Philip Davies
Main Page: Philip Davies (Conservative - Shipley)Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation) Bill
Philip Davies Excerpts
Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) on bringing forward her Bill and giving it a good airing. Unfortunately, we do not have a great deal of time left, so I am not sure we will be able to do it justice, but I certainly commend her for it.
First, I should draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. As I have said in previous debates on this subject, I am both a landlord—although an accidental landlord, I might add—and a tenant, and therefore in the unusual position of being able to see both sides of the argument and having an interest on both sides of the argument.
The private rented sector has been a topical issue for many years, not least recently, and there have always been arguments for more regulation of the industry. Indeed, landlords appear to be an easy target for the left. As this Bill is again directly targeted at landlords, it is worth considering exactly who these landlords are. The DCLG’s private landlords survey of 2010 found that more than three quarters—78%—of all landlords owned only a single dwelling for rent, comprising 40% of the total private rented housing stock, while 95% had fewer than five dwellings in their property portfolio, accounting for 61% of the total stock. A large majority—81%—of private individual landlords owned just one dwelling, of whom 97% had fewer than five properties in their portfolio. Only 3% of private individual landlords owned five or more dwellings, and they accounted for almost a quarter of all dwellings owned by private individual landlords.
Basically, nearly four in five landlords rent out only one property. When we talk about additional regulations and burdens, it is always worth pointing out that the vast majority of those affected are individuals with just one property, not great conglomerations or massive corporations renting out huge numbers of properties. I sometimes think that Labour Members want us to believe such a caricature.
Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)
As someone in the category of accidental landlords who rents out only one property, will my hon. Friend confirm that the vast majority of such landlords—many of them may have inherited the property—are law-abiding landlords who ensure that their properties are kept to a very high standard?
Philip Davies
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. There is no doubt that the overwhelming majority of landlords—I put myself in this category—want to do the right thing, would never dream of renting out a property that was not in a fit state to be rented out and want to comply with every regulation that is introduced. As someone in that situation, I can however tell him that it is very difficult to keep tabs on all the things expected of a landlord. It is very difficult for a landlord—an accidental landlord or one who has not set out to earn money from being a landlord—to keep tabs on every dot of the i and cross of the t that hon. Members seem to want to impose on landlords, as though they had nothing to do but wade through legislation generated by this House.
Catherine West
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that as there are some excellent landlords and paragons of virtue, including in my constituency, we should ensure that the very small number who are not good landlords are kept under much closer scrutiny and are held much more closely to account by local authorities? Will he join those of us who care about housing in approaching the Minister for more funding for local authorities on that matter?
Philip Davies
The hon. Lady wants me to cover rather a lot of ground, if she does not mind me saying so. If we get into the funding of local authorities and funding formulas, I am sure that you might start to raise an eyebrow or two at my going off piste, Madam Deputy Speaker.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)
Order. For the avoidance of doubt, let me say that the hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that I would raise several eyebrows. As I am sure the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Catherine West) who has intervened to ask all those questions will appreciate, I will make sure that we deal only with what is in the Bill. There is more than enough in the Bill to keep us going.
Philip Davies
I am very grateful to you for that guidance, Madam Deputy Speaker. My new year’s resolution was to try to stick to the subject on Fridays. As I have not always achieved that, I thought I would make a special effort this term to stick to the point, and I am rather pleased that you have supported my first attempt to do so.
On the part of the intervention by the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Catherine West) that is most relevant to the Bill, I accept her premise that it is important for everybody to be in a home that comes up to a certain standard. I am not aware of anybody who would disagree with that proposition. The issue is whether the Bill is necessary to achieve that. If I am allowed to make a bit more progress—time is pressing—I would like to set out my contention that the Bill is not necessary to achieve what she would like, which is exactly the same as what I would like. I cannot speak for the Minister, but I would like to think that he agrees—I am pretty certain he does—with the proposition that all housing should be fit for human habitation. We do not object to that principle.
The starting point for the Bill, as the hon. Member for Westminster North said, was the 1996 Law Commission report, “Landlord and tenant: responsibility for state and condition of property”. The explanatory notes to the Bill confirm that it is adapted from the Law Commission’s draft Bill, which was included in the report. The report was 230 pages long and covered many issues.
I cannot resist pointing out that we are nearly 20 years on from when the report was produced. I hope it has not escaped everybody’s attention that since 1996, we have had 13 years of Labour Government. They had plenty of opportunity to put the draft Bill into legislation if it was a matter of great importance, as the hon. Member for Westminster North claims.
Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the growth in the number of people who live in the private rented sector—40% of people in the London Borough of Lambeth now live in the private rented sector—gives rise to the need for additional protections for tenants against irresponsible landlords? Responsible landlords have nothing to fear from the Bill, but that additional protection is urgently needed.
Philip Davies
I think that the hon. Lady is going down a rather dangerous line of argument, if she does not mind my saying so. She seems to be saying that as long as only a few people are affected, it does not matter what the condition of houses in the private rented sector is, but now that a lot of people live in the sector, all of a sudden it does matter. I would argue that the standard and condition of the housing matters regardless of how many people live in the private rented sector. It does not matter whether it is 40%, 20%, 5% or 2%—we should make sure that all accommodation is fit for human habitation. I do not accept her premise that this has only become an important issue because there are so many people in the private rented sector.
Philip Davies
I will give way in a second, if the hon. Lady is patient.
Anybody who was living in the private rented sector between 1997 and 2010 would have thought that this was an important issue, but for some reason the Labour Government, which I presume the hon. Lady supported, did not think that there was any necessity to introduce this legislation. I am happy for her to explain why that might have been the case.
Helen Hayes
The hon. Gentleman is being very generous with his time. By the extension of his argument, it should not matter whether a landlord is a small landlord with only one property or a large private sector landlord with many properties—the same rules and regulations should apply to all, and all tenants deserve the same level of protection.
Philip Davies
I do not think anybody has disagreed with that proposition, either. I certainly have not said that there should be different rules for different sized landlords, and I do not agree with that view.
I was merely making the point—I will reiterate it because I obviously made a dog’s dinner of explaining it clearly the first time around—that it is unnecessary for the House to keep passing legislation that affects landlords because there is already lots of legislation that makes it perfectly clear that homes should be fit for human habitation. When this House adds more and more regulations, it does not achieve anything for tenants because there are already rules and regulations in place. All it does is pass on a huge burden to landlords who have to work out whether they are complying with the law today compared with what it was yesterday. Good landlords who want to do the right thing find it difficult to keep up with all that. We had lots of legislation that affected landlords during the last Labour Government and the coalition Government, much of which was very challenging for landlords.
My contention is that we should make the law for landlords reasonable and sensible, and then leave it at that and let them get on with it, rather than introducing a law and then 10 minutes later introducing another law that does exactly the same thing but that sends out the message that this is so important that we can send a press release to our local paper saying that we really care about tenants, even though the law already applies. This legislation does not achieve anything; it just causes a lot of grief for many people who did not deserve it in the first place. I reiterate that if the Law Commission report was so important, the Labour party had plenty of opportunity to implement it, but it did not bother to do so.
The 1996 Law Commission report states:
“This is the third occasion on which the Commission has considered possible reforms to the law on repairing liability in leases. The recommendations in the first of our two previous reports, Civil Liability of Vendors and Lessors for Defective Premises, were enacted in part by section 4 of the Defective Premises Act 1972. Our second report, Obligations of Landlords and Tenants, has not been implemented.”
Its point was that the previous report had not been implemented, yet now we are moving on to another one.
Understanding what is meant by “fitness for human habitation” is crucial to this debate. The Law Commission report stated:
“When the implied term of fitness for human habitation was first introduced in 1885, the term ‘fit for human habitation’ was not defined. The meaning of those words was therefore a matter for judicial decision alone, at least in the context of the implied term. It was only in the Housing Act 1936 that an attempt was made at some form of statutory definition.
Before the introduction of statutory criteria for determining whether or not a property was fit for human habitation, the issue was treated as one of fact to be determined according to the standard of the ‘ordinary, reasonable, man’. A property might be unfit for human habitation not just because of structural defects or internal physical conditions, but because of ‘external causes, such as want of ventilation, noxious effluvia, etc’, In the earlier decisions, the standard was held to be satisfied quite readily. It was ‘a humble standard’ and it ‘only required that the place must be decently fit for human beings to live in.’”
Ms Buck
The Bill is based around category 1 hazards in the housing health and safety rating system, as set out in the Housing Act 2004. That is the basis on which enforcement will be carried out, and the point is to give a power of enforcement to tenants when local authorities cannot and do not act. I can see no relevance to the points raised by the hon. Gentleman.
Philip Davies
If there was no relevance to my points, I am sure that you would be the first to tell me, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am not entirely sure when the hon. Member for Westminster North became judge and jury for what is relevant to a debate, but as you made clear, Madam Deputy Speaker, there is plenty to go at in the Bill. I am trying to be as comprehensive as possible in explaining why the Bill is unnecessary.
I will therefore repeat—well, I will not repeat anything, Madam Deputy Speaker, as you would not want me to, but I will continue from where I left off. The report states that at the time:
“‘Unfit for human habitation’ was ‘a very strong expression, and vastly different from ‘not up to modern or model requirements’”.
Those were two very different principles and definitions.
“Nor did it equate to ‘good and tenantable repair’. Some decisions were remarkably harsh. A plague of rats was thought by the divisional court not to make a house unfit, though the correctness of this decision must be open to serious doubt.”
Mr Steve Reed (Croydon North) (Lab)
The low standard of repairs is fundamental when we are talking about the state of some of these properties. I presume the hon. Gentleman agrees that there should be more direct accountability back to tenants to allow them more power to force change where that is required in their properties.
Philip Davies
I would contend that plenty of legislation already allows tenants to ensure that their house is properly repaired by landlords—indeed, some of that legislation was introduced in the previous Parliament.
Mr Reed
Would the hon. Gentleman like to come with me to visit some of my constituents in Croydon North who are completely exasperated by landlords who refuse to do even the most basic repairs on properties that people are living in with their children? I would be happy to take him around and show him how wrong he is.
Philip Davies
I do not want to get sidetracked, but local authorities have much of the power to ensure that landlords maintain their houses to a proper standard. I know that the hon. Gentleman was leader of a local authority. Perhaps he should look to see what he and that local authority did to ensure that private landlords in his area were of a sufficient standard. He had the powers to do that.
Philip Davies
I will not give way again because time is pressing and I do not want to embarrass the hon. Gentleman further about his record as leader of Croydon Council—[Interruption.] It was Lambeth Council. I apologise to the hon. Gentleman, although I am sure the same principles apply.
It has to be said that a rather broader view came to be taken, under the influence of Lord Atkin, on what was considered fitness for human habitation. In his opinion:
“If the state of repair of a house is such that by ordinary use damage may naturally be caused to the occupier, whether in respect of personal injury to life and limb, or injury to health, then the house is not in all respects reasonably fit for human habitation.”
That definition was approved by the House of Lords in the case of Summers v. Salford Corporation. In that case, a defective sash cord on the only window in the bedroom of a small house was held, in the circumstances, to make the property not reasonably fit for human habitation. Lord Atkin equated the requirement of reasonable fitness for human habitation with habitable repair, which had been defined earlier.
There was an attempt to come up with a specific definition in the Housing Act 1936. It is clear from the definition relating to sanitary defects that this approach was derived from the regulations made under the housing Act of 1925. There have, therefore, clearly been developments in the definition. The Bill proposes to change that definition once again, despite the fact that for all the previous stages of the definition there was not the other legislation in place that is in force now. We did not have all the legislation that came into being in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. None of that was in place, yet even then there was a narrow, if evolving, definition of homes fit for human habitation. There is even more legislation in place to protect the rights of landlords now, yet the hon. Lady wants to change the definition once again.
The report also gives the history of the fitness for human habitation provisions. That is key to understanding why they originally came into being, as they are the subject of the changes proposed in the Bill. I would, if time had allowed, have gone through the origins of the legislation and the definition, because if we are trying to fiddle with a definition, it is very important to know why it was introduced in the first place. I will not test your patience by doing that, Madam Deputy Speaker, because time is precious.
The hon. Lady argued that the Bill will merely do as the law originally intended on human habitation, but I do not accept that. Yes, the Bill seeks to address the original rent limits which exist to trigger the fitness for human habitation provisions in the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985, but it does so in such a way that includes nearly all properties, not just those with a certain level of rent. That was certainly not the intention when this was first introduced. It also extends the list of matters in the fitness for human habitation list and ignores the fact completely that there has been so much other legislation covering landlords since. The Bill covers nearly all properties, not just those in a certain rent band. The only exemptions appear to be those—the hon. Lady can correct me if I am wrong—contained in section 14 of the 1985 Act, which states:
“Section 11…does not apply to a new lease granted to an existing tenant, or to a former tenant still in possession, if the previous lease was not a lease to which section 11 applied…Section 11 does not apply to a lease granted on or after 3rd October 1980 to—a local authority…a new town corporation, an urban development corporation, the Development Board for Rural Wales, a co-operative housing association, or an educational institution”—
or housing action trust.
The hon. Member for Croydon North (Mr Reed) made a point about the terrible state of repair of houses in the private rented sector. I will make no comment on the back of it—people can draw their own conclusions—but of all the people who have come to me in my surgeries to complain about the standard of their housing, I think I can count on one hand the number who come to me in a year to complain about the standard of housing in the private rented sector. However, the numbers who come to see me about the standard of their housing in the social rented sector by their social housing provider is huge. I get no end of complaints about social housing. People can draw their own conclusions from that fact.
Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)
Would my hon. Friend therefore join me in bringing forward a private Member’s Bill directed specifically at social landlords?
Philip Davies
Again, I do not want to deviate. I was merely asking whether the Bill addressed the right problem. It seems to me that there are many other problems with many other housing providers that are not being addressed. Labour Members seem to think that social housing landlords can get away with anything and do not need regulating. All they ever want to do is clamp down on private landlords, even though the problem does not seem to exist to the extent they believe—