Private Rented Sector
Debate between Clive Betts and Graham P Jones
Mr Betts
We did, but I will come on to rents later, if I may, because that is a separate issue. We did refer to that matter, but the main point of our report concentrated on standards, which is what I am trying to address now.
As we all know, the reality is that some of the worst standards in housing are in the private rented sector. That does not mean that every such property is bad and we should not give all private landlords a bad name, but as well as some of the worst properties, the sector has some of the most vulnerable occupiers, and that juxtaposition should really worry us. Some landlords simply want to sit and do nothing, while others blatantly break the law and think that they can get away with it, and we particularly want to bear down on them. There was general agreement about how to bear down on the really bad landlords without putting extra burdens on the good ones, and about how, at a time of financial constraint for local authorities, to enable them to take action against such private landlords and ensure that they can use their resources and recover their costs.
Graham Jones (Hyndburn) (Lab)
I would add long-distance landlords to the list of problem landlords. I had a letter from a lady in west Sussex complaining about the condition of properties and various other things in the area of Church in Accrington. Many landlords in that area do not live there and have never visited it, and their properties are not in a particularly good condition. That is not necessarily for nasty or unpleasant reasons, but because landlords generally live too far away, and because they are amateur about making such an investment, rather than professional in housing management. Will my hon. Friend add long-distance landlords to his list?
Mr Betts
I do not want to say that every landlord who lives at a distance is a bad one—that would be wrong—but living further away can clearly make it more difficult for tenants to contact landlords and get instant responses about problems, particularly if landlords do not use a reputable agent to help them manage the property on the spot. We will come on to agents a little later. The issue is about local authorities having the powers to act against not merely individual properties, but areas with collections of properties in poor condition, which is probably the sort of area to which my hon. Friend refers.
Graham Jones
I think that my neighbour, the hon. Member for Rossendale and Darwen (Jake Berry), was referring to the housing health and safety rating system and its implementation by local authorities in respect of category 1 and category 2 hazards. Does my hon. Friend agree that if significant cuts are made to local government, it does not help environmental and housing enforcement teams in local authorities to enforce the housing standards, even if they have a statutory ability to do so?
Mr Betts
The Committee received evidence of concerns in some local authorities that the squeeze on their resources was affecting their abilities in respect of the private rented sector. We tried to look at how authorities could deal with the challenges that they face most effectively with the resources that they have. One thing that we looked at was licensing.
On balance, the Committee did not come down in favour of a national licensing scheme. That is essentially because, over a number of reports, we have tended to be localist and to believe that local authorities should be allowed to make such choices for themselves. We went to Leeds, which has a very good accreditation scheme, under which there is good training and advice for landlords, which the landlords really appreciate. However, we were told by landlords and tenants that the problem is that it is the good landlords that join such schemes. They said, “It’s those landlords down the road you want to get hold of and they’re not going to volunteer.”
The selective licensing approach tends to be cumbersome, time-consuming and bureaucratic, and the criteria are very restricted. The Committee therefore asked whether we could relax the criteria and make them more flexible so that local authorities could engage in selective licensing if they wanted to. We also asked whether, in a more general sense, a local authority could have an accreditation scheme that was mandatory, so that it would include all landlords, including those who do not want to join.
Unfortunately, on both issues, the Government’s response was not as helpful as we would have liked. They said no to mandatory accreditation schemes and no to a review of the flexibility of selective licensing. The Government’s recent consultation document does include changes to selective licensing, but they are talking about tightening the criteria, rather than making them more flexible. That seems to be a retrograde step. All our evidence suggested that that was too cumbersome and does not work, and authorities that want to make it work find it difficult to make it happen.
We are apparently consulting on a landlord-specific, rather than property-specific, licensing or accreditation scheme, which the consultation document refers to as a suggestion from the Communities and Local Government Committee, although it was not. It has clearly come from somewhere, however, and it may not be unwelcome if it gives local authorities another set of powers and another way to deal with rogue landlords who are causing problems. If those landlords who persistently cause problems with individual properties have to become part of a mandatory registration scheme, that could be perhaps not a complete response to the Committee’s request, but at least a helpful step in the right direction, as we suggested.
Mr Betts
Yes, and the Government are consulting on retaliatory evictions as part of their consultation document, which is to be welcomed. One other issue that the Committee report dealt with that we must consider is how to encourage longer term tenancies. Families in particular want greater security. They may not want to be in the private rented sector, but if they are there and have a property they like, they probably want to be there for five years rather than six months. Considering how we can change the culture—that is what it is, as much as anything else—to get landlords and tenants to understand that there are possibilities within the framework of the existing assured shorthold tenancy for a tenancy longer than six months or a year, is a step forward. We must also consider how to get letting agents to recognise that they should be advising on that—letting agents often have a vested interest in regular reviews of tenants and tenancies because they make a profit and receive a fee every time they do it.
We must also deal with the fact that many lenders prevent landlords from having a tenancy of more than a year. Nationwide is now, I think, prepared to accept a three-year tenancy, which is a good step forward, and the Government are trying to bring lenders together to try to make that change happen. I entirely accept the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North about retaliatory evictions when tenants complain. However, if landlords are to accept a tenancy period of three or even five years, they must have a way of getting the tenant out, rather than waiting until the end of the tenancy period. Shelter has accepted this and the Government have established a working party on it. That is being looked at as a quid pro quo. Shelter accepts that; it is not only landlords associations that have been pressing for it.
Graham Jones
My hon. Friend made the point that landlord licensing is seen as a panacea, and the sound point that licensing applies to landlords and not properties. It is thought that that panacea will deal with rogue landlords, but, as my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton (Mr Love) has suggested, there is the question of property and stock conditions in both high and low-demand areas. Is there not a case for extending landlord licensing to include stock condition and other criteria to deal with those problems?
Mr Betts
The Committee called for more flexibility in licensing—perhaps that covers my hon. Friend’s point.
The Committee recognises the need for more powers and action in one or two other areas to improve standards. We call for the possibility of fixed penalty notices, so that local authorities can deal with less serious offences at relatively low cost. The Government are consulting on the range of measures that should be available. We also say that, when a landlord lets a property in an unfit condition and is prosecuted, it should be possible to claw back any housing benefit paid or any rent paid by an individual. We are pleased that the Government are consulting on that proposal.
One additional matter that the Committee did not get into—we might have a look at it in the autumn—is what happens when landlords are taken to court. That goes back to the fact that authorities are strapped for cash, as many are, and have limited resources. If a landlord is found guilty, the court should award the authority the full cost of the action. Sheffield, my local authority, advised me the other day that it has brought five successful prosecutions of landlords in recent months. On each occasion, it has not been given its costs back—it got back roughly 50% of its costs in total. That is not acceptable. We ought to put pressure on the courts—perhaps the Minister’s colleagues in the Ministry of Justice could do this—to recognise that, when effective action costs money and the landlord is found to be responsible for and guilty of an offence, the costs should be returned to the authorities.
Finally, there are two other points. On letting agents—
Local Government Finance Bill
Debate between Clive Betts and Graham P Jones(12 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Mr Betts
It is very nice of the Minister to say so, so I will smile in return. However, even he could not rise now and say that this is a simplified system. It is a new system—it is a radical departure—but it is certainly no less complicated than what went before it; rather, it is complicated in a different way.
Let us talk about transparency. By that I mean the possibility that when a development is put forward in part of a local authority area, it is possible to say to residents, “If that development is granted, these will be the financial consequences.” There is no chance of that happening with this piece of legislation. It will be very difficult for local authority treasurers to explain to their members collectively what the implications of the new legislation are, let alone for a local councillor to tell residents looking at a planning application, “These are the financial consequences of accepting this proposal.”
I have no problem with the principle behind the Bill; indeed, I think there is a shared principle across the Committee. We all realise that there must be more incentives in the system to reward local authorities for encouraging and promoting growth in their areas. There is no problem with that principle at all. The difficulty, which is reflected in the responses to the consultation on the legislation that we are considering today, is that the authorities with a relatively high business rate base, or the potential to develop one and grow their business rate relatively easily, are obviously all arguing for lower tariffs and top-ups, whereas those that have lower business rate bases and more difficulty in attracting growth to their areas, perhaps including those with the greatest need, are arguing for more top-ups and tariffs.
As I said on Second Reading, the Government have a fundamental problem. Because of the effective removal of Government grant to local authorities from 2013-14, they are now trying to use the business rate to do two potentially contradictory things. They are trying to use the business rate as a mechanism to encourage growth and development, rewarding authorities by allowing them to keep the business rates that are raised from development and growth, but they are also trying to use it as a method of redistribution to help authorities that cannot achieve development and growth easily, and that have problems of deprivation. The Government are trying to do two things with one tax, which is a problem. That is why we have such a complicated arrangement.
If there was a separate element of Government grant that could be used for redistribution and if authorities were then allowed to keep their business rates, separately—as was the case with the old system, which we have just discussed with the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman)—that would be relatively easy. There would be a business rate that was an incentive and a Government grant for redistribution. The fact is that we do not have the second of those; complications thus arise.
Some of us can remember the GREAs—the grant related expenditure assessments—the SSAs or standard spending assessments and other complicated arrangements like regression analysis that used to be done on all these matters. On every consultation, local authorities in various parts of the country would have different views about the allocation of resources and the finance system—of course they did, and the same applies on this occasion. What the Secretary of State and this Government have managed to do this time, however, is to unite the whole of local government on one fundamental issue—a feat that I do not think has been achieved before by any Government or any Secretary of State in relation to local authority finance.
Every local authority association and every local authority in the country has united against the principle of set-aside. They all view this as central Government putting their hands into the local authority pot and taking money out of it for themselves. When we used to debate local government finance, as we still do, most people rightly assumed that it was a debate about finance for local government. Now the debate is going to be about finance from local government, as local government will be contributing to national Government and the national Treasury. We will no longer talk about a business rate that is collected locally and distributed nationally, but a business rate that is collected locally and spent nationally. That does not strike me as a terribly localist move.
The Government have created a fundamental problem for themselves with set-aside. One can see the Secretary of State sat in his office, snaffling local government resources and getting into the Chancellor’s good books by passing those resources over and saying, “Look, I’ve done it again, Chancellor. I’m the good guy in all this; I’m giving you lots more money to spend.” Perhaps it is more like good cop, bad cop. We generally see the Secretary of State coming along to join the Minister for these debates, with the Secretary of State doing the broad sweep and the Minister knowing the detail. Perhaps they will go along to the Local Government Association in future when the pantomime season is in bloom. The Minister will go along as the wicked uncle, describing how much the set-aside is going to be worth in that year and how much is going to be taken away, while the Secretary of State will come along as the fairy godmother to say, “Look at all the goodies I’m going to give you back when I spend the set-aside. The problem is that when I wave my magic wand, what you get might not be what you thought you were going to get, because the money is going to be spent on things for which you would previously have had a grant.” This is the delusion being created.
The reaction on the part of local government is obvious. It says, “You are asking us to accept 28% cuts to Government funding over a four-year period and to cut our fundamental services.” Despite what the Minister said to the Select Committee today, there is not a local authority in the country that is not having to cut social services and social care. That is what is happening. At the same time as local authorities are being asked to make profound cuts to front-line services—it is happening to authorities of all persuasions up and down the country—the Government are saying, “By the way, we are now going to take away from local government resources that could be spent on local services, by means of the set-aside.”
All this explains why I tabled the amendments. Amendment 44, for example, is an attempt to make the point that something must be wrong when a Government say that they are going to take the set-aside away—irrespective of the real needs of local authorities, which they are clearly unable to meet in the current financial situation.
Graham Jones
On the same argument, would my hon. Friend add to that the housing benefit and council tax cuts, which are on top of the 28% and have a disproportionate effect on deprived areas? Does this not mean that we are talking about cuts of 28% plus—and they are growing rapidly?
Mr Betts
My hon. Friend is absolutely right that we should look at the totality of the effects of the cuts on local authority budgets. Before the Secretary of State takes this set-aside from local authorities, he should look at what is happening to social care and with council tax increases, which authorities will have to impose after the freeze or deferment comes to an end. He should look at what is happening to concessionary travel for young people, which gives them their independence and mobility, and to care for the elderly and to road safety schemes, which cannot now go ahead. He should look at what is happening to proper protection for private sector tenants from rogue landlords, which authorities will probably not be able to fund, or at the diminishing possibility of providing weekly bin collections across the country—something close to the Secretary of State’s heart. Before looking at set-aside, surely the Secretary of State ought to consider how far local authorities have been able to meet such needs.
Mr Betts
I am not sure, because how the set-aside ends up being used is fundamental. Will it simply go to the Treasury, and we never see it again? Alternatively, will Department for Communities and Local Government or other Ministers say, “We used to fund certain council services, and now we will use set-aside for that.” It will save central Government money. A classic example is the requirement on local authorities to fund 10% of the cost of council tax benefits in the first year—that will almost certainly rise if unemployment rises. What will stop Ministers saying in future, “We have already established 10%, so next year it will be 20%, 30% or 40%”? That will bring no benefit in council services or to local taxpayers or councils; it is just a saving to the Treasury. From a Minister’s point of view, however, it is a neat way of linking two parts of the Bill together.
Graham Jones
Another Treasury or DCLG idea could be to use the set-aside to pay for wasteful weekly bin collections.
Mr Betts
It could be; we are not sure where that funding is coming from. In future, a whole variety of things, such as police grant, could be paid for out of set-aside. Things that Government would have paid for through another source could be paid for out of set-aside, saving the Treasury money. We do not know, because the Bill does not contain the detail. All that we can say is that there will be no power at local level, or among local government collectively, to decide such things. Will there be any power in the Chamber to decide such things, or will it all be up to Ministers?