Immigration Bill (Second sitting)

Chloe Smith Excerpts

Tuesday 20th October 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Craig Whittaker]

Q 132 So there is no real evidence—

Richard Lambert: That is what I am saying: there is no strong evidence of discrimination, although there is the potential there, and some minor level of concern may emerge in the focus group.

[Chloe Smith]

Q 133 Will the panel give us their assessment of what numbers might be involved in the area of policy that we are talking about? Do you have any assessment in particular of how many prospective tenants might present themselves to your members, or how many bank accounts in the case of Mr Leenders?

Richard Lambert: We can talk about how many households are in the private rented sector—there are about 4.4 million at the moment—and I think there is a turnover rate of about 25% to 30% a year, so we are looking at just over 1 million to 1.25 million new tenancies a year.

[Chloe Smith]

Q 134 Of those, do you have a sense of how many might fall under the provisions of the Bill?

Richard Lambert: None whatsoever.

David Smith: In a sense, they should all be falling under it, because landlords are required to check every new tenant, so one would assume that 1.2 million of them will require checks. How many of those people will then be found to have established the right to rent is perhaps one of the most hotly contested questions before this Committee, I would have thought.

[Chloe Smith]

Q 135 That is exactly what I am driving at. Could you give us your view on it?

David Smith: We have no information, clearly, as to how many unlawful immigrants there are within the private rented sector. The reality, as I think has been established before, is that landlords who are routinely and knowingly renting to illegal immigrants are probably breaking the law in a vast range of other exciting ways and are therefore intentionally well below the radar. Landlords who do not know that they are renting to illegal immigrants do not know that they are renting to illegal immigrants. Therefore, the information is extremely hard to come by.

[Chloe Smith]

Q 136 Just sticking with the two landlords, if I may, before coming to Mr Leenders on the same question, your organisations are membership organisations, clearly, and you know how many members you have. Do you have any sense of how many members you do not have? In other words, how many landlords are under the radar, to use your phrase?

Richard Lambert: That again is difficult to say—for under the radar. I estimate that there are probably about 100,000 landlords in all the landlord associations throughout the country—ours and the many little local landlord associations that exist. So there are probably about 1.4 million landlords who are not in landlord associations. It is then about what you mean by “under the radar”. If you mean the people who are completely illegitimate, who are renting beds in sheds and are probably landlords incidentally, because actually what they are is organised criminals and the housing element just comes in as part of that, they are more interested in prostitution, people trafficking, money laundering and so on, who knows? We could not tell that. What we do know is that there are probably about 1.3 million to 1.4 million people renting out property who are not directly engaged with our organisations or any other organisation. Our concern is always where they get their information from, how they know that what they are doing is the right thing, and how they learn about what is best practice or, indeed, about changes in the law.

David Smith: You should be aware that of landlords not in our organisations a significant number will be using letting agents who, themselves, are perhaps not always perfect either—a significant percentage of them do not fall under any professional body. A goodly percentage of them are aware of their responsibilities and will no doubt learn about them as they go forward. In a sense, there is a force multiplier effect by engaging landlord organisations, which can capture a good percentage of landlords, and by engaging letting agent organisations, which will pick up a lot of landlords who choose not to join a landlord membership body.

[Chloe Smith]

Q 137 Mr Leenders, any reflections?

Eric Leenders: I think we can identify 123 million instant access accounts. If we were to apply the experience from the Immigration Act of roughly 1% of searches being referred to the Home Office, that would potentially lead to a working assumption of about 1 million or 1.2 million searches being referred to the Home Office. That, in itself, surfaces an operational point about the readiness of the Home Office to deal with that volume in the initial wave of searches in the first quarter of the implementation of the Act. That is just one of those technical issues that we would like to work through. We might be able to find mitigants to that. For example, we might be able to strip out those who currently hold UK passports, but that is detail that we can work through in secondary legislation. I would not see that as a primary legislative point at all.

[Sarah Champion]

Q 138 I have two small, mopping-up questions. Mr Leenders, you went through the customer service and administrative burdens that the legislation puts on you, but are you largely in favour of it? Are there any unintended consequences of the legislation that we should be aware of?

Eric Leenders: We do not have a policy position on the Bill, nor did we on the Immigration Act 2014. There are some customer service points that give a little cause for concern. Referring customers with a seven-day service level agreement to the Home Office leaves them, effectively, in limbo for a period, and that customer might, quite justifiably, be entitled to an account. We do not feel that is the best experience, so we would want to work through one or two details like that. We would certainly want to have a period of testing—we are already encouraged by the Treasury giving some consideration to its own pilot exercise—presumably during the formulation of the secondary legislation, such that the customer impacts are minimised so far as possible.