Homes (Fitness for Habitation) Bill

Kevin Foster Excerpts

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Friday 26th October 2018 Commons Chamber

[Eddie Hughes (Walsall North) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) and a privilege to be here to support the Bill. I speak as an accidental landlord myself: when my second wife and I got together 10 years ago, she was shrewd enough to want to hang on to the property that she had, just in case it did not work out, and 10 years later we are still renting out that property. I believe that we are excellent landlords, and that is because it makes financial sense and moral sense: if we maintain our property to a high standard, we will retain our tenant. There are, though, parts of the country where that is not the case—where demand outstrips supply. Some 1.2 million houses have been identified as non-decent. That is clearly appalling and I am delighted that the Bill will address it.

In October 2015, legislation was introduced putting an obligation on landlords to provide a smoke detector on each storey of a property and to provide a carbon monoxide detector if the property has solid-fuel-burning appliances, such as a wood-burning stove. I introduced a private Member’s Bill that would have made it an obligation for landlords to provide a carbon monoxide detector in all properties, socially and privately rented, in which any fuel is burned and carbon monoxide produced. That is an absolute necessity to ensure that all homes are fit for human habitation and do not present a danger to the occupants.

[Kevin Foster (Torbay) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making some interesting points based on his experience in the social rented sector. Does he agree that no landlord should have any problems with the Bill and that we should be clear that it will create an additional power to help tenants, not replace the powers that councils have?

[Eddie Hughes]

When we consider how many properties are rented out, for both social and private purposes, it is important that they are all as safe as possible.

Unfortunately, when I became a Parliamentary Private Secretary in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, I had to step down from my position as chair of the board of Walsall Housing Group, a housing association with 20,000 properties in Walsall. I had been leaning very heavily on the association to get it to provide carbon monoxide detectors in its properties, and I believe it now does that for all its new build properties. I shall continue to try to influence the association to do that in its existing social rented properties.

I completely support and endorse all elements of the Bill and look forward to its becoming law.

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[Matt Rodda (Reading East) (Lab)]

I rise to speak in favour of the Bill and to urge the Government to go further. I wish to point out just how serious the issue of poor-quality private rented accommodation is in my constituency and to show why urgent action is so sorely needed.

Just last week, I met a constituent who was desperate for help. She is a single mother who lives in damp terraced accommodation, with mould growing on the walls. She was desperate. Her son and daughter both have problems with their breathing. One of them has asthma and was seeing the doctor about it. She had asked the landlord for help, but he was unwilling or unable to make changes to the property and solve the damp problem. She is applying for a council house, but because of the severe shortage in places such as Reading and Woodley, she is unable to progress quickly up the list of those seeking homes. The woman’s plight explains the seriousness of the issue and why urgent action is needed.

In Reading, nearly a third of houses are in the private rented sector. There are many good landlords, but there are also many who do not provide a good service. Problems with damp, difficulties with landlords and high fees all make for deep-seated problems that affect thousands of local people. At the same time, as was mentioned earlier, councils have few powers to tackle rogue landlords and there are simply not enough good- quality private rented properties or council houses available in many parts of the country. I urge Ministers to take steps to address this serious problem by considering Labour amendments to the Bill and other related measures on the issues that affect the wider housing sector.

Several amendments to the Bill were proposed, and I am grateful to the Government for taking some of them on board. I hope that they will look again at one in particular. Earlier this year, I spoke about the potential loophole that allows landlords to charge for items such as lost keys. That could provide less scrupulous landlords with a loophole through which they could bypass the Bill’s intent. I urge the Government to look into the matter again.

Other changes that are needed include a much larger programme of council house building and wider measures to improve the planning and development sector.

I urge the Government to support Reading Borough Council’s bid for about 140 new council houses and ask them to go much further in considering the funds that are available for council house building. In my area, we could easily find families to fit into another 1,400 council properties, let alone the 140 that have been bid for.

[Kevin Foster]

I welcome the spirit of the hon. Gentleman’s speech. Does he agree that his local council may well benefit from the removal of the cap on borrowing to fund housing and therefore might be able to fund more of the council houses he is talking about?

[Matt Rodda]

I do welcome that. My council colleagues tell me that they are waiting for further details from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, and I look forward to Ministers being more amenable to local authorities on this matter.

To sum up, as time is pressing, poor-quality rented housing is a serious issue for many residents and urgent action is needed to address both the problem of rogue landlords and the problems in the wider housing market.

[Kevin Foster (Torbay) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate and to give my support to what is a welcome and timely Bill. It is welcome that I am able to speak on this matter. While I was in the Department for Communities and Local Government, I would have been unable to do so, but now that I have the joy of being in the Cabinet Office I can, although I have to be careful not to go into some of the issues around Grenfell, given the ongoing inquiry for which the Cabinet Office is responsible.

It is welcome that the Bill has cross-party support today. In summing up, I know that the Minister will want to reflect on how the Government will take it forward and how they will publicise these rights, as was touched on earlier. A key point to make is that the Bill is about additional powers; it is not about replacing the role of local authorities. That clear message will have to be given through local authorities. I accept that the vast majority of them will act on that basis.

A tenant who makes a housing standards complaint should not just be told that there is now an opportunity to pursue it via a civil route; the Bill is about providing an opportunity to pursue complaints via a civil route in addition to the housing standards enforcement work of local authorities. It would be helpful if, in summing up, the Minister reflected on what promotion and engagement work might be done with local authorities to ensure that that is clear in their approach.

A landlord in my constituency came to see me after my speech on Second Reading, when I said that the Bill was absolutely needed because of the actions of a small number of people. They were concerned about the Bill. I said quite bluntly that if they were concerned about a standard that meant they had to maintain their property as fit for human habitation, they really were in the wrong place entirely. Being fit for human habitation is about the lowest standard one can imagine for a property. It covers basics, such as making sure that the heating is on, that there is not undue damp, that it is safe and that the windows are fixed. It really is not the highest of standards. It is therefore right that there is another way for tenants to enforce it.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North (Eddie Hughes) said, most reasonable landlords will not fear the Bill at all; they have no reason to fear it. If people are maintaining a reasonable property, the Bill is utterly irrelevant to them. It will never have any impact on them; it will not change how they run their business; and it will not cost them any money. The only people who need worry are those who constantly ignore reasonable requests for repairs, those who have just about avoided prosecution on a couple of occasions because their actions did not quite come up to the criminal standard that is used for local authority offences and those who skimp at every opportunity. Those are the landlords who need to worry.

Landlords who are part of a quality assured system and who work closely with groups such as the Devon Landlords’ Association have absolutely nothing to worry about and will see absolutely no change to their business. As I said on Second Reading, the vast majority of landlords provide reasonable properties at a reasonable rent. Those who do not are the ones who will have to think about the implications of the Bill.

As the Bill covers civil matters, when they go to court they will be dealt with on the balance of probabilities, rather than against the criminal standard. Being able to enforce something as a civil matter gives a court slightly more leeway. When things are done to the criminal standard—beyond reasonable doubt—different evidential standards apply.

[Eddie Hughes]

With reference to recourse to the law, does my hon. Friend recognise that tenants who have complained about repairs are 50% more likely to be evicted?

[Kevin Foster]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. He will realise that I have to face the House and am not deliberately turning my back on him as I reply. He is absolutely right that if someone makes a legitimate complaint to their local authority or pursues a case under the Bill, there must be clear actions to be taken if so-called revenge evictions take place.

I am conscious that that danger may vary between areas. In some parts of the country, a large amount of housing may be available at reasonable prices, although I accept that affordability is an issue across the country. However, in other places, particularly the area represented by the promoter of the Bill, the cost and availability of housing are huge issues. The threat of having to move out is much more significant in such places than somewhere where people could just move down the road. There is a need to tackle revenge evictions, because if revenge evictions are the result of the Bill, it will not be a success.

Again, the vast majority of landlords respond to complaints fairly and reasonably and will work with their tenant in their mutual interests. If the landlord has a long-standing tenant, they do not have to pay agency fees to relet their property. Likewise, the tenant is able to make more of a life for themselves and does not have the disruption to their family life and their children’s schooling that comes with regular moves.

My hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North, as always, brings his vision and knowledge to this debate, and rightly highlights that we must not only ensure that the powers are used, but that revenge evictions do not take place.

[Andrew Bowie (West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine) (Con)]

What would my hon. Friend say to those who say—I disagree with them—that any legislation that impacts on landlords will have an unwarranted impact on the availability of housing, because people will be more unwilling to rent out their properties in areas where there is already a pressing demand for housing?

[Kevin Foster]

What I would say to them is, as an Opposition Member said earlier, “If you are renting out a property that is unfit for human habitation, you really should not be in the business of being a landlord. If that is the standard of what you are renting out then, bluntly, we do not want you to carry on.”

Will there be an impact on availability? Possibly, but—and it is a very big but—if someone cannot afford to do a property up to the standard where it is fit for habitation, they have an obvious option, which is to sell the property to someone who can. Another option is to discuss with the local authority whether planning permission needs to be granted to allow for a proper redevelopment.

I recently went to see a superb development in Paignton. It used to be poor-quality, guild house-style accommodation. In theory it was sheltered accommodation, but it was more like guild house-style accommodation, with shared bathrooms and facilities that were not particularly good. It was on the site of a former brewery. It was really not that great and the local housing association took the view that it did not meet the standard. It has been done up properly and there are now 22 new homes. The new apartments are modern properties that meet modern standards of disability access; the facilities reflect this era, rather than the 1950s; and young families have moved back in.

Let us be clear about what happens when we take action on housing standards. I know my hon. Friend the Member for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine (Andrew Bowie) will agree with this point; indeed, he probably made his intervention so that I would put it on the record. There is always the theory that when we introduce legislation and take action on housing standards, we might reduce the supply and make it more difficult or more expensive—because if we contract the housing supply, the price clearly goes up—for the tenant to find housing. However, in my experience when enforcement action is taken by local authorities, which will still happen, in many cases it results in the same amount of housing, or even slightly more of it, but this time of the right standard.

If a landlord feels that one of their properties is not up to standard—again, I refer to the landlord with a property in Paignton—they should start engaging with the local authority. Most councils will be reasonable and sensible if a landlord is trying to do the right thing. That could mean looking at how the property is used, perhaps converting the property or getting planning permission to allow the proper redevelopment of the site, as happened in Paignton. I am happy to take another intervention but I think that my hon. Friend can be reassured that, although there is always an argument about how much we do in terms of pushing measures so far that we reduce supply, this Bill will not do that. In fact, it could reduce the supply of completely unsuitable accommodation and increase the supply of the type of rental properties that we want to see.

Let me turn to the matter of implying terms into a lease—a sensible and proportionate measure. For those wondering what that means, this is about how the legislation creates the civil enforcement. Any tenancy will now contain this provision in the lease. As has been said, this is not about bringing back a piece of Victorian legislation, where the maximum rental price is now woefully out of date—probably as historical as the piece of legislation itself. Rather, this is about having a modern piece of legislation that does not come with the idea that every so often we need to decide the maximum rent to which it would apply. That makes this a more secure piece of tenancy legislation.

Following amendment in Committee, it would be interesting to understand how the Bill will affect those who rent out a property in a block where the leaseholders are the freeholders. A concerning issue came out following the fire safety work in Torbay after the Grenfell Tower fire. To be clear, there is not a large local authority owner of tower blocks in Torbay, as some hon. Members might have in their constituencies. We have a lot of apartment blocks and blocks of flats, particularly for those entering retirement, where the leaseholder is the freeholder—that is, the leaseholder owns a share in the freehold—and some of these flats may be rented out. In these cases, the freeholder, who is supposed to be dealing with certain issues and maintaining certain safety standards, has absolutely no incentive to enforce against its own shareholders. In fact, the shareholders are not very keen at all for the freeholder to take enforcement action.

There was an example in my constituency whereby a block had been built in the late 1960s—not a dissimilar era from that of Grenfell Tower. There were two apartments on a floor, which had two fire doors, then the corridor and then the door to the stairwell. About 20 years ago, the owner of one flat bought the other flat on the floor and turned it into one property along the whole floor, so instead of having two doors and the fire door to the stairwell, there was now just a fire door to the stairwell. This had not been picked up, partly because the freeholder had no great incentive to take action against the leaseholder, because the leaseholder was the freeholder. In the Minister’s contribution, she might wish to reflect on whether a tenant of a leaseholder would be able to enforce against the freeholder in such a situation.

[Matt Rodda]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that there is a related issue—cuts to fire services—to which he is almost referring in his very thoughtful contribution? I have had representations from Royal Berkshire fire and rescue service about the dire need for more fire safety officers, who take a long time to train. Many properties in multiple occupation actually have multiple fire safety issues, including small adjustments made by landlords and tenants, as the hon. Gentleman has described, and because of the nature of the buildings, which are often old and in some cases dilapidated. I have heard some very concerning stories about this in my county. Will he refer to that aspect?

--- Later in debate ---

[Kevin Foster]

My uncle, Station Officer John Griffin, was for many years a fire safety officer in Plymouth fire service and then Devon fire service, which Plymouth service became. I do not want to get into the grounds that will be covered by the inquiry, as that is not right, but there is an argument about whether the change made just over a decade ago by a previous Government—removing the fire service from being proactively involved in fire safety inspections and very much reducing the role of fire safety officers from the fire service—was the right move.

I put on my hat as a former member of the Local Government Association’s national fire services management committee and as a former member of the west midlands fire and rescue authority, and I do think we should look at rebuilding a more proactive role for the fire service in fire safety. To be fair, I will not criticise everything the previous Government did with the fire service. Some of the measures regarding home fire safety checks and moves to more proactive areas made sense. However, we may well reflect that the changes to the fire regulations and moving the fire safety inspections away from the fire service were perhaps not right. Perhaps we will move forward and review that, although there will need to be a balance in outcomes.

[Mr Speaker]

I very gently say to the hon. Gentleman, to whose contribution in mellifluous tones I am listening with close attention, that he has now spoken for a little longer than the Member in charge of the Bill. I know that he is not the sort of Member who would respond to any exhortation from any quarter to speak at length for any reason, because he just would not do that, but there is a lot of business to get through and I therefore express cautious optimism that he is now approaching his peroration.

[Kevin Foster]

As always, Mr Speaker, you can incisively see what is happening with my speeches; you have worked out that I was moving towards the end of my remarks. I know that some colleagues will be very disappointed that I am not going to try to break my record for a speech.

[Chris Philp (Croydon South) (Con)]

My hon. Friend speaks so rarely.

[Kevin Foster]

My hon. Friend is enjoying this because it is such a rare chance to hear me in the Chamber.

This Bill is very worthwhile, and it is appropriate and proportionate. It has been strengthened in a welcome way in Committee with regard to the provisions on communal areas. I am pleased to support its Third Reading, and look forward to hearing the Minister’s response to the points raised during the debate.