Public Health (Coronavirus) (Protection from Eviction) (England) (No. 2) Regulations 2021

Lord Etherton Excerpts

Thursday 18th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Etherton (CB) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, it is a great honour to make my maiden speech in this debate and I thank the Minister and other noble Lords for their warm welcome today. That I am in position to make my maiden speech today is due to the support and kindness of many people. Time constraints mean that I can mention only a few by name. I thank, in particular, my supporters, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, and the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hallett; the Lord Convenor and his private secretary, Kate Long, and executive assistant, Daisy Christy; the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, and Donna Davidson. My thanks go also to the Clerk of the Parliaments, Black Rod and all the staff who have been so helpful to me.

I do not wish to comment directly on the merits of the statutory instrument, as that might be considered to be raising a controversial issue, but as Master of the Rolls and Head of Civil Justice until the beginning of this year, I would like briefly to remind the House of what the judges were doing in relation to residential possession proceedings from the first lockdown in March last year. In that month, I issued a direction requiring a stay of possession proceedings for 90 days. The object was initially to consider how possession actions could proceed appropriately in the pandemic and the lockdown. There were extensions of the stay until September 2020, the final one to enable the courts to consider, once the stay ended, how best to determine the anticipated thousands of residential possession actions that had to be heard. I asked Mr Justice Knowles to chair a unique cross-sector working group to advise on new court procedures in light of the extraordinary conditions. It advised me on a new procedural framework which would, in particular, support vulnerable tenants in the litigation process and encourage compromise and restraint on the part of social landlords, in particular.

Following the ending of the procedural stay, the Government in November 2020 secured the implementation of the first of their three successive statutory instruments restricting the carrying out of evictions by bailiffs. I pay tribute to those judges, overwhelmingly district judges and deputy district judges in the county courts, effectively the civil justice front line, and the members of Sir Robin Knowles’s working group, who have worked and continue to work so hard in seeking to make residential possession proceedings as appropriate as possible in the present, difficult circumstances.