Supported Housing (Regulatory Oversight) Bill

Matthew Pennycook Excerpts

Friday 3rd March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Matthew Pennycook (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate. I commend once again the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) for introducing this extremely important Bill, and congratulate him on piloting it through Committee to its Third Reading today. Let me take the opportunity, as he did, to thank again all those who have contributed to the development and drafting of the Bill, including Justin Bates, Joe Thomas, Sam Lister, the team at Crisis and, we must not forget, the hon. Member for Walsall North (Eddie Hughes).

The Opposition regret how long we have had to wait for legislation to address exploitation and profiteering at the hands of rogue exempt accommodation operators, and the fact that progress in this area has been dependent on the ongoing success of the hon. Member for Harrow East in the private Member’s Bill ballot. We have been clear since the Bill was published that we support the measures in it, as a means to enhance local authority oversight of supported housing and enable local authorities to drive up standards in their areas. As we have long argued, a robust framework of national standards for the sector is essential. There is an open and shut case for better regulating the eligibility for—and therefore access to—exempt benefit claims at local level.

That said, our position has always been that the Bill could be strengthened in important ways. As the House may recall, we made a number of specific suggestions to that end on Second Reading. They included new planning powers to allow local authorities to proactively manage their local supported housing markets; enhanced provisions for national monitoring and oversight; augmenting the list of new banning order offences; and establishing evaluation and improvement notice procedures, so that local authorities can drive up standards without implementing a full licensing regime. We remain of the view that those suggestions have merit, and we believe that they will need to be revisited if the Bill fails to deliver in the way that we all hope it will.

We welcome the three Government amendments that have been incorporated into the Bill, particularly amendment 2, which was initially pressed by my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) in Committee. As the Minister made clear, the amendment provides for conditions relating to needs assessments to be attached to a licence. We believe that the three amendments improve the legislation and we support them. However, although the Bill has undoubtedly been strengthened by their incorporation, there remain a number of important issues that we feel still need to be resolved, and I want to take the opportunity to speak briefly to three of them.

The first relates to methods of enforcing new national standards short of licensing. As hon. Members will know, although the Bill places a duty on all local authorities to publish a supported housing strategy, it does not require them all to implement a licensing scheme as a means of enforcing the new national supported housing standards that it introduces. On balance, we agree that the adoption of licensing of supported exempt accommodation should be optional. However, the fact that it will be gives rise to the possibility not only that local authorities with large amounts of badly run exempt accommodation could ultimately choose not to license, but that local authorities with limited resources or only one or two problematic providers will not be in a position to introduce licensing schemes and will therefore be unable to properly enforce new national standards.

We appreciate fully that the Government intend to consult on this matter under the duties set out in clause 6, but we urge Ministers to agree in principle now that there is a strong case for providing for a range of different enforcement options, in terms both of their strength and to whom they apply. In particular, we encourage the Minister to give serious consideration to giving local authorities powers analogous to those in part 1 of the Housing Act 2004, which provides for the housing health and safety rating system, hazard awareness notices and improvement notice procedures. As the Minister will know, outside large urban areas, most local authorities have only a handful of officers—if that—in their private rented sector teams. We need to ensure that there is a suite of options short of licensing that will allow smaller authorities to bear down on the problem.

The second issue relates to local authority resourcing. The Bill will place additional requirements on local authorities to carry out reviews of supported exempt accommodation in their districts and to publish supported housing strategies. In addition, authorities that believe it necessary to adopt licensing schemes and are in a position to do so will face additional costs as a result. In Committee, the Minister confirmed that a new burdens assessment will be made, but he seemed to imply that it would relate only to setting up supported housing strategies and the initial set-up of licensing schemes. We are therefore concerned that local authorities, ultimately, may not receive any support for ongoing costs, particularly in relation to licensing schemes. We would welcome some assurance from the Minister that the net additional cost of any new burdens arising from the Bill will be fully and properly funded and, if not, how the Government believe the ongoing costs can be made self-financing.

The third and final issue relates to the regulation of non-profit-making providers who let some properties at below-market rents, while letting others at market rents that are eligible for housing benefit support without coming within the scope of consumer regulation. We raised that matter at Committee stage of the Social Housing (Regulation) Bill, because it is a regulatory loophole that is being exploited by unscrupulous exempt accommodation providers, and this Bill contains no obvious provisions to close it. Indeed, our fear is that once the Bill receives Royal Assent, rogue providers of supported exempt accommodation will be incentivised to exploit the loophole in question further, as it will be one of the few that remain. We believe that the loophole can be successfully closed using the framework provided by the Bill, perhaps by using regulation to introduce passporting powers in respect of licensing schemes so that only those providers with a double-compliant grade could be automatically passported. I urge the Minister to give the matter further consideration and would be more than happy to engage with her on it.

Those specific concerns aside, we very much welcome the fact that the Bill will complete its passage today. It is not a panacea, but it will undoubtedly help to put rogue exempt accommodation operators out of business and better enable local authorities to drive up supported housing standards in their areas. In doing so, as the hon. Member for Harrow East said, it will improve the lives of some of the most vulnerable people in our society and bring relief to communities struggling to cope with the impact of concentrated numbers of badly run exempt accommodation properties. We recognise that today is a significant, important step forward and we are very pleased to give the Bill our support.