Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Lord Foster of Bath and Earl of Lytton
The Earl of Lytton
My Lords, this series of amendments has raised some very interesting points. At Second Reading, I suggested a means whereby prospective tenants might get access to information on landlords who were signed up to a reputable body with established standards that it imposed on its members, and with current and valid membership of a dispute resolution and redress scheme. I am told that there is no such facility. My thought was to bring out the best and to lead from the front with the positives rather than try to deal with the negatives and, in so doing, squeeze out those rogues we have heard about. It was suggested to me by a residential managing agent of my acquaintance that it would be a bit like Checkatrade or TripAdvisor, particularly if it had user or customer—that is, tenant—feedback built into the system. However, I cannot see that that sort of thing can work by compulsion.
I am not an advocate of a compulsory scheme, as proposed by noble Lords in some of the amendments. It would have large costs; it would be readily circumvented, especially by the rogues; and it would suffer from a measure of disregard through ignorance among the 1.5 million one-unit property landlords. I tend, therefore, towards the solution of the noble Lord, Lord Flight, but, again, with some caveats. I would particularly like to know what proposed new paragraph 27A(2)(a) means in terms of the word “category”, and, with apologies to him, where Airbnb fits into the framework. The Government have already moved to facilitate this trend, which may be here today and gone tomorrow. How, therefore, do you keep track of that as a “category” in terms of art? A holiday let today may be an assured shorthold tenancy tomorrow, or vice versa. I see great practical problems in this regard.
There is, however, another problem about candid declaration, if one is going down this road. How frequently, given this quite rapid churn in the system, do you have to trawl for the information to ensure that it is bang up to date? What happens when something that has planning consent for, for example, holiday lets turns out to be on an 18-month assured shorthold tenancy, potentially in breach of planning control? For that matter, what happens when it operates in the other direction? There could be issues to do with planning or potential breach of private contract, and I wonder who gets to see and use the information garnered by this process. There is quite a quite dangerous mix of stuff here, with all sorts of people coming in with different motives. The truth is that, over many years, housing has become commoditised. It has gone beyond being the roof over your head and the security for your family; it is now an investment vehicle, a pension pot and a place to park a significant sum safely where you can manage it and see what is happening, as opposed to subcontracting it to somebody who manages portfolios on the stock exchange, where you may have less control. That brings all sorts of different motivations and methods of managing, owning and occupying property.
I said earlier that I would hesitate, if I were a local government official—which I am not—to delve into this issue. It has very significant resource implications. I still tend, therefore, to the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Flight, but it has a number of holes and would provide far from perfect coverage. That said, we are beginning to drill down and head in the right direction, which is somehow to find a method whereby people will voluntarily sign up because they see it as being in their interests to do so—because they want to be seen as the good guys and the providers of quality, and not to be associated with the rogues about whom we have heard so much today.
I hope the Government will feel that there is merit in that. Perhaps with one or two tweaks—a combination of some of the things discussed in this group of amendments—we could end up with something of long-term benefit that would defuse some of the adversarial nature of what we have been talking about, which is corrosive to the sector and to relationships between landlords and tenants and ultimately may end up leading us around the houses—excuse the pun—several times without achieving what we need: the long-term betterment of the landlord-tenant relationship in the private rented housing stock.
Lord Foster of Bath
My Lords, we seem to be discussing two slightly separate issues in this group of amendments. The first is whether or not we need to have a register of all private sector rented landlords, and I certainly believe that we need to have that. As my noble friend Lord Greaves made very clear, if we do not know who owns a particular property or who is its landlord, it is very difficult to take enforcement action against them. It is also very difficult, as the noble Lord, Lord Flight, has pointed out, for a number of bits of government legislation to be effectively enforced without having such a register—for example, the requirement for landlords to vet the immigration status of their tenants.
Amendment 27 from the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, proposes a mandatory register and suggests that the way of filling the data in it is by requiring all landlords to sign up to it. As the noble Lord, Lord Flight, has pointed out, there are some difficulties with that: those landlords who are not particularly good, those who are on the border of being rogue landlords, are not likely to bother to provide the information. The noble Lord provides an alternative means of filling the data sets: using the form that is initially sent in for registering for council tax, although, as my noble friend Lord Greaves has pointed out, that is done by very many tenants only once in a blue moon.
So there are problems with how we fill the data set, but what is most important is that we hear from the Minister whether it is the Government’s view that we should be having a national database. Whether it is run at individual local authority level or nationally I am not that concerned about at this stage, but it is important to know what the Government’s thinking is about having a database of all private sector landlords. Then perhaps we could get together from all sides of the House to work out the details of how we could fill the data set and ensure that people registered appropriately.
The second issue is local authorities operating an accreditation or licensing scheme. There is a straightforward difference between Amendment 18 from the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, and my noble friend’s Amendment 33A. My noble friend suggests that this should be voluntary and local authorities can decide whether or not to do it, while the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, is suggesting that all local authorities must do it. I make it clear that I side entirely with my noble friend. It is right and proper that local authorities do this, but it is also important that we recognise that some local authorities have already found ways of doing it; across many parts of London there is already such a scheme, and other councils—for example, by using an Article 4 direction—have been able to do that.
Still, it is important that we treat these two issues as separate: first, with regard to the list of all private sector rented landlords so that we can ensure that legislation that we pass in your Lordships’ House will be enforced; and, secondly, that we allow discretion to local authorities to decide how best they wish to operate in the best interests of the people they seek to represent in local authority areas.