hours’ notice. This seems fair enough to me. By the same clause, the tenant is given only 24 hours’ notice. The reason for the difference in the timings of the statutory notice is not clear to me. The purpose of Amendment 28 is to probe the thinking behind this difference. In lieu of any explanation, I propose that the notice period for both provider and tenant should be 48 hours.

The changes made by Clause 22(3) move the responsibility for giving notice to enter a property from the registered provider to the authorised person. Therefore, there is no practical reason—as there was originally in the Housing Act—for the difference in the notice period. This is especially true as, to quote from the Bill, the notice can be fixed to a

“conspicuous part of the premises.”

When the Minister responds, will she also help me by explaining the addition to the Housing and Regeneration Act 2008 of new Section 218B? I apologise; I noticed this only when I was reading the Bill more carefully yesterday. The tenant is provided with a copy of the performance improvement plan—which is drawn up where a registered provider has failed to reach a statutory standard for properties under their responsibility —only if they make a “written request” for one. This seems unreasonable and not to fulfil the other parts of the Bill which are for greater transparency. In my view, the registered provider or the regulator should have a duty to inform the tenants affected by the performance improvement plan as a matter of course. Tenants who are directly impacted by poor quality of provision will want to be in a position to ensure that the plan is fulfilled. They are best placed to call the registered provider to account. I apologise for raising this issue at the last minute in the debate. If the Minister cannot give me a reply, I should be happy to receive a written response.

The amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, make excellent sense and we support them. I beg to move my amendment.

--- Later in debate ---

On the basis of the assurances provided for each amendment, I ask the noble Baronesses kindly not to move their amendments.

[Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)]

My Lords, I am glad to hear that the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, which seems both eminently sensible and fair, will be taken away by the Minister for further discussion—a very positive outcome—and that the Minister agrees that these are very important issues and that registered providers of social housing should always seek to remediate properties. Again, I thank the Minister for reminding us of the facts surrounding compensation. On emergency repairs, the regulator can step in for appropriate emergency action. I am glad that this new tool exists.

Clearly, I am disappointed that the Minister cannot accept the change of emphasis from “may” to “must”, but I am glad she recognises the importance of the appeal mechanism and I accept the notion of duality, which she explained clearly. On that basis, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 3 withdrawn.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, first, I thank the Minister for the letter she sent prior to the Committee today, explaining the reasons for the 42 government amendments that were tabled during the Recess and which she has had to explain today. I appreciate that they are technical amendments, but I find it a bit concerning that, time and again, government Bills are published without the minutiae of the implications having been checked. The consequence is that we have myriad alterations today. However, I thank the Minister for going through them in detail—it is clearly not her fault that she has had to do so. With that, I accept what she has said.

[Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)]

The government amendments are mainly of a technical nature, and Her Majesty’s Opposition broadly support their introduction. However, some of them introduce slightly more significant changes, and it is right that the Committee should consider these in more detail. Could the Minister explain the purpose of the amendments which repeal Sections 198A and 198B, and further confirm what consultation, if any, has taken place on these changes?

I also ask the Minister for further information on the operation of Amendment 49, and consequential amendments, which will mean that the Housing Ombudsman monitors its own compliance with the code of practice. In particular, can she explain the safeguards to prevent it marking its own homework—a device I rarely used with my own pupils?