Renters' Rights Bill (Second sitting)

Naushabah Khan Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 22nd October 2024 Public Bill Committees

[Rebecca Smith]

Q My question slightly expands on what David said earlier about the burden on local authorities. The new building safety legislation, for example, was really good news, but it had an impact on the level of staffing available to carry out roles, because of the conflict with the private sector, which might offer people higher salaries. Do either or both of you think that there is a similar risk with this Bill? What could we be doing to ensure that we have the right lead-in time and adequate staffing? Is there an immediate solution that we could learn from that previous example?

Dr Henry Dawson: Councillor Hug, would you like to start?

Cllr Adam Hug: As much support as possible in training up the next generation of environmental health officers is essential. There is a whole raft of skills shortages across the housing sector that you touched upon. Obviously, we want to make sure that people are considering this line of work as a career they want to go into rather than leave. There is a pipeline problem in terms of people coming into environmental health as a workstream, but I do not think that should necessarily delay what we are doing with the Bill. Ultimately, it has been talked around for some time; we need to crack on and get it done. It is absolutely the case that getting that local funding piece is right. Then we can join up with skills and training by making sure that local authorities have a pathway to recruit people into their teams. It is about getting the funding piece right alongside the direction of travel.

Dr Henry Dawson: We face some barriers to bringing people into the profession. For example, we have some more sustainable sources of income with things like licensing legislation, where we can charge a fee; at the moment, my own research finds that only about half those schemes charge enough in fees to cover the full costs of management and enforcement. The Lawrence and Wilson review of selective licensing has shown that if we do not charge enough, it ends up reducing the exercise into a sort of glorified paperwork, so we have to charge enough to make it meaningful.

I would argue that staffing is probably one of the most fundamental issues when it comes to the effectiveness of the interventions proposed in the Bill. At the moment, the predominantly hand-to-mouth existence with local authorities, which we have had for quite a long time now, has been predicated on the fact that we are relying on the council tax payer to fund the enforcement of the private rented sector. That is quite peculiar compared with other industries such as building control or planning, which are able to levy up-front fees that do not have to go through a test of political will—which a lot of local authority managers have to navigate to try to predict what the market within their local political support will accept. It takes a lot out on the guesswork and acceptability side.

The ability to charge a fee also provides us with a sustainable and predictable source of income, and that has been lacking for a long time in local government. If you are never sure of whether you will have funding beyond one or possibly three years, with short-term pots of money that are provided often based on a competitive approach—it is about winning them—then you get a member of staff, but you have to train them once you have got them in. Being optimistic, we can train them through an apprenticeship scheme lasting a year to do just housing work, or if we are training them as an environmental health officer, it is three years for the traditional degree route or five years for an apprenticeship.

Having some form of ringfencing of the funding, which allows local authorities to dedicate resources to attract people into the profession, would be very helpful, as the report that I have pretty much every time I speak to a local authority about recruitment for my programme at the university is, “We don’t have the resources to send people to these events to raise awareness about the profession.” A lot of people are just not aware of what we do; once they find out, it is something that sells itself.

Fire and police are comparable bodies, and they tend to have much more success because they have the resources to devote to this. It comes down to sustainable and predictable funding. That allows us to train and retain, and attract new staff.

[Naushabah Khan (Gillingham and Rainham) (Lab)]

Q I have a question about the wider implications of the Bill and the impact on local authorities. For example, it would be helpful to understand whether you feel the abolishment of section 21 will have a wider implication, and how it might help to tackle some of the bigger homelessness challenges that local authorities are currently seeing—or whether it will have an impact at all.

Cllr Adam Hug: I think the provision will help; the whole point is that we are desperate for this. It has been talked about for a long time and as soon as it can be brought in to provide security in the market, it will be extremely helpful to help stabilise a lot of tenancies where there is still uncertainty. The quicker it can come in, the more helpful it will be.

The Bill will not be a magic bullet that will solve the homelessness problems that councils are facing. I pointed out earlier one of the small technical challenges: the duties that local government will be dealing with will be extended in time and go up, we think, from 56 days to 21 weeks on average under the prevention duty. That is a small price to pay, but ultimately, we would like some help paying for that price.

In terms of stability in the private rented sector, this measure is long overdue and will hopefully take some heat out of the sector, but there are all sorts of things going on that mean that it is going to take a long time to turn around the wider issues of local government finance for temporary accommodation, because that is one of the biggest pressures; there are so many councils at the moment that are working hard to procure as much temporary accommodation as possible.

[The Chair]

I call Harpreet Uppal.