Policing and Crime Bill (Second sitting)

Debate between Jake Berry and Craig Whittaker

Tuesday 15th March 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Jake Berry]

Q I have one final point on this. You said that you were about to publish it. How long after publication will it be until it becomes accepted as practice?

Alex Marshall: It went out to a three-month consultation period that finished about six weeks ago. From memory, we are now adopting the consultation responses, including from charity and voluntary sectors. That will be published by us and then we will put it into the curriculum for everybody joining policing and for their training throughout policing. We will publish it to forces but, of course, we then rely on forces to adopt and use it.

[Craig Whittaker]

Q Dame Anne, could I just come back to you? It was really good to hear that the Government were listening to your ideas and allowed you to get on and do the IPCC work. Could I just touch on what you said? I think that you said that the Bill goes “some way” towards being an effective complaints system. Do I detect that we could have done more?

Dame Anne Owers: The decision was made, and I understand why, to proceed by way of amending current legislation, rather than starting with a blank sheet. There are still a lot of tie-ups between complaints and discipline in a way that you might not do if you started from scratch. To be honest, I am grateful for what there is, so I am not about to say that the exercise should not be done. I understand exactly the pressures of legislative time and so on. There is still quite a considerable tie-up between the two, but I hope that, between us, the police and crime commissioners and ourselves will be able to develop a more effective way of handling complaints in the first instance. You should not start an investigation by saying, “Who dunnit?” You should start an investigation by saying, “What happened?”

Private Rented Sector

Debate between Jake Berry and Craig Whittaker

Wednesday 23rd January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Craig Whittaker (Calder Valley) (Con)]

I declare my interest in this topic, as reported in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

I support the need to take action against letting agents, and I support action taken against rogue landlords, as I support action against any rogue operating in any sector—whether it be builders, window salesmen, car salesmen or any rogue at all. The answer, however, is not further to regulate the whole sector because of what Shelter calls

“the small but dangerous minority of rogue landlords who are making people’s lives a misery”,

but to enforce what is already in place.

There are currently more than 100 pieces of legislation and regulation, containing about 400 individual measures affecting the private rented sector. Figures from Shelter show that only 487 landlords in England were prosecuted last year from a cohort of about 1.2 million. That is low. What is needed is support for local authorities better to enforce existing regulation to root out more effectively the criminal landlords who blight the lives of tenants.

[Jake Berry]

Is it not an example of how regulation will not work that the tenancy deposit scheme can be avoided by rogue landlords simply by taking a rent deposit rather than a breakage deposit? Is that not evidence that regulation will always be avoided by criminals?

[Craig Whittaker]

That is exactly right. In some cases, landlords do not take deposits at all, as I shall explain later.

What is the point of having more legislation and regulation when local authorities are not enforcing what is already in place? Let me point out that a recent English Housing Survey found that 85% of private tenants were either very or fairly satisfied with their landlords, which compares with 81% for social housing tenants.

As an MP, I meet my local landlords association and associations nearby, so I can say that if a stable rental contract that gave renters a five-year term came into force, we would go back to the bad old days of the ’70s and ’80s when landlords advertising their properties would plainly put on the adverts “No DSS”. [Interruption]. It is true. I wonder whether the Opposition Members who proposed this motion ever went out to speak to landlords. If they did, they would find that landlords who rent particularly to the local housing allowance sector often cannot get a bond, let alone four weeks’ rent up front. They have to wait for the local housing allowance payment to come to the tenant before they get paid, and unless they go and collect the rent on the day the tenants are paid, they often find their rents are short.