Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 22nd March 2023 Lords Chamber

This is not the stuff of simple arithmetic. The Government may be looking hard into all these things but, until we have some qualitative data, going back to the point of the noble Lord, Lord Foster, we will be adrift. We are at risk of making policies that produce an adverse reaction in their target area, because you never know what the intuitive response will be. There will be a disruptive effect, which is avoidable. There is a sensible way and a disruptive way of doing this. I hope we take the former route.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, who was a member of the Built Environment Committee when we discussed this issue. I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, for his excellent introduction; I agreed with probably most of what he said, which is quite unusual for me.

There is a housing problem. We are here to talk about the short-term issue and the relationship between supply and demand, the short-term issue and location, as other noble Lords have said. It comes back to the question of where the workers—the term is a little insulting—the people who need to live locally, will live. It varies across the UK. As noble Lords will know, I live in Cornwall and sometimes on the Isles of Scilly. I have a bit of data from Cornwall Council that puts this into perspective. According to the council, we have 13,292 second homes in Cornwall. I am not sure how that was measured or how you define a second home, which is partly what we are talking about now, but that is a pretty high figure.

On the question of where people might live, the same council and its deputy leader have said that there are 6,000 affordable homes in Cornwall which have planning permission, but only 600 are being built. One has to ask why. Is it that the developers are waiting for a year or two so that they can get a better sale price, or what? We need that information.

The noble Earl, Lord Lytton, said that he did not have any evidence of people being kicked out of their longer-term lets for Airbnb, but there was evidence of this in Plymouth in a local paper article about six months ago. It named the person—I think—and where it took place. It involved a man who was working in some local authority role. He had been there for many years, but one day his landlord, who lived downstairs or upstairs in the house, gave him notice to quit, because he said he was going to sell it. So, the tenant had to leave. I do not know whether he found anywhere else; history does not relate. However, he did keep an eye on the property, and six months later he found it advertised on Airbnb. Whatever the rights and wrongs of this, it is keeping the availability of accommodation—both affordable and unaffordable homes—in a pretty nasty state wherever this happens. I recall asking the Airbnb witness, when he or she came to our committee, whether they felt it would be all right for somebody to be kicked out like that and for the council worker to sleep on a park bench—that was his alternative. I did not get much of an answer; I did not really expect one.

There is a problem here, but it is only in some places, as other noble Lords have said. There are other places where it is probably not necessary to have legislation, and that is the purpose behind Amendment 441. For me, the most important thing is to have the ability to register these properties when the local authority believes that it is necessary. So, I favour “permitting” in Amendment 441, but if the Government think that it is essential around the whole country, we will have to look at this again.

My worry about Amendment 443 is the inclusion of “90 days” in the definition of a short-term rental, but as the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, said, this a probing amendment. It is easy to ask: would this apply to a rental if it is let for 90 days, or if it is available for let for 90 days? Who is going to check? It is a bit difficult to define something which will probably cover the whole country—ditto my comments about Amendment 444. That amendment talks about one room in a house, which sounds fine. If you have a three-bedroom house and you let one, that sounds fine. However, there may be people who then build a bigger house in order to let multiple rooms—I do not know how many; it could be three, four, five or six—and make a lot of money out of it, and they could get away with it because it is a series of single rooms. All these special exclusions could make it more difficult for this legislation to work.

The amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Foster, are absolutely essential. This is one of the things we discovered with Airbnb, as the noble Lord said: it does not have to comply with any of these regulations. Fire and safety are fundamental to any property that is let. I know many people who run holiday lets, and they moan like anything that they have to get all these certificates. But if you have rented something, whether it is for a week, a day or a year, you still expect the same level of safety. It is amazing that people think they can get away with not having this.

Some noble Lords will have met the people doing the R&R, who told us what is going to happen with the restoration of this building. My first question to them was, “And what are you doing about fire extinguishers, fire monitoring, and extinguishers in the roof in particular, after Notre-Dame?” They said, “Well, that will come later, when we’ve decided what to do and started the work”. We all know that the most likely time for an old building to catch fire is when the contractors are in. That probably applies as much to lets registered or unregistered with the local authority as it does to this place—which we all love, of course.

In supporting all these amendments, my final comment, therefore, is that it is going to cost local authorities money to do these things. We know that. They must have the money and be allocated the money, and they must be able to spend it on what they like. Everybody will then think that this is all fair and above board, and they will sleep better in their beds at night.

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

My Lords, I am speaking as a former member of the Built Environment Committee; I was a member when the committee’s report was drawn up. I thank the chairman, the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, and his committee clerk for sending me a copy of the letter received by the committee this week, I understand, from the Minister who has accepted responsibility for this issue. It is, as it turns out, the Minister from DCMS. Before I go any further, I say that in a previous debate it was extremely frustrating for the Government Front Bench to reply, “Well, that was a matter for the Department for Transport”, and for no answer to be forthcoming. I hope we will not get into that dead end today, because this is a significant set of amendments on a significant proposal in the Bill. As this debate has already made clear, it has a very clear crossover into the housing market and the availability of housing in many areas of the country.

When the committee commenced its inquiry, it consisted of members with a very wide range of views—from those who had an extremely free-market approach to the housing situation and believed that the market would determine it, to those at the other end who thought that the best solution to our housing problem was a state allocation system. So, we had a very wide range of views in the committee, but we received such convincing evidence during the inquiry that it was not that difficult for us to produce a consensus report. The amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, are very much exploring with the Government their response to the committee’s report, and I have signed Amendment 441 in particular. The Government’s wording in the Bill is that the Secretary of State can propose regulations “requiring or permitting” local authorities to do something, but the amendment would delete “requiring” so that the Secretary of State’s regulations can only be about “permitting” them.

I am also privy to what my noble friend Lady Thornhill would have said if she had not tested positive for Covid yesterday: “My first major concern is that there are several ‘may’ or ‘must’ statements in the Bill, which could either require or permit action, and there is a world of difference between the two. We are being asked to agree a general principle and accept that there will be additional shorter consultations to bring forward a set of regulations on the details of how such a registration scheme would operate.” My noble friend Lady Thornhill shares my aversion to the Government having unfettered power and, on this occasion, even being able to restrict the time for consultation. The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, has spoken about that. I hope that the Minister, despite being from the wrong department, will be able to tell us what the outcome of that consultation process was.

--- Later in debate ---

On Amendments 441, 443, 444 and 446, tabled by my noble friend Lord Moylan, he has suggested how certain elements of the registration scheme could be designed, and I am grateful for his thoughts on these important questions of detail. As he will have heard, we intend to consult both on the registration scheme and on the potential for short-term let use classes, and we will need to reflect on the responses to those consultations in coming to a view on the matters he has raised. That will of course, as I alluded to earlier, include giving careful consideration to the interaction between the two sets of reforms. Although the Government wish to move quickly in this area, it is also important that we get this right for the affected communities. I look forward to working with him and other noble Lords as we seek to do so.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

I should be grateful if the Minister could clarify a question that the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, and I put: what are the Government going to be consulting on? Is there a document?

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist]

I will be coming to that in a moment.

Finally, I turn to Amendments 445, 445A, 445B and 447, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath. These amendments concern the detail of how the registration scheme will operate, particularly in relation to data sharing and the safety of properties. These issues will indeed be explored in the consultation, and a registration scheme will be designed to ensure that all providers of short-term lets are aware of their legal responsibilities to ensure health and safety in their properties. Infrequent use should not mean that short-term lets do not need to meet safety standards, but that issue will be considered in much more detail in the consultation.

The shape of England’s guest accommodation landscape has changed greatly over the past 15 years. Online platforms have enabled greater choice in accommodation for holidaymakers and have brought many benefits to the tourism sector. This proliferation of a new type of guest accommodation has, however, been unregulated, which has prompted concerns including on safety, as my noble friend highlighted. We want to ensure that England continues to provide a safe and competitive guest accommodation offer, while also supporting those who live and work in our local visitor economies.

That is why the Government launched a call for evidence on this topic, as an important first step in understanding how we can ensure we continue to reap the benefits of short-term lets, while also protecting holidaymakers and local interests. This initial call for evidence, which ran between June and September last year, was indeed led by DCMS, as it follows on from previous work that that department did, as short-term lets are an integral part of the UK visitor economy. A report on that call for evidence will be published at the same time as the consultation on the registration scheme, this summer, and I reassure noble Lords that both departments are working together closely because of their shared interest in the scheme.

It has become clear from the call for evidence process that there is a compelling case for introducing light-touch regulation in this sector, and that is what we are intending to do through the Bill. The Government are also introducing a registration scheme for short-term lets through the Bill. The details of how the scheme will operate will be explored through a public consultation, which will be published before this year’s Summer Recess with a view to the register being up and running as soon as possible thereafter. The consultation is intended to flesh out many different aspects of how the scheme would operate, such as what information would be collected, who would administer the scheme, which requirements should be satisfied as a condition of registering and whether any fees would be charged; it will also cover any enforcement powers, which were asked about by an earlier contributor to the debate.

The important matters on safety that noble Lords raised—