Sarah Teather
Main Page: Sarah Teather (Liberal Democrat - Brent Central)
Sarah Teather (Brent Central) (LD)
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
I want to begin by telling the story of one of my constituents. I do not want to give her real name, so I am going to call her Jo. She and her partner had a pretty horrendous year last year and, in spite of the best efforts of our local citizens advice bureau in Brent, it all went from bad to worse. Jo was living in a studio flat with her partner, but there were real problems with the property. The ceiling collapsed as a result of leaking drains upstairs and, to make matters worse, there was no heating in the flat.
Being a reasonable tenant, and expecting the best of her landlord, Jo reported the problems to her landlord. Rather than trying to fix the problem, as one might hope would be the case, the landlord responded by giving Jo and her partner a basin to catch the water dripping from the collapsed ceiling. Understandably, Jo and her partner continued to press the landlord to get the problems fixed, but the next time the landlord responded, he did so by beginning eviction proceedings. Jo had become a victim of retaliatory eviction.
I dare say that many colleagues in the House will have heard similar stories to Jo’s in their advice surgeries over the years, because, sadly, this situation is not as unusual as we might like to think. I hope that there will be time today for colleagues to air some of their stories. Jo’s story is also depressingly familiar to organisations such as Citizens Advice and the charity Shelter, whose advisers are all too frequently contacted by people who are facing eviction after making requests for repairs to be carried out in their property. They are the victims of a small minority of landlords who would rather get rid of tenants than bring their properties up to scratch.
It is because of stories like those that I am bringing the Tenancies (Reform) Bill to the House today, and I ask the House to support it. No one should be evicted for asking their landlord to do basic repairs. No one should be frightened to tell their landlord about a problem for fear of losing their home. No one should be forced to put up with poor conditions because their landlord might retaliate if they make a fuss. This is about fairness and decency, and about doing the right thing. It is about upholding the existing law, and it should benefit everyone: tenants, landlords and local authorities.
Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)
I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing this important debate. Does she agree that at the heart of the issue is a massive power imbalance between landlords and tenants, and that if we could get that power balance more in equity, tenants would be able to press for the things that they need in order to have a secure roof over their head.
Sarah Teather
The hon. Lady is correct to say that there is a power imbalance. I will talk more about this later, but I do not want to skew the power wholly in favour of the tenant either. This has to be about fairness; both landlord and tenant have to be treated well. The landlord needs to know that they can let their property without being exploited by the tenant, and the tenant needs to know that they can live in a decent property without being exploited by the landlord. This is about levelling things out a bit, through a relatively small change in the law.
Nick de Bois (Enfield North) (Con)
I support the Bill, but regrettably I shall not be able to vote on it later—should there be a vote—owing to constituency business. Will the hon. Lady acknowledge that not all landlords are bad landlords, and that there are many good ones providing a good service? However, there are many rogues, and I welcome the fact that she is trying to deal with that issue.
Sarah Teather
I agree with the hon. Gentleman. The good landlords are desperate to see the system improve, because they feel that the present situation is damaging their reputation. They do not want rogue landlords in the system; they want them to leave the playing field open to people who are decent and who uphold the law.
Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)
I, too, support the Bill. The hon. Lady will be aware that, since 2010, renting has become £1,020 a year more expensive, on average. It is now the most expensive form of tenure. In the name of fairness, should we not also be addressing that issue?
Sarah Teather
I am going to try to avoid getting into the wider issues today, partly because I am keen to ensure that we have consensus on the narrow points in my Bill. However, the hon. Gentleman has had this opportunity to make his point and it will appear in Hansard. Also, the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol West (Stephen Williams) is in his place and he will have heard the hon. Gentleman’s point.
I shall be leaving Parliament at the next election, after 12 years as an MP in Brent, and I have put in for private Members’ Bill ballots many times over the years and not been successful. It is therefore a huge privilege for me to be selected so high in the ballot this time, particularly in my last few months in Parliament. I recognise that an awful lot of MPs wait for years for an opportunity like this as a Back Bencher, so when I found out that I had come up in the ballot, I was determined not to squander it by pursuing something very party political and divisive which had no chance of getting through. Instead, I wanted to use the opportunity to make a real difference to people’s lives by introducing a proposal for improvement that could command cross-party support and had a chance of becoming law.
Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)
I congratulate the hon. Lady on this Bill, which has support from Labour Members. Has she been assured that it has Government support? What I hope we are not going to see today is ostensible support from the Government while Government Back Benchers talk out her excellent Bill.
Sarah Teather
I have been assured that the Bill has Government support. Unfortunately, each person in the House will have to follow their own conscience—[Interruption.] I shall leave their consciences pricked and hope that they do the right thing.
I have heard about many cases such as Jo’s over the years in Brent, and about many others, where fear of eviction has prevented someone from complaining to a landlord about a problem. I know that this issue needs tackling, but I want to place on the record how grateful I am to Shelter for suggesting this topic to me, for all its work in campaigning on this issue, and for supporting me with preparation and drafting of the Bill.
Annette Brooke (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (LD)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on introducing her important Bill. I also congratulate the many organisations that have given it their wholehearted support. I wish to reinforce a point that she made: there is a real fear of eviction. I know of people living in damp conditions who dare not put in a complaint. Removing that fear, without putting any extra burden on good landlords, is vital.
Sarah Teather
I absolutely agree with my right hon. Friend about that. The fear of eviction has a chilling impact on the sector, and it also hugely damages the reputation of good landlords and the relationship between tenants and their landlords.
Tessa Munt (Wells) (LD)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on this Bill, and she will know that my team and I have been working on this problem. As an MP, it is most distressing when tenants come to us with a problem, the landlord takes advantage of the fact that so many tenants are looking for properties and new tenants move into a property once the first ones have been evicted, and then the new tenants come to the MP with exactly the same problem, and this repeats and repeats itself, sometimes on a six-monthly cycle.
Sarah Teather
That can be extremely frustrating, both for MPs and for those in local councils and in citizens advice bureaux, who may see the same problem in the same property over and over again. I want to place on the record my thanks to the citizens advice bureaux in Brent, which have campaigned on this issue for a long time, and to Generation Rent, which has been very supportive. I also wish to pay tribute to the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol West for all his help and for the support of his officials in championing the Bill across government. I well remember from my time as a Minister that getting cross-government agreement on anything requires sustained focus from a Minister, and I am extremely grateful that the Government will be supporting the Bill today.
Dr Matthew Offord (Hendon) (Con)
Although I support the Bill, a lot of emphasis has been put on so-called “rogue” landlords and, having been a landlord, I know that things are not always as they are portrayed Will the hon. Lady reassure the House, and reassure me, that the Bill will not allow rogue tenants to frustrate the process of eviction when they do not comply with their tenancy agreements?
Sarah Teather
Absolutely; the Bill has been carefully drafted to make sure that spurious complaints cannot be a reason to frustrate the eviction process. In addition to the clauses relating to retaliatory eviction, the Bill contains other clauses about simplifying the process for applying for a section 21 notice to make it easier for landlords who are operating entirely legitimately to make sure that they comply with the law. At the moment, we often have situations where a landlord may serve a section 21 notice and find that they have fallen foul of a technicality when they were operating perfectly legitimately. So the Bill is not all about skewing everything in favour of the tenant; it contains some simplifying elements, too.
Mr Slaughter
That is the most pernicious use of section 21 notices, but does the hon. Lady agree that the ability to have a no-fault eviction—quickly getting rid of tenants for no reason—is a problem? Will she continue to lobby for tenants’ rights, even when no longer in the House, including for longer tenancies and controls on rent increases and proscriptive letting fees? In other words, will she support a future Labour Government on that?
Sarah Teather
I am inclined to say that the hon. Gentleman has made his point and move on.
I want to stress that the Bill is not an outright attack on section 21. Members of the House will have very different and varied views on the future of section 21. Some will think that it should be touched as little as possible, and others will want to reform it significantly or even get rid of no-fault notices. The Bill is not about getting rid of section 21; it is about operating within the current legal structures and trying to protect tenants who, at the moment, find that they cannot uphold their right to live in a decent property. Although it is stated elsewhere in the law that landlords ought to comply, at the moment they do not have to, because they can simply get rid of tenants when they complain. If Members want to remove section 21 notices, they will have to bring in their own Bill, because that is not what this one does. I want to make that clear, as I have done to landlord organisations. This is a relatively moderate change that I hope will protect tenants, not an enormous ripping up of the current legislative framework.
Sarah Teather
The problem for environmental health officers—I was going to make this point later—is that, as many of them told Citizens Advice for a report in 2007, they know that the consequence of intervening is often that the tenant is evicted. That prevents councils from making full use of the powers available to them. There really is no point having legislation that gives councils powers to intervene if they are too afraid to use them to drive up standards for fear of ending up with tenants being evicted. Again, this is about trying to ensure, through a small tweak, that the existing law works better.
Mike Thornton (Eastleigh) (LD)
Does my hon. Friend agree that that will level the playing field for good landlords who are really interested in helping their tenants, because they will be able to provide decent accommodation that is well looked after without being undercut by rogue landlords who are not interested in their tenants at all?
Sarah Teather
That is a perfectly fair point. Good landlords who make the necessary repairs get very frustrated when rogue landlords who treat their tenants extremely badly undercut them on rent.
Before talking about the context of the Bill, I want to thank the many colleagues on both sides of the House who have sponsored the Bill, spoken in favour of it and lobbied the Government to ask them to support it. I also thank Opposition Front Benchers for their engagement on the issue. Getting the Bill on to the statute book will require Members with radically different views to support it in the Lobby. I am very grateful for the engagement I have had from many colleagues already. I hope that they will support the Bill today in the Lobby and at all subsequent stages.
Mr David Heath (Somerton and Frome) (LD)
My hon. Friend is right that Members with very different views will support the Bill, but is not what unites them the fact that this is about preventing those who are strong—economically strong in this case—from bullying those who are weak? That is what Parliament is about, whichever party we belong to: protecting people against bullies.
Sarah Teather
The problem with retaliatory eviction at the moment is that the people who are most likely to fall victim to it are those who have the least agency in being able to help themselves. That relates to my next point, which is on the extent of the problem—how wide it is and who appears to be affected by it.
YouGov conducted a survey on behalf of Shelter and British Gas, surveying 4,500 private renters. It found that one in every 50 tenants had been a victim of retaliatory eviction, having been evicted or served with an eviction notice in the past year because they had complained to their landlord or local council about a problem in their home. With a very large private rented sector across the country, Shelter estimated by extrapolating those figures that 213,000 renters experienced that problem last year. That is a significant number of people, and the problem appears to be much worse for some groups living in areas where housing demand is very high. In London, for example, three in 20 renters surveyed reported being a victim of revenge eviction, and nearly one in five black and minority ethnic families renting in the capital said that they had been affected. Those numbers, particularly in London, explain why we have had support from the Mayor of London for this campaign.
We should be careful of assuming that the problem affects only London. The Citizens Advice report that I mentioned highlights the knock-on effect that the practice of revenge eviction has on renters. The report opens with the story of a woman from Merseyside who had been living alone in her private rented flat for 13 years and who suffered from Crohn’s disease. She sought advice from her local citizens advice bureau because the property was damp and the windows did not close. The landlord had recently replaced the gas fire with a two-bar electric fire that was expensive to run and did not sufficiently heat the property anyway. As the woman was receiving benefits, it was becoming increasingly hard for her to survive.
After they were approached for help, the local CAB advisers were able to secure a grant from the Warm Front scheme for gas central heating. It would not cost the landlord anything, so initially he seemed to be happy for it to be installed. However, on the day that the workmen came to survey the site, they decided they could not do the work because the gas meter was located in the flat on the ground floor, whereas the woman lived on the third floor. This could cause a massive safety hazard because if there had been a leak, she would have had to travel down two flights of stairs and try to gain access to a neighbour’s home to switch off her gas supply. The landlord was told that he would need to pay £800 to have the meter relocated, which he was obliged to do to comply with his duties under the health and safety regulations. However, he refused.
The CAB advisers told the woman that she could take action to force the landlord to deal with the issues, but they also had to tell her that if she did, the landlord would be free to use a no-fault section 21 notice in retaliation, giving the woman two months’ notice to leave her home. Despite all the difficulties that she was living with, she decided not to go ahead, as the landlord had been known previously to evict people who had asked for problems to be fixed. As a result, the woman had to continue to live in conditions that were detrimental to her health.
The fear of revenge eviction is just as real as the incidence of it, and it has a chilling effect on the sector, on the powers that environmental health officers feel they can use, and on the relationship between landlords and tenants. It stops people being able to enjoy their right to live in a decent property. It is also a real problem for local authorities, which are not just frightened of the impact on the tenant if they take action, but well aware that if they do take action and the tenant is evicted, they are likely to end up with an extra homeless person on their books, placing additional burdens on councils to rehouse them. It is no wonder that many councils appear reluctant to use all the enforcement powers available to them.
Because of those issues, the Bill has received widespread support. I mentioned Shelter, Citizens Advice and Generation Rent. Further supporters are the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, the Association of Tenancy Relations Officers, the Electrical Safety Council, the National Union of Students, PricedOut, the Tenants Voice, the Chartered Institute of Housing, the Mayor of London, the Local Government Association and the Local Government Information Unit. Supporters also include many organisations that one would not expect to be on the side of tenants. Nationwide, for example, which is one of the largest providers of mortgages, supports the Bill because it believes that it will have a good effect on those who are providing rented accommodation.
As I said, most landlords want to treat their tenants with respect and with decency. They take pride in doing repairs promptly, and they want to keep good tenants in their property paying rent. In drafting these protections, I have been very mindful of making sure that we can intervene to prevent unfair evictions but do nothing to dissuade law-abiding landlords from operating or to place undue burdens on those who are behaving well.
During the drafting of the Bill, I was extremely grateful to the many landlords’ associations and individual landlords who contacted me and to those who engaged with consultations held by the Department for Communities and Local Government. Comments made during that process fed into the version of the Bill that is now before us. In drafting it, great care was taken to make sure that it impacts only on landlords who are not fulfilling their legal obligations. It should not impact at all on the work of the vast majority who want to provide good-quality, safe homes for their tenants.
In short, the Bill seeks to provide tenants with protection from retaliatory eviction by limiting landlords’ ability to issue a section 21 notice. Clause 1 would prevent a landlord from issuing section 21 notices on a tenant within six months of the serving of a notice by a local authority in response to a serious problem in the property. The types of notice that would trigger this restriction include improvement notices, hazard awareness notices, and notices of emergency remedial action under the Housing Act 2004.
The clause would make a section 21 notice invalid if, before the notice was served, the tenant had made a complaint in writing to the landlord, the landlord’s agent or the local authority about the property, and after the section 21 notice had been issued the local authority had inspected the property, found the problem indeed to be serious, and served a notice on the property. I want to stress that the complaint must have been made prior to the section 21 notice being issued. This is not a charter for people to make spurious complaints and frustrate the process right at the end of eviction. They will need to have made the complaint already. This is about tackling retaliatory eviction.
Stephen Gilbert (St Austell and Newquay) (LD)
Is not the six-month sanction in line with six-month sanctions that already exist in legislation where a landlord withholds a deposit from a tenant or fails to license the property properly, and the Bill does not go beyond that in protecting tenants from certain forms of harassment by landlords?
Sarah Teather
There are certainly restrictions on the use of section 21 notices if landlords are not compliant with the tenancy deposit scheme. This is about extending the law by making a similar provision so that a landlord cannot leave their property in a terrible state of disrepair and then, when their tenant tries to get some joy out of them in getting them to repair it, they retaliate by evicting the tenant.
Under clause 1, tenants would be able to defend against a landlord’s claim for possession under section 21 by establishing that prior to the service of the notice they had made a written complaint to the landlord or local authority but the local authority had yet to complete the inspection process. To ensure protection for the landlord, clause 2 allows courts to ignore this defence if they decide that the tenant’s complaint is completely without merit.
Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)
That would involve having to go to court, with all the time taken, expense and uncertainty of litigation. Does not the hon. Lady think that it would be much better to have a similar provision that did not require going to court?
Sarah Teather
In most cases, if an enforcement notice is in place, the accelerated process of eviction would be quashed prior to going to court. However, there will be cases where it is right and proper that the landlord is able to defend themselves. This is about fairness. There is a balance to be struck in how we structure this. I do not want to skew everything in favour of the tenant so that the landlord is unable also to exercise his rights. Clause 2 also contains other important safeguards for the landlord. For example, it contains a requirement for the issue in question not to have been caused by the tenant. Clause 2 also allows for section 21 notices to be issued when the local authority had served a notice on the property if the landlord is genuinely seeking to sell the property.
I do not wish to go on for significantly longer. If there is a lot more time available later, I would like, with the leave of the House, to make some comments in response to what other Members say. What I will say is that a number of the Bill’s other provisions are about clarifying things for landlords and making some things easier for them if they are operating entirely legitimately. Clause 3 in particular clarifies the law following the decision in Spencer v. Taylor, a Court of Appeal case pertaining to technical details of how a section 21 notice is served. There are also provisions enabling the Government to produce a prescribed form on section 21 notices, which should clarify things both for tenants and for landlords.
In short, this is a very moderate Bill that would introduce relatively small changes to the law. It is very much in keeping with what many other countries do, including some that one would imagine would have an extremely right wing and libertarian attitude towards housing supply in the private rented sector. Most have protections to stop tenants being victims of revenge evictions, because that is not good for tenants, landlords or society. The Bill proposes a moderate change and I urge colleagues to support it.
Mike Thornton
That should be examined more carefully. It is vital that we continue to consider the private rented sector because otherwise we may have to look seriously in a few years at not having one at all. It is vital that we make things viable and fair, and make living in a private rented property a decent proposition.
Sarah Teather
What is the situation in my hon. Friend’s constituency? I was struck by the words of the environmental health officers quoted in the 2007 Citizens Advice report and by how aware they were that almost every case in which they intervened resulted in the tenant being evicted. That makes my council quite nervous about using the full force of its powers.
Mike Thornton
When I brought up the case to which I referred, Eastleigh borough council’s housing department explained to me that the situation was difficult. As its main aim is to keep people in accommodation, it was very worried, and it said that it did not want to intervene too often. When I have been asked to get involved in cases, tenants sometimes do not want me to report anything because they are worried about eviction, and I think that that is probably true across the whole country. My hon. Friend makes a good point.
As a Government and as ordinary decent people, we have a duty to tenants. This is about common decency. We should be able to listen to tenants. If, as MPs, we are unable to listen to tenants and act on their behalf because we are worried that we will make their situation even worse, we are put in an incredibly difficult position. I think that most MPs are determined to help their tenants, and that is what they want to do—
Proceedings interrupted (Standing Order No. 11(4)).