Stephen Gilbert
Main Page: Stephen Gilbert (Liberal Democrat - St Austell and Newquay)
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.
Stephen Gilbert (St Austell and Newquay) (LD)
It is a pleasure to join so many colleagues from so many different parts of the country in this very important debate. I hope to be among so many colleagues from all parts of the House who seek to right a wrong and address injustice. All of us have constituencies to serve, often in far flung parts of the country—were it not for this debate, I would be attending the opening of the refurbished Treverbyn town hall, and I wish my constituents well in that—proving the point made by the hon. Member for Erith and Thamesmead (Teresa Pearce) that this problem affects not only London and metropolitan areas, but constituencies such as mine and more rural parts of our country.
This matter is not just an urban phenomenon. It is often a lazy assumption that private renting is just a city-based phenomenon, but there are more than 18,000 private renters in my constituency. That is the same number of people who live in St Austell, one of the largest towns in my constituency. As hon. Members know, conditions in the private rented sector can be poor. I have had constituents in my surgery in tears because of problems with damp, boilers and hazard notices being served on their property, and, as the hon. Lady said, a lack of legal clout to redress the power balance between tenant and landlord. I am keen to congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Brent Central (Sarah Teather) on introducing the Bill, because it provides us with the opportunity to debate and address the power imbalance at the heart of the relationship between tenant and landlord.
The private rented sector has expanded dramatically in the past 30 years. There are now 9 million private renters in England, but, as hon. Members have said, legislation has not moved with the times. Demand far outstrips supply, reducing the power of consumers, the renters, and leaving them vulnerable to the malpractice that exists in the industry. Hon. Members have been clear that it is the malpractice of a minority of landlords, but to ensure good standards for everybody we need to address malpractice where we find it. We must also congratulate landlords who respond well to the needs of their tenants, and treat them in a fair and equitable way.
We have ourselves partly to blame: we have been slow to react to the increase in the private rented sector and the problems that have come with it. As my hon. Friend said, more than 200,000 people have been either evicted or served with eviction notices in the past year alone. That is a considerable number. I am sure we have all had tenants with legitimate complaints about their homes coming to see us in our surgeries over many years. The Bill is timely.
As I said to my hon. Friend in an intervention, the Bill is also proportionate. If we consider how tenants are protected in other areas, we see similar levels of protection to those proposed in the Bill. If a landlord withholds a deposit, tenants cannot be issued with a section 21 notice for six months. That is logical and fair. If a landlord has failed to license a property properly, tenants cannot be issued with a section 21 notice for six months. That, too, is logical and fair. The same should be true when tenants make legitimate complaints regarding the failure of landlords to carry out repairs they are legally expected to carry out. Tenants should not receive a section 21 notice for six months—logical, fair, proportionate and exactly what the Bill proposes.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Wells (Tessa Munt), who is not in her place at the moment, on securing a motion on this issue at the Liberal Democrat party conference in October. More importantly, I congratulate those from all sides of the House on their support, across parties, for the Bill. Occasions when the House unites to address an injustice show Parliament at its best. I think we should see more of that and less of the partisanship we are sometimes prone to in this place.
Stephen Gilbert
Well, we can look forward it. [Laughter.]
Rogue landlords should not be able to deprive tenants of the fundamental right to enjoy their property in the way we all hope to enjoy the place we live in. However, we should also remember that section 21 notices are not the only possession rights that landlords have; they will retain their section 8 rights as well, meaning that tenants who break their agreement with the landlord—through antisocial behaviour, for example—could still be legitimately evicted. This would instil balance and fairness in the relationship. Good tenants and good landlords would be protected, and landlords who have problems with rogue tenants would still have legal redress.
Landlords would also benefit from the local authority’s ability to be an independent judge of legitimate complaints. Colleagues will be perhaps too familiar with improvement and hazard notices. I have come across them many times in my casework, so I am sure others have as well. These notices would act as a fail-safe in respect of perhaps the biggest concern landlords have: whether people can make spurious claims to stay in a property. By ensuring that complaints are verified by the local authority, good landlords will be protected.
Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)
I support the Bill and the comments people have made, but does the hon. Gentleman share my concern that environmental health officers, who are the unsung heroes of action against the significant minority of landlords who keep tenants in bad conditions, are under enormous pressure, as local authorities face up to a 50% reduction in their funding; that there is a massive variation in the ability of EHOs to issue hazard notices and take enforcement action; and that none of this is properly recorded either? If we are to make these measures work, it has to be on the back of consistent and properly funded environmental health organisations.
Stephen Gilbert
I do not disagree with the hon. Lady’s fundamental point: many EHOs and local authority departments are facing significant pressures. However, there is a plus side to the Bill. At the moment, we cannot track improvements to housing stock, because we are not clear where the poor housing stock is. As renters come forward, challenging their landlords under the provisions in the Bill, and as their complaints are verified by environmental health departments, we will be able to track improvements across the country and see the general uplifting of standards. I absolutely share her view that we need to resource local authorities properly so that they can perform their statutory duties, and of course EHOs are no exception, but the Bill gives us the opportunity to ensure continued improvement in the housing stock and to ensure that poor conditions cannot endure.
To conclude, it is hard-working people living in poor conditions and too afraid to speak out for fear of eviction who would most benefit from this Bill—we all see them in our surgeries. It would introduce a proportionate and timely system of legal redress to tenants who otherwise would live in fear of unfair eviction by those few rogue landlords across the country. That is why I will be joining my colleagues today in supporting the Bill.