Renters’ Rights Bill

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Tuesday 4th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, like a number of other speakers, I begin by referring to my entry in the register of interests. I declare that I am a landlord of some rented properties on my own account, and I am a landlord in a capacity as trustee for quite a lot more.

At the risk of stating the obvious, but I think this is rather important, houses are wasting assets. They always need refreshing and maintaining, and that is a predicament that affects everyone in this country in one way or another. They are also, and I think this is also significant, a crucial part of our national infra- structure. While we have heard a lot recently about the failures to properly maintain our national infrastructure —the railways, roads and water systems—we do not really think about housing in that context, but of course it should be thought of that way. If you want to look at an example of what happens if you do not carry out proper maintenance on buildings, you need go no further than the building where we are this evening, which is an absolute scandal.

Although we sometimes might have thought to the contrary today, the private rental sector is not homogenous, and there clearly has been abuse, which the Government are right to address. Nevertheless, as is also clear, the private landlord/tenant process is an essential element of our housing scene in this country and, as the previous speaker has just said, quite distinct from owner-occupation. Getting it right as much as we can in the real world—I say that because I want to contrast it with the kinds of desktop studies that sometimes accompany debates of this sort—is crucial for individual families’ well-being and the wider provision of housing in the country taken as a whole. We must not throw out the metaphorical baby with the bathwater.

However, we cannot do that unless we start from the presumption, which has to be based on realism about the real world, that both landlords and tenants are not scheming crooks. Still, there must be usable mechanisms that can cut in quickly and unequivocally against tenants and landlords if roguery is suspected. It is a question of balance. Some of the changes in the Bill seem desirable and move in the direction of improving that balance, while others perhaps go in the opposite direction. As we shall be discussing those in more detail at later stages, I will not go into them now. All I will say as a landlord is that if the rent is not paid, it has the same effect as opening a wallet and taking cash out of it, and trashing a house or flat is the same as trashing someone’s car. They are not victimless activities —on the contrary.

From the tenant’s point of view, security of tenure is clearly an important aspect, and I have considerable sympathy with the proposals to end no-fault eviction. However, market rent is a very slippery concept, as the noble Lord, Lord Desai, touched on. Where I live, in the north of England, rent levels in Cleator Moor are very different from those in Chelsea. That has a considerable bearing because, where landlords are being expected to improve houses at the behest of the Government, you find that building costs have recently been increasing, as far as I can see, way ahead of inflation, so the whole thing gets into a muddle if we are not careful. There is an important question for the long run: if the code by which private landlords are expected to operate turns—de facto, not necessarily de jure—into some kind of housing benefit, what are the consequences and implications of that?

It is one of the mysteries of the world we live in that the land and housing market does not appear necessarily to follow the rules that are generally thought to apply under the wider laws of economics; we have to look only at the Government’s recent experience with calculating profitability in agriculture to see that. When there is a conflict in this sort of context between experience and theory, the experience of the real marketplace must always be right.

Simply repeating historic mantras is not very helpful in this context. What is needed is a complete rethink from first principles about a whole range of both the subject matter of the Bill and the inexorably connected flanking measures. The noble Lord, Lord Desai, has been doing a bit of that, as did the noble Lord, Lord Best, earlier in the debate. If we do not do that, we will end up simply going down a cul de sac.

As I have said already, the whole housing sector, just like other infrastructure, is a wasting asset. That has to be at the centre of our thinking and has to be understood by Governments—not only this Government, but Governments of all political persuasions—and the private rental sector is an integral component of that. My belief is that the only way it can function in the national interest is if it works for both landlords and tenants. That depends as much on the balance within the legislation as it does on the specificity of each and every element of it. If the arrangements—taken together with the Government’s involvement outside but having a bearing on this market—do not achieve that, the Bill will simply become an Act that fails.