Renters’ Rights Bill

Debate between David Simmonds and Daisy Cooper

Tuesday 14th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)]

May I echo the Minister’s comments, and extend my thanks to him and his team, the other Members who served on the Committee, and the many witnesses who came in to share their views? It is clear that a lot of the discussion has been on the real-world impact that the legislation will have, rather than on political points, and in that spirit, I will set out my responses, and the rationale behind a number of the amendments that we have tabled, which will be the subject of debate and votes this afternoon.

Clearly, legislation is about striking the right balance. This afternoon, we will recognise—as we have done in our contributions to debate on this issue—the impact that the Bill will have on tenants, landlords and the stakeholders whom our amendments seek to protect. I highlight in particular the impact on students; on financially vulnerable tenants, such as those with low credit scores; on tenants who have pets; on small landlords, who are themselves vulnerable to financial shocks; and of course on other groups, such as agricultural workers and those with work-related accommodation, including NHS workers, military families and school staff, all of whom were mentioned in Committee and will, I am sure, be covered again later. All our amendments have sought to address practical issues, such as ensuring that when work is required on a property and a tenant is reluctant to allow the landlord in to carry out that work for whatever reason, there is sufficient freedom and flexibility in the legislation to ensure that the work can take place.

[Daisy Cooper (St Albans) (LD)]

The shadow Minister talks about situations in which tenants must leave a property. A constituent of mine had a terrible ordeal. She moved into a new rental property, but after three months it became uninhabitable, and she spent a further 11 weeks going in and out of eight Airbnbs. She was left thousands of pounds out of pocket because the landlord’s insurance covered his loss of rent but did not cover the accommodation costs that she incurred as a tenant. Will the shadow Minister support my new clause 22, which would require landlords to hold appropriate insurance for the purposes of paying any costs related to alternative accommodation in such situations?

[David Simmonds]

There are a number of ways to address that issue. The Minister has talked compensation, and we have tabled amendments on insurance, but clearly there needs to be an effective dispute resolution mechanism in place, so that such situations can be resolved when they arise. We were focused in particular on ensuring that there is sufficient flexibility when, for example, work must be carried out to improve energy efficiency or to address health and safety concerns such as mould, and a tenant needs to leave because the work will render the property uninhabitable.

Although there have been substantial areas of agreement on the Bill, much of which takes forward work that started under the previous Government in their Renters (Reform) Bill, we have concerns that it creates significant new problems for the availability and affordability of accommodation in the private rented sector. That sector, we must not forget, enjoys the highest tenant satisfaction of any private tenure: 82% of private renters say that they are satisfied with their accommodation.

The backdrop is challenging, and has become a lot more so recently. The Chancellor’s Budget has set inflation rising, and borrowing costs are soaring. Markets are responding to the chaos in No. 11, and that is causing a great deal of uncertainty for tenants and landlords alike. Her decisions are stoking inflation, and that is pushing up rent and housing costs of all kinds. The black hole in local government funding, which was unveiled just before Christmas, means that councils facing the twin existential threats of wholesale reorganisation and growing funding shortfalls lack certainty from the Government about the funding to deliver this enormous increase in workload.

Fire Safety Bill (First sitting)

Debate between David Simmonds and Daisy Cooper

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 25th June 2020 Public Bill Committees

[David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)]

Q Apologies to the witnesses for dancing around behind you in this way. Picking up on the point about qualified persons and the inspection process, one issue that has been raised a good deal in my experience as a local authority councillor is how those inspections can be undertaken to satisfy the responsible person that the fire risk is being appropriately managed.

For example, if you have leaseholders in a block of flats owned by a local authority that is responsible, what the leaseholder does within the property that may create risk to others may not be something to which the local authority can readily gain access. I am interested in this point about how the different pieces of legislation interact. Do you have a view on how we might collectively move towards a resolution of that problem?

Dan Daly: We talked earlier about how the clarifications in this Bill are really useful in terms of ironing out some of the overlaps we have seen that have caused us difficulties before, both in holding people to account, and in people’s understanding of their duties.

This is a bit of legislation that underpins a self-regulatory regime, and we must ensure that at the end of this we have something that makes it very clear to those people what their responsibilities are. It must also help residents and leaseholders to understand what they can rightly expect from the people with day-to-day responsibility for the safety of their buildings. That is the sort of thing that we are working closely with Home Office colleagues on. The Bill has been presented as it is today, but I know we have taken some assurances in the background that we will work together on providing secondary legislation and guidance to pick up those areas where we might still seek further clarification, to ensure that it is absolutely clear to those people who it most directly affects day to day.

[Daisy Cooper (St Albans) (LD)]

Q I have two interlinked issues. One is about the number of assessors needed; we have received some evidence that suggests there are around 400 third-party registered fire risk assessors and potentially around 400 APQC independent assessors, but there is nobody putting a number on the assessors that might be needed.

The first question is whether you have any estimates, because we know roughly where we are at the moment and where we need to get to. I was pleased to hear you say that you would welcome a register of assessors, but the interlinked issue is how we train those people. We have had differing evidence. Some suggests there should be a fast-track training, or different levels of assessment, and other evidence suggests that we should not have fast-track training because it can lead to problems. I would welcome your views on both questions: how many people do we need overall, and does there need to be comprehensive training for everybody, or would you take a differentiated view?

Dan Daly: I do not think I can give you a number on how many we need overall, because there is a bit of work to be done before that. This speaks back to the risk-based approach. If we look at the work we are doing with the building safety regulator and the ideas going forward about the level of competency to interact with buildings of different complexity and risk, we could apply a similar staged approach to how we look at the buildings to which the legislation needs to be applied. Picking up those most at risk will allow time for training to come through, and development of people to support the wider piece of work, while ensuring that the effort is focused on the buildings that we would see as highest risk.

There is further work that we need to do as a service overall on understanding what risk looks like. We have a historical risk matrix that informs the regularity with which we inspect buildings; that was based on good evidence at the time, but we have a richer understanding of risk now. We understand vulnerabilities, behaviours and lifestyles that have an equal impact on the likelihood of fire, and therefore the settings that those people may be living in. It helps us understand risk in a totally different way—understanding that this is not just our opportunity to fix high-rise living but is about the wider built environment. It is an opportunity to understand risk in a much more holistic way and ensure we are applying more rigorous inspections to those higher-risk premises, and an appropriate level of inspection to those lower down the risk register, so to speak.