Regulation of Property Agents

John Healey Excerpts

1st reading: House of Commons
Wednesday 18th October 2017 Commons Chamber

[John Healey (Wentworth and Dearne) (Lab)]

My goodness, the Government really are now scraping the bottom of the barrel: an oral statement on a call for evidence about property managing agents—not a statement on the Grenfell Tower fire and why four months on only 14 of 200 surviving families yet have a new permanent home, on bold Government action in the face of home ownership hitting a 30-year low, on rough sleeping doubling, or on the lowest level of new affordable house building for 24 years.

More than 80 Members on both sides of the House want to speak next in Labour’s debate on universal credit, yet the House is being held up by the Minister telling us he wants to

“create a fairer property management system that works for everyone.”

If Mr Speaker were a football referee, he would book the Minister for time wasting. Where is the hon. Member for Moray (Douglas Ross) when he is needed?

In the face of the country’s housing crisis, this is a truly feeble statement. It is not even a commitment to act; it is a commitment to ask some questions. The Government are launching today, the Minister tells us, “a call for evidence”. He tells us that he is seeking views on

“whether regulatory overhaul of the sector is needed”.

Of course it is: managing and letting agents can set up with no expertise, no qualifications, no registration and no professional body membership. This is a market with no legal regulation, just partial self-regulation. It is a market in which the reputation of the best is dragged down by the worst, and a market in which consumers too often face unfair upfront fees, restrictions on what they can do to their own homes, and a system in which it proves impossible to get problems sorted out.

Better regulation of letting and managing agents has long been a commitment on this side of the House, so the Government’s concern now is welcome, but action needs legislation. Therefore, can the Minister confirm when the proposed legislation will be introduced, and when it will come into force? Can he confirm that this “call for evidence” today will not delay still further the announcement the Government made a year ago to ban letting agents’ fees? When will that legislation be introduced, and when will it come into force? As a result of today’s announcement, can the Minister tell us how much on average each leaseholder and private renter will save, and when—oh, when—will he act on the other protections leaseholders and renters need from this Government?

Finally, may I give the Minister his first response to this “call for evidence”? Rather than asking whether or not renters and leaseholders need better protections, will the Government instead act on Labour’s proposals to end the building of new leasehold homes and to cap rises in ground rents, and will they back our plan for new consumer protections for private renters, with longer tenancies and a control on rent rises, a ban on letting agents’ fees, and new legal minimum standards that all landlords must meet before they rent their homes?

We have a big housing crisis and small thinking from Conservative Ministers. After seven years of failure on all fronts on housing, when will Ministers come to the House and announce a proper plan to fix this country’s housing crisis?

[Alok Sharma]

I have not said this before, but I have enormous respect for the right hon. Gentleman. However, I am extremely sorry that he started his response to the statement with such rancour. There are 4.5 million households renting in the private sector. For them, this absolutely matters—it really does—so I hope he will reflect on how he started his contribution and on the fact that perhaps what we ought to be doing is working together on making this happen. He says we should do it. Of course, and that is precisely what we are doing, but I say respectfully that he was the Housing Minister—why did he not do it?

Let me talk about fixing the broken housing market. The right hon. Gentleman said that we are tinkering. We are not tinkering. He will have seen the work that has been done since the White Paper was published and he knows the announcements that have been made. I recommend to him that, instead of talking to his colleagues in the Labour party, he talks to the social housing sector to ask what it makes of the announcements made at the Conservative party conference—the £2 billion extra and CPI plus 1%. It will tell him that those announcements were a sea change.

I also say to the right hon. Gentleman that, in the work that we are doing, there is finally some joined-up thinking in Government. We have already announced—I am pleased he welcomes this—the ban on tenant fees from letting agents. We will publish the draft Bill very shortly, together with the consultation. He knows that, when it comes to rogue landlords, it has been possible since April to levy civil penalties of up to £30,000, and we are also looking at banning orders. A range of work is ongoing.

The right hon. Gentleman will also know that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State made an announcement a few weeks ago on measures to help the private rented sector with landlords being required to be part of a redress scheme and housing courts being consulted on incentives to landlords for longer tenancies. We are doing a huge amount of work.

The right hon. Gentleman raised a couple of other points. He asked by how much leaseholders will benefit. He has seen the figures I talked about: £3.5 billion is charged, and some experts say £1.4 billion is overcharging, so if he does the maths he might be able to work it out for himself.

The right hon. Gentleman knows that we have just concluded a consultation on leasehold. I pay tribute to the all-party parliamentary group on leasehold and commonhold reform for all the fantastic work it has done. We have had 6,000 responses—a record—to this consultation, and we agree with him that this is an area that needs fixing, but I hope he will reflect and welcome what we are doing with this call for evidence.