Housing and Planning Bill

Mark Pawsey Excerpts

Tuesday 5th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Teresa Pearce]

I am aware of the Scottish scheme, but this measure applies to England and it is perfectly possible that we could do it better. We will discuss our amendment on the ombudsman later, so I hope the hon. Gentleman will bear with me.

[Mark Pawsey (Rugby) (Con)]

We all accept that substandard rental accommodation should not be offered to tenants. Does the hon. Lady agree that local authorities currently have plenty of powers to deal with substandard accommodation, but the problem is that often they do not exercise them? Should we be putting pressure on local authorities to make use of powers they already have?

[Teresa Pearce]

Local authorities have the powers but they do not have the resources. Many local authorities have very few officers who are able to police the system, but resourcing that is an argument for a different day. We discussed in Committee whether the fines that were brought in should be ring-fenced for that purpose, but that measure was not accepted.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Betts]

I thank the Government for taking up two of the proposals from the Select Committee’s report in the previous Parliament on rent recovery and civil penalties. That was something the Committee agreed unanimously. I see the hon. Member for Rugby (Mark Pawsey) in his place. He was a member of the Committee at that time. It is right to give local authorities a lighter-touch way of dealing with the less serious problems that may exist in private sector properties by introducing civil penalties and rent recovery. The idea that landlords should be getting public money when clearly providing a property that breaches legal requirements is outrageous. It is good that the Government are acting and legislating, I think with all-party support, to ensure that the money paid out in those wrongful circumstances can be properly recovered by the public sector and indeed by tenants where their money has been used to pay for rent for a property that has not met the legal standards.

I want to raise one or two issues mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Erith and Thamesmead (Teresa Pearce) and refer to the Select Committee report. When the Committee published its report—I am sorry to cut slightly across my hon. Friend on this issue—we concluded that licensing schemes should be a matter for local discretion. We said that they were a useful tool in the armoury of local authorities to deal with particularly bad problems in areas with poor landlords and poor-quality housing, but we adopted a localist approach and said that in the end it should be a matter for local discretion. However, we did raise the problem—it is right that my hon. Friend raised the issue again—that many authorities chose not to take up licensing schemes, not because they thought they were a bad idea, but because the whole bureaucracy around the schemes deters authorities and makes it expensive to get them in place. I hope the Minister will have another look at that.

I speak from experience, not in my constituency but in the next-door constituency of Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough. A licensing scheme that was introduced in Page Hall has been very successful in dealing with the real problems caused by bad landlords and bad properties, but the process of establishing it involved a great deal of bureaucracy and money that could have been better spent on enforcement and attempts to deal with the inadequate housing situation.

[Mark Pawsey]

The hon. Gentleman led the production of the Select Committee report very effectively during the last Parliament. As he will recall, the evidence suggested that good landlords were happy to go on to the register, or, alternatively, were reluctant, but did so because they wanted to play by the rules. The rogue landlords, by definition, do not want to play by the rules and would not register in the first place. The process tends to be not terribly productive.