Draft Housing and Planning Act 2016 (Banning Order Offences) Regulations 2017

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown Excerpts

Tuesday 9th January 2018 General Committees

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson. I well appreciate that my hon. Friend the Member for Rossendale and Darwen (Jake Berry) is only standing in today. Although my remarks will be probing and I would like to receive some answers, I would be more than happy if he wrote to me after the sitting and put a copy in the Library. I am not necessarily expecting answers today, unless he has good knowledge he can impart. Before I make any further remarks, I should declare my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, as I own some residential property.

I want to probe the scope and proportionality of the regulations. I welcome my hon. Friend’s opening remark that the vast majority of the 4.5 million private landlords in this country let their property to a good standard. That is partially because it is in their own financial interest to do so. Getting new tenants is a very expensive operation these days, so it pays a landlord to maintain his property in a good state of repair and to try to retain tenants for a long time.

When the usual channels put someone like me on a Committee like this where I know something about the issue, they have to suffer the penalty of a few probing remarks. Under section 16 of the Housing and Planning Act 2016, a landlord can be convicted of an offence that is also contained in the schedule to the regulations. In a sense, the banning orders apply a double jeopardy offence under the law. In fact, it is clear from listening to my hon. Friend’s remarks today that there is a third jeopardy, because in certain circumstances the landlord could be denied the ability to earn any income from his property while he is subject to a banning order. That is probably reasonable for a serious offence, such as violence to secure entry to a property, but I am concerned about the possibility of more minor offences leading to a banning order.

For example, under the Immigration Act 2016, a landlord has to inspect immigration documents to ensure that he or she is not letting to illegal immigrants. We might see that as perfectly reasonable, but some of the immigration documents from around the world are difficult to interpret, and it can be even more difficult to interpret whether they are fraudulent. It is also a requirement under the law to produce an energy performance certificate prior to letting a property nowadays. It is possible to commit a fairly minor offence and then be subject to a banning order.

A banning order is a serious step. It means that a landlord has to delegate letting and management powers to someone else. It may mean, if he can get possession under an assured shorthold tenancy, that he would rather gain possession and sell the property than have to go through the process of being unable to manage the property while subject to a banning order.

Through the all-party parliamentary group for the private rented sector, which is supported by the Government and the Opposition, we regularly come across landlords who own tens if not hundreds of properties. A banning order would have far more serious consequences for one of those landlords than for a landlord who owned just one property. I am not necessarily expecting an answer to this today, but when deciding whether to make a banning order, will the first-tier tribunal take into consideration section 16(4)(d) of the Housing and Planning Act, which mentions

“the likely effect of the banning order on the person and anyone else who may be affected by the order”?

My hon. Friends in the Whips Office will be pleased to know that I am not planning to oppose the regulations. They are a serious step, and when the first-tier tribunal is imposing banning orders, it needs to be fully cognisant of the serious effects they have.

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[Clive Efford]

I will, if I can just get my questions out to give people in the room the chance to hand the Minister a note if necessary. I am trying to be fair to him. I know the situation and I am genuinely after the answers, rather than trying to trip him up.

On the resourcing of tribunals, are we expecting a glut of these applications? My hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby raised the issue of tenants’ rights during this period; they do need to be protected. We do not want a flurry of evictions coming about as a result of this measure, as has been pointed out by the hon. Member for The Cotswolds. People might decide that they want to sell the property, or even attempt to evict the tenants under the guise of wanting to sell the property, and therefore seek possession. What about damage that arises during the period in which a housing authority is in charge of the property? Who is liable? Does the landlord have any say over who manages that property during a banning order period, or is that to be determined by the tribunal and the local housing authority? I would like some clarification on those points.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

The hon. Gentleman has raised an interesting point as to who is able to run those properties when a banning order is in place. Is the landlord or agent simply able to delegate that to somebody else not subject to a banning order, such as another agent, or will it have to be managed by a local housing association? We do need some clarification on that.

[Clive Efford]

I would like some clarification on that, too, but I feel the latter should be the case. The default position should be for the property to go to the local housing authority, because my experience with these companies, as I have described, has been that if we check with Companies House we find that they not only shift the properties around, but shift the companies around. They change the responsible person for the company just by changing a few letters in the name, because there are other things going on behind some of these companies, such as tax avoidance and defaults on mortgages. With rogue landlords, this goes much deeper than the issue of letting properties, though I accept that the vast majority of landlords are not like that.

Those are the people we are legislating for here. It is important that a banning order is taken not just because that is desirable, but because we are taking punitive action against a landlord as they are not a desirable body to be managing their property, albeit for a year and possibly for a fixed period beyond that. At the same time, it is important that we are alive to the fact that those organisations will be prepared for actions such as these and will just shift the property’s ownership around if they have a say in who takes over its management. They will no doubt have their own pet agency to take over and run it should the hiccup of a banning order occur. We want the orders to stick and we want them to be painful for those rogue landlords, so that we prevent them from entering into this kind of business in the first place. Perhaps the Minister will deal with my question now.