Private Rented Sector Housing

Debate between Ian Byrne and Nadia Whittome

Tuesday 15th March 2022 Westminster Hall

[Ian Byrne (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered private rented sector housing.

It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Sir Gary. I thank Members for attending this debate today and for what I know will be powerful contributions. I start by paying tribute to my constituents in Liverpool, West Derby, who are the innocent victims of this country’s current housing system. I also want to thank ACORN, the Vauxhall law centre, Generation Rent, Shelter, the Daily Mirror and the many other organisations for their campaigns to get the changes we need.

For millions, the current system in the private rented sector is failing to provide homes that are safe, secure and affordable for everyone. Mindful of this House’s sub judice rules, I am unable to go into the details of some of the appalling cases that my constituents have written to me about. However, issues raised with me by private renters include: constituents with health conditions such as asthma whose landlords have left them in damp properties with no gas supply in the middle of winter; constituents, including children, who have been hospitalised and suffered serious health impacts as the result of disrepair in their homes; and families living in fear of bailiffs, who were served a section 21 eviction notice by the landlord after complaining about terrible disrepair and conditions. My constituent told me:

“Section 21 takes the humanity out of the situation and that’s precisely the problem. We are human and lives are being carelessly destroyed!”

Other constituents who have contacted me wanted the Government to take urgent action so that nobody in future has to go through the same horrific experiences. Nationally, the private rented sector includes some of the oldest stock in England; it remains the tenure with the lowest standards, based on the Government’s decent homes standard. The latest English housing survey found that one in five homes in the private rented sector is classed as non-decent, and 12% have a category 1 hazard for which the most serious harm outcome is identified, for example, as death, permanent paralysis, permanent loss of consciousness, loss of a limb or serious fractures.

Does the Minister know how many serious injuries and deaths have resulted from making people live in such appalling accommodation? Shamefully, we have a system that means a private renter has more than a one in 10 chance of living in a home that could kill or seriously harm them or their children. Let that fact sink in—how can this be allowed to continue?

Private rented sector homes also have the worst energy standards on average. That means private renters will have to pay significantly more in heating bills because of poor insulation, inefficient heating systems or lack of double glazing. With the cost of living crisis starting to bite and energy prices set to soar, private renters really are in a precarious situation. Added to that, it seems that complaining puts them on a fast track to eviction. Research from Citizens Advice shows that those complaining to their local authority about disrepair were 46% more likely to get a section 21 from the landlord. Section 21—the fast track to eviction—must be scrapped.

I recently spoke to Professor Ian Sinha, a consultant respiratory paediatrician at the fantastic Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in my constituency, about the health impacts of poor housing conditions. Ian told me:

“The consequences of poor quality housing can be fatal for children: the National Child Mortality Database identified poor housing as one of the top risk factors associated with the inequalities that result in children's deaths....If babies and children breathe air rife with fungus, toxins, and dust, in overcrowded and cold homes, their lungs develop abnormally. Even though we focus on the shortterm effects, the problems they face in adulthood are even more stark—the poorest children are 5 times more likely to develop adult diseases like COPD, and chronic illnesses such as this lead to the poorest adults dying two decades earlier than the richest ones in Liverpool and many other cities...Poor housing can result in 20 years being taken away from your life...There is a window of opportunity for children to develop and grow—and the state of housing in which millions of children are forced to live is holding them back...That’s why good housing for all should be the very essence of any levelling up agenda otherwise it’s a vacuous nonsense.”

Professor Sinha continued:

“Parents are gaslighted at every opportunity—landlords deny pest problems—but mothers of premature babies tell us they know there are rats in the house because they see bite marks in their baby’s oxygen tubing; mothers tell us that when they reach for the cereal there are rodent faeces in them; mothers tell us that their toddlers are afraid to go in rooms because they see mice looking at them through the gaps in the floorboards that still haven’t been fixed. While parents are told that damp isn’t an issue, they tell us their children are waking up coughing thick mucus every night in rooms riddled with mould, and they are bullied because their clothes smell of damp”.

After listening to that, we must remind ourselves that it is 2022, not 1822.

It is clear that the current legislation is failing, which is compounded by a decade of Government cuts to local authority budget cuts and the cutting of access to free legal support. Between 2009 and 2019, local authority budgets to ensure that private rental standards were kept up were slashed by 44%. Local authorities have lost almost half their capacity to enforce standards.

Selective licensing is a tool that local authorities can use to tackle poor property conditions and poor practice in the private rented sector. The landlord licensing scheme in Liverpool, which ran from 2015 to 2020, found that 65% of properties were not fully compliant on the first visit. Some 37,000 compliance actions were taken to improve conditions and 250 rogue landlords were prosecuted. I saw this first hand when I worked with my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Dan Carden), as his office manager, when we utilised the scheme to tackle rogue landlords. I hope the Minister can enlighten us further as to why landlord licensing is not operational across the whole country.

The regulatory framework for the private rented sector is fragmented, underfunded and, quite frankly, broken, and the White Paper and renters reform Bill must address these systemic issues. A renters reform Bill was promised by the Government in 2019. Where is it? Every single day that the Bill is delayed is a day millions spend in cold, insecure, unsafe and unaffordable homes.

During the height of the pandemic, renters were trapped in unsafe housing while the Prime Minister was apparently picking out new wallpaper. Now, many renters are fearful of section 21 evictions if they raise complaints, because they cannot afford to move house in the middle of this appalling cost of living crisis. The power imbalance means that the mental pressures facing renters are built into this broken system.

[Nadia Whittome (Nottingham East) (Lab)]

I wholeheartedly agree with the points my hon. Friend is raising and I thank him for leading this debate. I am regularly contacted by constituents whose private landlords are refusing to fix issues. Like the examples raised by my hon. Friend, they are not small problems; ranging from black mould to rat infestations, these failings have a disastrous impact on my constituents’ health and wellbeing.

As it stands, tenants who decide to withhold rent from landlords who fail to maintain their properties to standard will be in breach of contract and have next to no protections. Does my hon. Friend agree that increasing protections for tenants should form a fundamental part of our strategy to make the PRS safer and improve conditions overall?

[Ian Byrne]

My hon. Friend makes some fantastic points, and I fully agree. I thank her for all the work she does on this issue in her constituency.

The Government must present the White Paper as a matter of urgency, and new legislation must have real teeth and be enforceable. A renters reform Bill must abolish section 21 and end no-fault evictions, drive up standards through an updated and improved decent homes standard and create a national landlord register and licensing scheme to improve accountability and ensure that legal standards are met. It works—Liverpool has shown that. This is not more red tape, but an investment in the health and wellbeing of present and future generations. To reinforce this, have the Government undertaken a cost-benefit analysis of what it means for a child to grow up in a home that is a threat to their health and safety?

Let us put ourselves in the shoes of the people whose cases I have outlined. If an MP or a Minister were asked to live in a flat riddled with mould, in such a state of disrepair that it endangered the life of their family members and might lead to reduced life expectancies, we would rightly hear howls of rage reverberating from both sides of the Chamber. Let us take that fury and that righteous anger and, as legislators, represent with the same force the millions who are suffering that fate daily, forced into silence because of our unjust system. That would really be levelling up, and the Minister knows it—taking on the vested interests and doing something transformational, changing the life chances of millions for the better. Surely that is why we are all in this game.

This Bill must not tinker around the edges of a broken system, and it should not just move the goalposts. It must empower tenants and hardwire social justice into the system. From working with the Minister on numerous Bill Committees and Select Committees, I know he understands the need for change; but deeds will be the measure, not words.