Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation and Liability for Housing Standards) Bill

Eddie Hughes Excerpts

Friday 19th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Eddie Hughes (Walsall North) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter), although I am not one of the lost sheep that he referred to, having been an MP for only seven months; I am just a keen, enthusiastic advocate for the Bill in its present form.

Before I turn to the Bill, I would be grateful, Madam Deputy Speaker, if you would convey to Mr Speaker my best wishes for his birthday. The Moonpig card, personally designed by me, that I ordered earlier this week has not arrived, so he will have to settle for just my verbal congratulations.

[Stephen Pound]

The hon. Gentleman clearly has an encyclopaedic knowledge of people’s birthdays, so it will not have escaped him that today it is also the birthday of the Speaker’s Chaplain, Rose Hudson-Wilkin. Will he join those from all parts of the House in wishing her the happiest of birthdays?

[Eddie Hughes]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his wisdom—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

Order. Let us take this moment to wish the Speaker’s Chaplain and Mr Speaker a happy birthday.

--- Later in debate ---

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

No, we will not divide. I shall assume that the entire House wishes to send best wishes to Mr Speaker and to Rose. The matter has now been dealt with.

[Eddie Hughes]

Let me return to the Bill—or nearly, at least. I thank the hon. Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) for introducing it. In the near future, I shall seek her advice because I have a private Member’s Bill on carbon monoxide safety. I am grateful to Project Shout for helping me to publicise the Bill earlier in the week, and I am grateful for the support of many Government and Opposition Members, particularly the hon. Members for Ipswich (Sandy Martin), for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) and for Wolverhampton South West (Eleanor Smith), to name but a few. I shall seek some advice on how to take my Bill forward. Thanks to the support of the Members I have mentioned and Project Shout, I secured a meeting yesterday with the new Minister for Housing, who convinced me that the Government will consider my Bill. I shall return to that topic on another day.

Were this speech an essay, I guess it would be entitled “It’s not always easy being a landlord”. I have three separate perspectives: first, I am an accidental landlord; secondly, immediately before I was elected to the House, I was the assistant chief executive of YMCA Birmingham, which is a small housing association; and thirdly, I am currently the chair of the board of Walsall Housing Group, a housing association with 20,000 homes, mostly in Walsall, although the group operates across 18 local authorities.

My personal perspective is that of an accidental landlord. When I married my wife and we bought a house together, she already had a house. She obviously did not have complete faith in the longevity of our relationship, so decided that it was appropriate for her to hang on to her house, just in case things did not turn out for the best, so we have a property that we rent out.

People often inherit a property, but they do not inherit with it any understanding of building or safety regulations, or the knowledge to enable them to keep the property in good condition while they rent it out. Indeed, I think the ridiculous statistic is that something like 95% of landlords in this country have only one property. How do they get the knowledge they need to ensure that they maintain their property appropriately? As the chair of the board of a housing association with some professional experience, I feel that I personally have the knowledge, but there are many other landlords who do not. It is not the tenants’ fault if their landlord does not have sufficient experience to know how to maintain the property, and they should have some means of redress through the law. That is why, as a landlord myself, I am delighted that the Bill will afford tenants the ability to seek redress, should it be necessary.

As I said, immediately before I was elected, I was the assistant chief executive of YMCA Birmingham, which has 300 accommodation units for previously homeless young people, some of whom lead chaotic lives, to say the least. We had a 72-bed direct-access hostel in Northfield that was definitely the ugly sister of our portfolio. I was delighted that, just before I left the YMCA, the Homes and Communities Agency awarded us £800,000 to install some en-suite accommodation, training facilities and better cooking facilities on the ground floor of the hostel. The existing accommodation was passable and clearly legally compliant, but for someone coming straight out of prison or off the street—

[Martin Whitfield (East Lothian) (Lab)]

Is it not right that the Bill will greatly improve safety for the large number of children who reside in unfit habitation, and help to narrow the educational and health gaps—a priority for any good life?

[Eddie Hughes]

I completely endorse the hon. Gentleman’s comments. The YMCA took people from 16 years of age—sometimes previously looked-after children—and it was incredibly important that the accommodation was of the highest standard. I am grateful to the HCA for giving the YMCA the money to do that.

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

Will the hon. Gentleman also accept that a safe and secure environment should mean having carbon monoxide detectors in accommodation, for which he and I have campaigned for many months? It is a high priority that people not die from that silent killer.

[Eddie Hughes]

I completely endorse those comments. As the hon. Gentleman says, carbon monoxide is a silent killer—you cannot see it, smell it or taste it—so the best protection is to install an audible carbon monoxide detector. I thank him for his endorsement—I think that is what it was—of my Bill.

The HCA has given the YMCA £1 million to build new-build accommodation at the site in Erdington. When I was working on that project, I was approached by one of our tenants, who asked that I try to find him employment on the building site, which I did. I offered my support, and the company arranging the construction offered considerable support as well, and then all of a sudden that tenant disappeared. He did not turn up for work for a few days, and when I went to see him in his room, I found he had had some mental health problems and had smashed up his room completely, causing considerable damage. That brings me to one of the exemptions in the Bill. Clearly, in such a situation, the circumstances of the case are different: it is not that the landlord has not maintained the property appropriately, but that the tenant has not lived in the property appropriately. It is not necessarily the case that the landlord is not maintaining the property properly; sometimes it is that the tenant has not treated the property appropriately.

Finally, I would like to move on to my tenure as chair of the board of Walsall Housing Group. It is a housing association with 20,000 homes, so clearly it has the facilities and money to maintain its stock properly, but at any given time up to 10 of those properties might not have a current gas certificate. That is not because we have not been diligent in ensuring there is a certificate for the property, but because we have not been able to get access to that property. Sometimes, the only way is to seek legal access, which can take many months and costs thousands and thousands of pounds. I heard of a case this morning: the tenant is in prison, yet we still cannot gain access to the property to service the boiler because the courts are saying we need to consider further action. It is possible to be a completely diligent landlord, and still be unable to maintain a property to the expected standard.

I know, then, from my broad range of experience that landlords often do their best to maintain a property in a fit and proper state, but sometimes that is not the case, and when it is not the case, we need legislation that protects tenants. Tenant safety is a very high priority for this Government, as we have seen in the work carried out since Grenfell, and we will continue to deliver on that. For my part, in all the various guises of my landlord responsibilities, I will continue to discharge my duties as well.