Renters’ Rights Bill

Lord Best Excerpts

Tuesday 14th October 2025 Lords Chamber

Finally, Amendment 19C includes a power to end the exemption in the future; for example, once the building safety programme has been completed. However, the amendment does not put a date on this to ensure that the exemption remains in place for as long as necessary. I hope that, when the time comes, the House will agree to this Motion.

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, on the compromise he has achieved on this important amendment. I must declare a family interest: my wife owns rented property in Dorset. I shall speak in opposition to the amendment to Motion C in the name of my noble friend Lord Cromwell, well-intentioned though I believe it is.

My noble friend’s amendment would mean that a landlord who had gained possession of a property using the grounds of an intention to sell would be able to relet that property after six months if it had not been sold, rather than having to wait up to a year, as specified in the Bill. In normal circumstances, one would expect a sale to be agreed within around six months, or, if not, the landlord would still want to go for a sale rather than relet the property, so the issue would not arise in most instances where this ground for possession could be used. However, the Government want to prevent an unscrupulous minority of landlords using these grounds for eviction as a way of bypassing the Bill’s fundamental intention of giving renters greater security. The fear is that the landlord will profess to want to sell but has no such intention; they simply want to evict the tenant. They may want to switch to more profitable Airbnb-style lettings, or they may want to replace a tenant who is complaining about the landlord’s neglect of essential repairs and find a more malleable or more desperate tenant.

There is some evidence of such cheating behaviour from Scotland, where similar legislation has not had constraints on how quickly a vacated property can be relet, so the Government want to prevent abuses. The Bill needs to ban reletting for long enough to deter a landlord from misusing these grounds for possession. The question is how long a pause before re-letting is permitted would be long enough. Let us take a case where a renter is complaining about damp and mould. The property needs, say, £15,000 to be spent on rectifying various defects. If the tenant is paying £900 a month, it would be advantageous for the landlord to go without six months’ rent, that is £5,300, to be rid of that tenant and find someone who will tolerate the poor conditions. Having to forego 12 months’ rent before reletting, well over £10,000 in this case, would present a more robust deterrent against using this no-fault eviction route to removing the tenant.

I can see that a compromise of a nine-month ban on reletting would probably be acceptable all round, but in the absence of that halfway house, it is safer and more foolproof to stay with the Bill’s 12-month term and reject this amendment.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

My Lords, first, I join the noble Lord, Lord Best, in praising the noble Lord, Lord Young, for his tenacity and commitment to shared ownership owners, who really are the raw end of the market and get a raw deal in many ways. He has really shown his mettle in his commitment to this. It is also fair to thank the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, for listening and doing something about it. I hope that her commitment to shared owners continues in other areas that we will look at.

Turning to Motion C1, from the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, which it appears we will vote on, it is very difficult to follow the eloquence of the noble Lords, Lord Pannick and Lord Cromwell, but I will try. The noble Lord, Lord Best, has already highlighted what we call “revenge evictions”, and we are approaching that issue from the position of working—for many years, in the case of my noble friend Lady Grender—with renter groups and renter charities. From that, we get a real idea of what is happening at the sharp end, which is not quite as narrow as we might like to think it is. There are probably more unscrupulous landlords out there than the number of homes that take over one year to sell.

On revenge evictions, there is the risk that a tenant will be kicked out because they ask for improvements—the noble Lord gave a very good example of that, but there are many others. In certain parts of the country where rents are not as expensive, six months’ rent would make it worth while for the landlord to kick somebody out on that ground if they ask for even some modest accessibility improvements and so on. We are arguing over six, nine or 12 months, and the truth is that only time will tell. What I seek from the Government is some reassurance that this will be looked at, because that could very well be the case.

The noble Lord, Lord Best, mentioned Scotland. It is interesting that the properties in one in five evictions that were made on this repossession ground then turned up on their database as still being for sale. That gives weight to the fact that people are prepared to do it, because in Scotland they have no period for not re-letting.

In several debates, I mentioned that I chatted to my women friends who are landlords; I referred to them as my “landladies”. I put this to them, and they looked at me as if it were a weird question. They said, “If I were concerned about my property sitting empty, I am actually able to sell my property with the tenants still in the property while the ‘For Sale’ board is up on the door, so I would talk to them and say that the ‘For Sale’ board is going up, but I certainly wouldn’t be serving notice until I was certain that I had a buyer”. That is due to—this is a statistic that has not been bandied about—the length of time it sometimes takes to sell a house. Interestingly, they did not see it as the kind of emotive, big, terrible, unfair problem that noble Lords have made it out to be. By keeping your tenants in the property, you are not only getting the rent but—much more importantly, in our view—you are giving your tenants more time to find a home.