Renters’ Rights Bill

Helen Maguire Excerpts

Report stage & 3rd reading
Tuesday 14th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Matthew Pennycook]

It is a pleasure to bring this important Bill back to the House this afternoon. Let me begin by thanking hon. Members on both sides of the Chamber for their engagement with it over recent months. In particular, I thank the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (David Simmonds), and other members of the Committee for the diligent and thoughtful line-by-line scrutiny of the Bill that they undertook over the course of many sittings late last year.

This Labour Government promised to succeed where their predecessor had failed, by quickly and decisively acting to transform the experience of private renting in England. Today, we make further tangible progress towards delivering on that commitment. Our Renters’ Rights Bill will modernise the regulation of our country’s insecure and unjust private rented sector, levelling decisively the playing field between landlord and tenant. It will empower renters by providing them with greater security, rights and protections so that they can stay in their homes for longer, build lives in their communities and avoid the risk of homelessness.

It will ensure that we can drive up the quality of privately rented housing so that renters have access to good-quality and safe homes as a matter of course. It will also allow us to crack down on the minority of unscrupulous landlords who exploit, mistreat or discriminate against renters. The Bill will also provide tangible benefits for responsible landlords who provide high-quality homes and a good service to their tenants. Not only will its provisions see the reputation of the sector as a whole improve, as we clamp down on those landlords whose behaviour currently tarnishes it, but the Bill will also ensure that good landlords enjoy simpler regulation and clear and expanded possession grounds, so that they can regain their properties quickly when necessary.

Although we have eschewed the previous Government’s habit of shoehorning swathes of new clauses into legislation following Second Reading, we needed to make a modest number of improvements to the Bill in Committee. Many of the amendments in question were minor and technical or consequential in nature, but I shall briefly explain to the House some of the more substantive changes.

To increase fairness for tenants being evicted because their landlord is at fault, we chose to make an amendment connected to ground 6A. As hon. Members will be aware this mandatory ground allows landlords to remove their tenants when eviction is necessary for them to comply not only with enforcement action, but as a result of separate changes that we made to the Bill with planning enforcement action as well. The amendment allows the court to require landlords to pay compensation to the tenant when they are forced to vacate their homes under such circumstances.

To provide greater flexibility for social landlords in meeting the demands of local housing markets, we widened ground 1B for rent-to-buy tenancies, ensuring that registered providers can take possession in all necessary circumstances. We also exempted assured tenancies from the 90-day rule, which protects housing supply in London and benefits permanent residents by preventing the conversion of family homes into short-term lets. Should a tenant give notice early in their tenancy, meaning that they leave before 90 consecutive nights have passed, these changes mean that the landlord will not automatically be found to have inadvertently provided temporary sleeping accommodation.

Lastly, we made changes to ensure that the introduction of a decent homes standard in the private rented sector works as intended.

[Helen Maguire (Epsom and Ewell) (LD)]

Last week, I asked the Government to ensure that all service family accommodation meets the minimum standards of social housing, as set out in the decent homes standard. The Minister for Veterans confirmed that this is already done, so will the Government support amending the Renters’ Rights Bill officially to extend the decent homes standard to Ministry of Defence service family accommodation?

[Matthew Pennycook]

I thank the hon. Lady for her question and I agree with the objective that she has in mind, but, as we discussed fairly extensively in Committee, we do not think that the Renters’ Rights Bill and the way that the decent homes standard will apply to assured tenancies in this sector is right for MOD accommodation. The MOD is undertaking its own review, and I shall touch on that issue later in the debate.

As I was saying, the changes around the decent homes standard will guarantee that the appropriate person can always be subject to enforcement action and they close a potential gap that may have been exploited by clarifying the types of accommodation that will be required to meet the standard.

Today, we are proposing a small number of further improvements, most of which are again minor and technical in nature. As I have made clear repeatedly, the Government have long recognised that demands for extortionate amounts of rent in advance put undue financial strain on tenants and can exclude certain groups from renting altogether. I am sure that many of us in the Chamber will have heard powerful stories from our constituents about the impact of such demands. The typical story is all too familiar. Tenants find and view a property which, as advertised, matches their budget only to find that, on application, they are suddenly asked to pay several months’ rent up front to secure it. Tenants in such circumstances often confront an almost impossible choice: do they find a way to make a large rent-in-advance payment, thereby stretching their finances to breaking point, or do they walk away and risk homelessness if they are unable to find an alternative?

Renters’ Rights Bill

Helen Maguire Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Monday 8th September 2025 Commons Chamber

[Gideon Amos]

I do agree with my hon. Friend, and I pay tribute to the sterling work he does in Torbay, and has done in the past as leader of the council, on these issues.

That change in the burden of proof may sound technical, but in fact it would gut the powers of local authorities to hold bad landlords to account, as my hon. Friend has just said. At a stroke, it would make justice for tenants far harder to achieve.

Lords amendment 53 points in the same wrong direction. It seeks to introduce fixed-term tenancies, but the whole point of the Bill is to shift to periodic tenancies—arrangements that give renters both flexibility and more security. Dragging us back to fixed terms, which would become standard across that particular element of student housing, would undermine those core principles.

On the other hand, there are amendments that make the Bill fairer and more workable, which we support. Lords amendment 19 recognises the reality faced by shared ownership leaseholders, who can be can be, and are, hit disproportionately hard when sales fall through, through no fault of their own. Without that exemption, they could face financial ruin. This is a simple matter of justice and we support it.

Lords amendment 64, which would create a new possession ground where a landlord needs to house a carer, is in keeping with the Liberal Democrats’ belief in the importance of supporting the millions of carers out there who are so often overlooked. It is right that the law should recognise the vital role they play, and if there are risks of abuse, it is open to the Government to table their own amendments to set out how they would make the same provision for accommodation needed by carers.

Lords amendment 39, which would legislate for a decent home standard for our military, goes to the heart of who we are as a society and our obligations to those who serve. I pushed for this amendment at earlier stages in the Commons, and indeed this has long been the Liberal Democrats’ position, having been raised by my hon. Friend the Member for North Shropshire (Helen Morgan) in the previous Parliament. It is therefore disappointing that, while the Government have come forward with their own amendments on other matters, they have not come up with any such amendments on decent homes for our military, although that has been agreed across the parties in the other place.

[Helen Maguire (Epsom and Ewell) (LD)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that if the Ministry of Defence itself says that the MOD housing standard is already higher than the decent homes standard, the Government should do the decent thing and accept Lords amendment 39 and put it on the face of the Bill?

[Gideon Amos]

Indeed, our military deserve no less than this being on the face of the Bill, in whichever way the Government wish to do it. If it is so easy and, as my hon. Friend points out, it is the Government’s position, surely it can hold no fear for them.

It would be disappointing not to have those amendments. We are told that 90% of service accommodation meets the decent homes standard—my hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell (Helen Maguire) had clearly already read this part of my speech—but those figures come from contractors who are responsible for managing those properties and have an interest in saying that they already meet the standards. There is no independent assessment.

The Defence Committee painted a very different picture, when families reported to it. The Committee stated:

“It is disingenuous for DIO to present glossy brochures about being ‘decent homes plus’ when they are anything but. It is clear that the DIO’s property frequently does not meet the standards.”

Crucially, it added:

“Moreover, there is no local authority”—

or anyone else—

“to hold them to account as would be the case for private and other local landlords.”

We are also told that it would be impractical to extend the decent homes standard to military housing because of access “behind the wire”, yet former Chief of the Defence Staff, Lord Stirrup, reminded colleagues in the other place that civilian officials already go into far more sensitive areas of military bases, so that is not a serious objection.