Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 22nd March 2023 Lords Chamber

The Government said they are committed to ensuring that England has high-quality tourist accommodation. Amendments 445 and 445A, together with Amendment 447 which provides definitions, would help achieve this. I believe that these amendments on data collection and sharing, and on safety requirements, are useful additions to the Bill. I beg to move.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, for his introductory remarks. He made some important points. The points I am going to make are slightly different.

I will speak to the four amendments in my name in this group: Amendments 441, 443, 444 and 446. I do so with the cross-party support of other members of the Built Environment Select Committee, as is seen from the names subscribed to the amendments. I am glad to see various noble Lords here who are, or who have been, members of that committee and who may wish to speak in this short debate, which is principally focused on the Government’s proposals in the Bill to empower themselves to introduce a national registration scheme for short-term let properties.

These amendments arise from a short inquiry conducted by the Built Environment Select Committee last year in which we looked at the effects of Airbnb and similar type properties on various localities. It was chaired not by me at that time but by my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe. As committees tend to, we reached some conclusions we agreed on and had various questions that we wanted to ask the Government about the national registration scheme, which by then we were aware they were bringing forward and proposing. The Government clearly see it as central to their approach to dealing with the problems that have been identified.

One of the things we were able to agree on—here I part company slightly with the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, as was mentioned in Committee only two days ago—was that, while there was a problem, the evidence showed us that it was quite localised. It is a problem which exists in particular types of localities, including densely populated urban areas such as central London and in holiday areas. We did not see the case for a compulsory national registration scheme. We did see a case for local authorities in areas that are adversely affected to be empowered to have a registration scheme that they could apply locally.

Beyond that, we had a number of questions. We put our views and questions in a letter to the Government, as one does, and we addressed it—thinking we were doing the right thing—to the Secretary of State at the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. Our first surprise was being told, after a little while, that the reply would in fact come from a different department—the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. So I first ask my noble friend to explain clearly why a scheme so closely identified with the Secretary of State at DLUHC should in fact be handled, in policy and implementation terms, by a totally different department. It is of course entirely up to the Government to decide how to manage these things, but I think noble Lords will want to know who is in charge, so to speak, and where they should turn if they have views on the matter.

As I said, we received a reply from a Minister at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport that was slightly odd in some ways. First, he appeared to think that the Bill in this Committee had already been enacted.

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

It had of course passed the Commons at that stage, and that may have been the cause of his confusion, but I know that noble Lords here would want him to be aware that the Bill is far from enacted. In fact, it is further from being enacted at this stage in Committee than it possibly was on the first day on which we sat to consider it. The Bill that emerges may yet not be quite the Bill that the Minister thinks is in force, but I am sure that all of this will be sorted out for him by his officials.

In his reply, he referred to the call for evidence that the Government issued last year—I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, for bringing this up. He referred to it, saying that the Government had gone out and called for evidence, but he gave no explanation of why, months later, we still have not seen the evidence submitted as a result of that call. I am sure it would be immensely helpful to your Lordships, in considering this particular aspect of the Bill, to know what evidence the Government received. So my second question to my noble friend is: can she tell us when we will see the evidence that was submitted to the Government last year, with any conclusions that they might have drawn from it at this stage? In particular, will noble Lords have an opportunity to see it before we arrive at Report, or—this would be very helpful—while we are still in Committee? The essential thrust of what I will say in the remainder of my speech—I think noble Lords might be grasping it—is that we are being asked to empower the Government to introduce a national registration scheme without being given any information on what it might contain.

This brings me to the remaining part of the letter that the committee received in reply to its polite inquiries. We asked some questions about how this would operate, but we were told by the Minister that none of these questions could be answered at this stage because they would all be the subject of public consultation. Public consultation is a very good and necessary thing, and we have no criticism of the Government for committing to undertake public consultation on the scheme, but you have to consult on something: you have to put some proposals to the public in order to elicit their opinion. My question, as a result of reading the letter from the Minister, is: do the Government have any idea at all of what they will put to the public? If they do—I very much hope they do—can my noble friend say what they are?

The content of these four amendments follows from this. I will run through them briefly, because all of them are probing amendments, seeking an answer from the Government to questions raised in our letter. It seemed very good to be able to give the Government this opportunity, in Committee, to answer questions that they were not able to answer a few weeks ago.

Amendment 441 raises the question of whether the Government have it in mind that this should be a national and compulsory scheme or one which has the local discretion which the committee favoured—we would like to know.

Amendment 443 raises the question of what the Government mean by a “short-term” let. It is put down as “90 days” in the amendment, but that is for probing purposes. Do they mean 90 days? What exactly will count as a short-term let for this purpose? If they do not have an exact figure—90 days, 80 days, 100 days—could they give us a range of what they think constitutes a short-term let before they go out to public consultation?

Amendment 444 raises a question about something on which the committee agreed—I should have said that earlier—that any national registration scheme should not apply to rooms being let out in one’s own home. In fact, the Government encourage people to let out rooms in their own home by giving them a tax break on the rental income received, so that appears to be one government policy. Is it the Government’s intention to include rooms let out in one’s principal home in a national registration scheme, and, if so, how does that mesh with the tax credits and the signals given by the tax system to those who do so?

The final question we wanted to know the answer to was: how will this be paid for? Whether it is a national or local scheme, I would have thought that it will almost certainly be implemented by local authorities, or that they will have a major role in its implementation, so how will they be remunerated for this? Fees will no doubt be charged, so how high will the fees be? Will the local authority be able to set its own fees in local circumstances, or will it be limited to charging only on a cost-recovery basis? Amendment 446 proposes cost recovery, but it is not a proposal; it is a probing amendment. This is a chance for the Government to say what they are thinking about fees and remuneration for local authorities.

Those are the four questions to which we did not feel we had received proper answers. I am sure that my noble friend the Minister will be able to give us some assurance and answers on those matters, and on the other matters I raised earlier, when she responds to the group. I add that, apart from this very short debate, I think that noble Lords will have no other opportunity, other than on Report, to have a say on the scheme before it comes to be proposed and no doubt incorporated in a statutory instrument or some other measure. So this is an important juncture—one in which noble Lords, I think, will want to hear some answers from my noble friend, as I do.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, in an earlier debate on these topics on Monday, we heard the noble Lord, Lord Foster, discussing Southwold, where I spent many happy hours on holiday as a child and which now has, if I remember my figures from Monday rightly, only 500 permanent homes out of 1,400 homes. In that same debate the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, referred, as he did again today, to the fact that have not just a numbers problem but a distribution problem around the country because of the lack of available data.

We are all aware of the considerable issues presented in parts of our country related to second homes and short-term lets. That situation was clearly articulated by my noble friend Lady Hayman in our debate on Monday, when she articulated that communities are hollowed out because of the second homes left empty for large parts of the year, which means that all the community facilities that permanent residents need struggle to be viable. In addition, we see local house prices forced out of affordability for local people as second homes and holiday lets contribute to the housing pressures.

An amendment creating new use classes for second homes or holiday lets was rejected in the other place. Although amendments on the same subject were withdrawn on Monday, I hope that we come back to this, as suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Best, because it is critical that we tackle this issue. In the House of Commons, the Government claimed that these were not necessary as neighbourhood plans could create principal residence policies. However, I wonder whether the full extent of this issue and its impact, particularly on rural and coastal communities, has been properly assessed and understood. The amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, would enable the collection of data relating to this problem which might help to develop the picture further. However, we should encourage the Government, through the Minister, to consider this matter as urgent; it may already be too late for some of the communities worst affected. Surely we will not abandon these communities to the opportunities they offer for a small number of people to make a fast buck.

On the amendments tabled to Clause 210, which were clearly articulated by the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, we too are interested to hear the Government’s thoughts on the registration of short-term rental properties. It was interesting to hear about the work of the Built Environment Select Committee in that respect.

In the Commons, Ministers referred previously to the ongoing consultation on this matter—indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, referred to it again this afternoon. What is the outcome of that consultation—it has not been published yet—and what conclusions will the Government draw from it? I believe that the noble Lord, Lord Young, referred to this in an earlier debate on this topic.

I was very interested in the comments on the work of the Built Environment Select Committee, and it is fascinating to hear that this issue sits with the DCMS rather than DLUHC. I hope the Minister will respond to that. It is disappointing to hear that a Minister thinks that the whole Bill has already been enacted. In view of the fact that none of these issues has been dealt with, I think we are glad that it has not been so far, and I am sure that noble Lords here will improve the Bill as we go along.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

May I just briefly say, as a matter of courtesy, that the reply to the letter that I referred to came from a Minister in the other place? I just thought, in all fairness, that I should make that very clear.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for that clarification.

The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, set out the four questions asked by his amendments, and they are all very important questions on which I hope we will hear further from the Minister, particularly Amendment 446, which addresses how this is going to be paid for. That is one of a number of questions on fees and costs that appear about many other clauses of the Bill, so I hope we will have responses to those questions.

The amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Foster, largely relate to ensuring that the safety of short-term let properties is not left to chance. It is particularly important that properties left empty for periods of the year are subject to detailed regulation on safety matters. This would also encourage absentee landlords to ensure that their responsibilities are met. Recently, we have seen increasing pressure on social landlords to address safety provision—in fact, there are very stringent new requirements on them—so it is clearly an issue that the Secretary of State takes seriously. We should not have what would amount to an exemption for the owners of short-term let properties in this respect. I hope that may be addressed.

The noble Lord, Lord Foster, also referred to the difficulty of enforcing licensing restrictions without data from booking platforms. Although I agree with him that booking platforms may be unwilling to release that data, it is really important and, without it, enforcement is difficult to address. Local authorities would struggle without effective data collection methods to enforce some of the matters raised in this debate.

The noble Earl, Lord Lytton, referred to the perverse incentives that exist between council tax and business rates. This is really important to data gathering: there is no incentive for councils, because if they collect business rates, they have to send it all off to our good friends at the Treasury, whereas if they collect council tax, they keep it to deliver services to their communities, so there is not much incentive for them to get matters straight here.

My noble friend Lord Berkeley referred to the importance of being reassured of the safety of the building, regardless of the length of time of the let. If you stay somewhere, even if just overnight, you want to be assured that the building is subject to the same safety regulations as would apply anywhere else you stayed.

Turning to the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, I am very sorry that the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, is not in her place today and I hope he will send her our very best wishes for a speedy recovery. He spoke about evidence to the Built Environment Select Committee from south Devon. I heard a great deal on this from my former colleague on the District Councils Network, Judy Pearce, who is the leader of South Hams Council and has been a powerful advocate of a great deal more action on second homes. The suggestion of pilot schemes—or taking advice from Wales, as I am sure my noble friend Lady Wilcox would say—is always a very good idea.

On 21 March, it was reported that changes aimed at restricting the way that homes can be turned into Airbnbs were being introduced, as the Secretary of State for DLUHC was going to bring them in. He acknowledged a problem with holiday lets preventing young people accessing jobs and homes. Can the Minister give us further information on whether that will come into the Bill as government amendments and when we will see government amendments to this effect?

Those are our comments on the amendments submitted. We support the amendments on registration and we certainly support the amendments on safety.