Renters (Reform) Bill

Lord Adonis Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 15th May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, I will address the fundamental change that the Bill makes, which is to Section 21 evictions. Although there is a difference between the two sides of the House on this issue in terms of what will happen, and Ministers have rightly been asked what their timescale is, the Minister set out some measures that will be taken. She mentioned one or two figures but did not give any timescale as to when the courts would be ready. None the less, given what my noble friend on the Front Bench said, it is pretty clear what will happen: by the time the Bill is enacted, and we have had a general election and probably a change of Government, the Government will not have brought this Section 21 abolition into play, but the next Government will do so, so we will get the change.

However—and this goes to the fundamental issues that have been raised about the PRS—the question then, given that we are likely to see the abolition of Section 21, probably within the next year to 18 months, or however quickly legislation can be brought in by the next Government, is what will happen in the courts in respect of the new requirements for eviction, and the new burdens there will be with Section 8 procedures, anti-social behaviour requirements, and so on. What will happen to see that the courts interact with the private rented sector in a way that does not stymie supply and lead to another generation of seriously dissatisfied and maltreated tenants?

The House needs to understand the scale of the issue here. The backlog in the county courts, which deal with these issues at the moment, is not minor. On the latest figures, published at the end of last year, the average time taken to go to trial in the county court is over a year—52.3 weeks—for small claims, and 78.2 weeks in respect of multi/fast-track claims, which will encompass quite a number of those envisaged under the Bill. Compared with 2019, that is 15.7 weeks longer for small claims, and 19.1 weeks longer for multi-track claims, so it is no exaggeration to say that the county court system has, in effect, broken down in dealing with housing cases at the moment. Unless that can be rectified—it appears it will be rectified on the basis of introducing the new regime, not before the new regime can be brought in—we will get a crisis in the management of the private rented sector, which needs to be addressed.

Apart from some fairly unconvincing measures so far for improving the county court system, we do not have any answers to this. The Minister referred to digitisation; well, as a habitué of these schemes in government, I think the idea that a nationwide county court digitisation scheme will produce dramatic improvements any decade soon is probably remote, but it will certainly not do so in the next few years. The sums of money the Minister referred to—I think it was £12 million—in her opening statement are trifling in this respect.

Therefore, I scouted around for the best course of dealing with these issues, if we do not want to see a crisis in the private rented sector as we bring in the new regime and while we have a problem in the court system. The best solution I have come across, scouting all of those that have been put forward over the last 10 years or so, is bringing in a dedicated housing court: a streamlined judicial process focusing specifically on housing cases—eviction, anti-social behaviour and enforcement measures.

It turns out that this has been considered seriously. There was a consultation on it in 2018. The case for it, which was put forward by the Government at the time, seems to me still to be compelling. The consultation looked at the problems with the current system and at streamlining redress schemes and considered the options for doing so. Paragraph 10 of the call for evidence stated:

“The government wants to explore whether a specialist Housing Court could make it easier for all users of court and tribunal services to resolve disputes, reduce delays and to secure justice in housing cases. The potential of establishing a Housing Court has been raised by some members of the judiciary. Presently, housing cases are heard in a range of settings. The First-tier Tribunal (Property Chamber) deals with a variety of specialised housing and property disputes. However other housing cases, including possession cases and claims for disrepair and dilapidations, are heard in the county court … The processes and procedures involved can often be confusing for tenants, landlords and property owners in leasehold cases”.


That was the Government’s view in 2018 when there were far shorter queues in the county courts for dealing with these issues, so should we be considering a more radical answer to this problem of judicial overload if we are going to see, as we clearly are going to see under this new regime, a great onus on the speedy resolution of housing cases? A Select Committee of the other place recommended a dedicated housing court at the same time as the Government were consulting on it. Clive Betts, the chair of that Select Committee, said that

“many more tenants may go to court over landlords refusing to do repairs, because they will no longer fear retaliatory evictions”—[Official Report, Commons, 23/10/23; col. 639.]

under Section 21, so we could see an escalation in the number of cases. A dedicated housing court that can bring together the various different parts of the judiciary that deal with these issues at the moment and set in place clear and expeditious timelines for dealing with these cases seems to me to be an option well worth exploring. I say this to my noble friend on the Front Bench as well because we will have to deal with exactly the same issues in a year’s time.

The noble Lord, Lord Frost, set the wider context, which is a massive undersupply of new homes in both the private sector and the public sector. I think he said that 1978 was the last year when we got anywhere remotely close to the 300,000 a year target, which went back to Harold Macmillan when he was Housing Minister after 1951. Actually, it is only in the 1960s that there were more than 300,000 new homes being built per year across a whole decade, which is a crucial thing to understand about the last phase of significant housebuilding in line with projected demand. The noble Lord said that if we had continued at the rate that the French have built since the late 1970s there would be 4 million new homes. The French now have 12 million more homes than we have, population-adjusted, so there is a huge supply problem. When you go back to the 1960s, when more than 300,000 homes were being built, with a peak in 1967 when 400,000 new homes were built, developments were almost equally balanced between the private sector and the state. It was the huge effort on the part of local authorities and new town corporations which produced a big surge in housebuilding in the 1960s.

We cannot get away from the fact that, if we are going to see a return to the levels of home building that are required to meet demand, and to get to or exceed the 300,000 figure, then not only will we need planning reform that incentivises the private sector to build but we will have to fundamentally change the role of the state. The state is going to have to become a major property developer again for the first time since the demise of council housebuilding in the 1970s. That means hugely empowering local authorities; it means looking at the case for significant urban extensions on the model of the new town corporations, which did so much of the building in the 1960s and 1970s; and it means a readiness to make significant new public investments, which would also mean harnessing the potential of pension funds and others with big concentrations of capital to undertake these investments.

My final point is that the peak year for home building since the Second World War was 1967, which was also the year when Milton Keynes, the largest of the new towns, was established. There is a clear connection between those two events, which demonstrated the mentality of a state that was prepared to take the responsibility for significant home building at scale in new communities. That level of ambition is going to be fundamental in dealing with the housing crisis. It is the only way that we will deal with the underlying issue of supply, which is what is leading to the pressures that we are debating today.