Tenancies (Reform) Bill

David Heath Excerpts

Friday 28th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Teather]

That is a perfectly fair point. Good landlords who make the necessary repairs get very frustrated when rogue landlords who treat their tenants extremely badly undercut them on rent.

Before talking about the context of the Bill, I want to thank the many colleagues on both sides of the House who have sponsored the Bill, spoken in favour of it and lobbied the Government to ask them to support it. I also thank Opposition Front Benchers for their engagement on the issue. Getting the Bill on to the statute book will require Members with radically different views to support it in the Lobby. I am very grateful for the engagement I have had from many colleagues already. I hope that they will support the Bill today in the Lobby and at all subsequent stages.

[Mr David Heath (Somerton and Frome) (LD)]

My hon. Friend is right that Members with very different views will support the Bill, but is not what unites them the fact that this is about preventing those who are strong—economically strong in this case—from bullying those who are weak? That is what Parliament is about, whichever party we belong to: protecting people against bullies.

[Sarah Teather]

The problem with retaliatory eviction at the moment is that the people who are most likely to fall victim to it are those who have the least agency in being able to help themselves. That relates to my next point, which is on the extent of the problem—how wide it is and who appears to be affected by it.

YouGov conducted a survey on behalf of Shelter and British Gas, surveying 4,500 private renters. It found that one in every 50 tenants had been a victim of retaliatory eviction, having been evicted or served with an eviction notice in the past year because they had complained to their landlord or local council about a problem in their home. With a very large private rented sector across the country, Shelter estimated by extrapolating those figures that 213,000 renters experienced that problem last year. That is a significant number of people, and the problem appears to be much worse for some groups living in areas where housing demand is very high. In London, for example, three in 20 renters surveyed reported being a victim of revenge eviction, and nearly one in five black and minority ethnic families renting in the capital said that they had been affected. Those numbers, particularly in London, explain why we have had support from the Mayor of London for this campaign.

We should be careful of assuming that the problem affects only London. The Citizens Advice report that I mentioned highlights the knock-on effect that the practice of revenge eviction has on renters. The report opens with the story of a woman from Merseyside who had been living alone in her private rented flat for 13 years and who suffered from Crohn’s disease. She sought advice from her local citizens advice bureau because the property was damp and the windows did not close. The landlord had recently replaced the gas fire with a two-bar electric fire that was expensive to run and did not sufficiently heat the property anyway. As the woman was receiving benefits, it was becoming increasingly hard for her to survive.

After they were approached for help, the local CAB advisers were able to secure a grant from the Warm Front scheme for gas central heating. It would not cost the landlord anything, so initially he seemed to be happy for it to be installed. However, on the day that the workmen came to survey the site, they decided they could not do the work because the gas meter was located in the flat on the ground floor, whereas the woman lived on the third floor. This could cause a massive safety hazard because if there had been a leak, she would have had to travel down two flights of stairs and try to gain access to a neighbour’s home to switch off her gas supply. The landlord was told that he would need to pay £800 to have the meter relocated, which he was obliged to do to comply with his duties under the health and safety regulations. However, he refused.

The CAB advisers told the woman that she could take action to force the landlord to deal with the issues, but they also had to tell her that if she did, the landlord would be free to use a no-fault section 21 notice in retaliation, giving the woman two months’ notice to leave her home. Despite all the difficulties that she was living with, she decided not to go ahead, as the landlord had been known previously to evict people who had asked for problems to be fixed. As a result, the woman had to continue to live in conditions that were detrimental to her health.

The fear of revenge eviction is just as real as the incidence of it, and it has a chilling effect on the sector, on the powers that environmental health officers feel they can use, and on the relationship between landlords and tenants. It stops people being able to enjoy their right to live in a decent property. It is also a real problem for local authorities, which are not just frightened of the impact on the tenant if they take action, but well aware that if they do take action and the tenant is evicted, they are likely to end up with an extra homeless person on their books, placing additional burdens on councils to rehouse them. It is no wonder that many councils appear reluctant to use all the enforcement powers available to them.

Because of those issues, the Bill has received widespread support. I mentioned Shelter, Citizens Advice and Generation Rent. Further supporters are the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, the Association of Tenancy Relations Officers, the Electrical Safety Council, the National Union of Students, PricedOut, the Tenants Voice, the Chartered Institute of Housing, the Mayor of London, the Local Government Association and the Local Government Information Unit. Supporters also include many organisations that one would not expect to be on the side of tenants. Nationwide, for example, which is one of the largest providers of mortgages, supports the Bill because it believes that it will have a good effect on those who are providing rented accommodation.

As I said, most landlords want to treat their tenants with respect and with decency. They take pride in doing repairs promptly, and they want to keep good tenants in their property paying rent. In drafting these protections, I have been very mindful of making sure that we can intervene to prevent unfair evictions but do nothing to dissuade law-abiding landlords from operating or to place undue burdens on those who are behaving well.

During the drafting of the Bill, I was extremely grateful to the many landlords’ associations and individual landlords who contacted me and to those who engaged with consultations held by the Department for Communities and Local Government. Comments made during that process fed into the version of the Bill that is now before us. In drafting it, great care was taken to make sure that it impacts only on landlords who are not fulfilling their legal obligations. It should not impact at all on the work of the vast majority who want to provide good-quality, safe homes for their tenants.

In short, the Bill seeks to provide tenants with protection from retaliatory eviction by limiting landlords’ ability to issue a section 21 notice. Clause 1 would prevent a landlord from issuing section 21 notices on a tenant within six months of the serving of a notice by a local authority in response to a serious problem in the property. The types of notice that would trigger this restriction include improvement notices, hazard awareness notices, and notices of emergency remedial action under the Housing Act 2004.

The clause would make a section 21 notice invalid if, before the notice was served, the tenant had made a complaint in writing to the landlord, the landlord’s agent or the local authority about the property, and after the section 21 notice had been issued the local authority had inspected the property, found the problem indeed to be serious, and served a notice on the property. I want to stress that the complaint must have been made prior to the section 21 notice being issued. This is not a charter for people to make spurious complaints and frustrate the process right at the end of eviction. They will need to have made the complaint already. This is about tackling retaliatory eviction.