Immigration Bill

Earl Cathcart Excerpts

Tuesday 15th March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Earl Cathcart (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Bates for tabling his government amendments. In my mind, it certainly makes the situation better, but maybe not perfect. I understand that the Government wish to tackle the rogue landlords who deliberately flout the law by knowingly taking in illegals as tenants. However, the Bill, as written, uses a sledgehammer to crack a nut by criminalising all landlords, even if they have done everything reasonably possible to confirm the status of a tenant and are actively seeking to evict a tenant they have been told does not have the right to rent.

I would like to explore how the government amendments would work in practice. I am happy to say that in my 30-odd years of being a landlord, I have never had to evict anybody, so this is new territory for me. Suppose one of my tenants in Norfolk was of Middle Eastern extraction with a Greek passport. As I do not know what a valid Greek passport looks like—other than like my British passport, but all in Greek—I send it off to one of those passport verification agencies. It gives me the all-clear and the tenant moves in. Subsequently, I receive a letter from the Immigration Enforcement office—in King’s Lynn, in my case—giving me notice that the tenant is an illegal with a fake passport. The government amendments say that I have a defence if I have,

“taken reasonable steps to terminate the residential tenancy agreement … within a reasonable period”,

beginning with the time when I first knew that he was illegal. Therefore I write to the tenant to evict him, with reasons, giving him so many days or weeks to vacate the premises. However, the tenant, realising that he has been rumbled, scarpers at once and disappears into another part of the country to become a tenant of some other unsuspecting landlord.