Housing and Planning Bill

Earl of Lytton Excerpts

Thursday 17th March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

If there are such regulations in place, of which I am totally unaware, how many prosecutions have been brought? I would bet that there has not been one anywhere in the United Kingdom. The reason for that is because there are probably hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people living in homes where those regulations are being defaulted upon.

[The Earl of Lytton (CB)]

My Lords, there are regulations about all these things. There are fire regulations, regulations on overcrowding, spatial regulations and so on. The difficulty arises if you have a room in the sort of flat that one of my children rented at one stage. Changes can be made without the local planning authority or anyone else knowing about them. In that particular instance, what had been a two-bedroom property with a fairly large kitchen and dining area was converted into a three-bedroom property when part of that area was hived off, thus creating another bedroom. It meant that, in effect, three couples—six people—were sharing one bathroom, which was a trial in its own right. However, the third bedroom which had been hived off the kitchen and dining area had no direct access to the safe environment protected by a fire door, which meant that the people occupying that room were not safe, given that a kitchen is a potent area for fires to start because of cooking, electrical equipment and so on. I felt that the property was at risk and I told my offspring that, if they had to rent in that flat, for heaven’s sake not to rent the room off the kitchen but to take a room off the lobby.

A local authority has no real way of catching up on this kind of thing, particularly if the properties are relatively temporary lets. Often these are places which are let to students for a year or nine months at a time for the academic year. The tenants may not be registered at the property as electors because their university might have registered them, so there is no real audit trail to enable the authority to look into the issues.

I think that there is a real problem here. The noble Baroness, Lady Gardner of Parkes, doughty campaigner as she is for getting these things sorted out—I support her in her intentions behind her amendments—should note that, nevertheless, to use a West Country phrase, we are a bale short of a stack on catching up with these issues in practical terms. That is the conundrum. Also, landlords might not be particularly interested in enforcing such a provision. It might be possible to deal with these issues through a body other than the local authority, but I do not know. However, there is a problem here which is creating situations that are hazardous and prejudicial to some of the people who are occupying these properties. I certainly therefore support the gist of what the noble Baroness has said.

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[Baroness Gardner of Parkes]

I shall be very brief: this amendment answers many of the points that I have raised and I strongly support it.

[The Earl of Lytton]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, has raised one of the legacy issues derived from the way in which leaseholds are set up. I have a possible reservation about the impact of leaseholders exercising their right to manage, but the point he made highlights a particular mismatch here.

Landlords of landlord-managed blocks tend to have rather blurred lines when it comes to dealing with what exactly constitutes a legitimate service charge item. It is all very well if they are pursuing something that will clearly protect the service charge payers in the block—if it is a block—generally; it is quite different if the landlord is using the service charge to finance his pursuit of a particular tenant on a landlord/tenant issue, as opposed to a service charge issue. That is where the muddle starts to creep in. The way in which the service charge provision and its recoverability are set out in many old leases simply has not kept pace with the passage of time. We are stuck legally where we are because of how these things were done historically, perhaps during the 1950s, 1960s or 1970s, when we did not have the same sort of concentration on ensuring that the rights of tenants, as the payers of service charges, were as adequately protected as they might be under modern drafting.

This does raise an issue, and the only thing on which I would counsel a bit of caution is long leaseholders who have exercised their right to manage. Would they get caught for part of the administrative costs of pursuing a non-paying long leaseholder in a block on a service charge item? Would they then suffer the same fate? Otherwise, it puts them in an exposed position. However, the basic premise raised by the noble Lord, Lord Young, is to me unassailable. Why should the generality of long leasehold service charge payers in a multi-unit building foot the bill for the landlord pursuing a particular tenant on a landlord/tenant issue? On that point, he is absolutely spot on.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My Lords, I would like to bring a little experience to this debate. I was involved in an enfranchisement over getting a share of a freehold from leasehold. Although it was an enfranchisement, if I remember rightly, the costs were not payable by the tenant in the enfranchisement proceeding before the tribunal. Notwithstanding that, it is interesting to know what can happen in these tribunals. In the tribunal in which my residents’ association was involved, we were paying £3,000 a day for a lawyer. I remember sitting there one day during the inquiry. There had been a gentle chat in the morning and at lunchtime the chairman of the tribunal looked up at the clock and said, “I think we’ve had an interesting day and I suggest that we adjourn until tomorrow morning”. In the event that the bill had been payable, the residents would have had to share out the £1,500 costs. In fact it was not payable, because, as I said, it was an enfranchisement. In circumstances where the liability did fall on the tenants, the bill would have fallen on the residents. Ministers have to have in mind the fact that complications such as those can arise in a tribunal, where the chairman might not be fully aware of the costs of the lawyers representing the residents.