Housing and Planning Act 2016 (Banning Order Offences) Regulations 2017

Lord Shipley Excerpts

Monday 22nd January 2018 Lords Chamber

I hope the order will assist in those matters, but I have a more fundamental question: why will the Government not take steps to provide the power and the funding for local authorities to promote selective licensing schemes? Selective licensing schemes take an age to implement from the start of a process. In my ward—I declare my interest as a Newcastle city councillor—we have a selective licensing scheme. We are looking for an extension and I am told that it will probably take two years to get such a scheme on its feet, if it happens at all. I wonder whether the Government should not revisit the whole issue of selective licensing, which surely must be seen as a potential tool to deal with the problems that these regulations very properly seek to deal with. Again, if we are to make progress in that way, appropriate resources will have to be diverted to it and, given the difficulties that local authorities are currently experiencing on the financial side, that means some increased funding from the Government to allow the perfectly acceptable and welcome objectives set out in these regulations to be implemented in practice.

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I remind the House that I am a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I support the points made by my noble friend Lady Grender and those made by the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, on selective licensing schemes. I hope that we all agree that it should not take two years to adopt selective licences.

However, I support the statutory instrument. I note that it has commanded broad support during consultation, which is important. I also note that the consultation has led to several additions to the list of offences, which confirms the value of consultation. That is because it is one thing to have banning orders and another to ensure their effective implementation, as has been made clear. There is a resources issue for local authorities, which I hope that the Minister will be willing to comment on when he replies, because resources need to be there for banning orders to be implemented properly.

The Minister referred to the statutory instrument being part of a package. It is indeed only one reform that we need to the private rented sector. We need action on letting fees for agents and capping of up-front deposits—about which a great deal has been said—but also an improvement in minimum standards for private rented tenants. Mention was just made of electricity safety checks, which are fundamental to get right.

It is vital that private rented tenants feel secure. It would therefore help to have a system for tenants and potential tenants to access a database of rogue landlords. If there is a list, it needs to be transparent and available to tenants and prospective tenants, otherwise how do they know that their prospective landlord is rogue? Of course, that person would in law have been banned, but it is important that tenants know who those people are.

Twenty per cent of all homes in the United Kingdom are now privately rented. The proportion has risen by half in the past decade. As the Minister knows, I believe that we must build more social homes to rent to reduce public dependency on the private rented sector, where heavy demand has led to high rent and to 750,000 private rented homes—one in six of the total—containing, according to the English Housing Survey, a hazard representing a serious risk to personal health and safety.

This number is unacceptable. It is too high. I hope that the Minister can confirm that the Government will continue to take the necessary action to support private rented sector tenants having decent, secure accommodation.

[Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)]

My Lords, a number of us spoke at some length on this matter when we were dealing in 2015 with what became the Housing and Planning Act 2016. This offers us the opportunity for a further canter around the course. I shall speak briefly because in principle, like most of the House, I support the regulations. I am trying to work out how effective they will be. One stat which would be helpful would be to know to what extent local authorities have, let us say, over the past 12 months or couple of years, prosecuted landlords with the offences defined in the regulations, because they already have the power to prosecute, which brings me to my second point. If they have that power to prosecute, and they do not do so—for all sorts of reasons, which I shall come to in a moment—the chances of them using a banning order are substantially reduced. The prosecution comes first, and the banning order comes second. I stand to be corrected if I am wrong. It is absolutely dependent on whether local authorities are prepared to prosecute.

Let us take a specific example. Slough is a town notorious for the number of sheds in gardens, most of which are there illegally. The local authority is in difficulty. I presume it knows that it could say to the shed owner, “Close the shed because you are in breach of the law”. On the other hand the local authority may say, “We want to ban that particular landlord”, but it is not prepared to do so because by prosecuting him it will create a homeless situation and it will have to step in and rehouse the family concerned. I am arguing that there may well be a hesitation within local authorities to prosecute and introduce banning orders in the knowledge that they may have to take on responsibility for the tenants. That might apply equally to unfit, overcrowded housing, which is covered under a contravention of overcrowding notice, or fire and gas safety standards offences. The local authority would have to have all that in mind if it decided to prosecute and get a banning order.

If one is dependent on the other and there is a hesitation to prosecute, to what extent will that influence the preparedness of a local authority to introduce the banning order? Unless there is housing into which to place people, or the local authority is prepared to take on the property, which in itself means expenditure because it has been through the legal process, the measure being introduced here might well not work in the way Ministers intend. What we need is more houses: more houses to rent and more houses at a sensible price. That would ease the whole process whereby local authorities would feel freer to proceed and close down property, with the obvious implication for rehousing families.

What stats do we have on the preparedness of local authorities to prosecute and place landlords in a position whereby ultimately, under these regulations, they will be subject to banning orders?