Tenant Fees Bill

Debate between Earl of Lytton and Baroness Thornhill

Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 11th December 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as one of the happy band of vice-presidents of the Local Government Association. I agree with much of what the Minister has said, but with specific reference to Amendment 48 I thank the Government for listening and accepting our amendment, moved in Committee, regarding letting agents and landlords receiving multiple holding fees from several people for one property. The arguments for this were well made in previous stages of the passage of this Bill. It has been recognised by pressure groups, by the industry itself—interestingly enough —and now by the Government that taking financial advantage of prospective tenants is totally unacceptable and bad practice. This simple but significant amendment corrects an injustice and will help many for whom navigating the private rental market is already a stressful and expensive business. We look forward to a speedy implementation, which I believe will be in May 2019.

[The Earl of Lytton (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as a vice-president of the LGA and also as a practising chartered surveyor and private rented sector landlord. Mercifully, I have managed to steer clear in a personal capacity of managing agents—at least for the last many years.

I have one query on the way in which the holding deposit arrangements are intended to function. I quite understand the geometry that sits behind this and the reason for it, so I will not go over it again. But let us suppose that a prospective tenant, having been provided with all the relevant information, pays a holding deposit and then, through some reason of default which would allow the agent to retain part or all of that deposit, there develops an argument as to what proportion—perhaps the whole—should be retained or not. That could take some while to resolve. Meanwhile, the agent is debarred from taking a holding deposit from anybody else, even though it may be clear beyond peradventure that the original deal with, and intention of, the tenant, whose holding deposit is still being hung on to, will not go ahead.

I can see that this could put an undesirable element of drag into the situation. I can also see that it might be the godmother of unforeseen consequences, in that the agent may feel that it is becoming a problem—a rather metropolitan problem, if I may say so; I think of zones 2, 3 and 4 of central London as the areas where a lot of this goes on, although I know it is not unique to there. The corollary to that is that the agent may say, “I’m not going to take a holding deposit at all. It is on a first-come, first-served basis. I have various people interested and the first who comes through my door with the relevant boxes ticked gets it”. That does not seem at all helpful either. That does not happen in my part of leafy Sussex, because we do not deal with things in that way and do not have that sort of high-pressure tenant demand. But I can certainly see it happening in zones 2 and 3 and I wonder what the Minister has to say about how he sees that working in practice, without having some perverse effects on the market.