Stephen Pound
Main Page: Stephen Pound (Labour - Ealing North)(9 years, 11 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)
The hon. Member for St Austell and Newquay (Stephen Gilbert) expressed the hope that the Bill will receive support from both sides of the House and that we will put aside partisan politics. I think that those who know my relationship with the hon. Member for Brent Central (Sarah Teather) will understand that the fact that I am here supporting a Bill that she has brought forward is extreme testimony to that. But it is the merits of the Bill that I am here to support.
I want to read out a letter from a landlord in my constituency who wrote to me about his concerns about the Bill. I do not know whether he is a good landlord or a rogue one, but these are the sentences he used to express his concerns:
“Surely anyone with an ounce of common sense must know if you are going to give a Tenant a five year contract up front they are not going to behave, respect the Property or be a good Tenant, and if you get struck with the bad one it’s a five year problem. All he needs to do is damage your property, run along to the Council and complain about the damage, and the landlord won’t be able to use section 21. This is utter nonsense of a Bill.”
I disagree with that, but I am confident that many of the remarks that will be made later on in an attempt to talk out the Bill will sound similar. The letter expresses pithily the fundamental worries that landlords, including good landlords, have, because there is abuse not only by landlords, but by tenants. The Bill has its best chance of success because that has been taken on board, while recognising that there has to be greater equity of power between the landlord and the tenant. At the moment, the balance of power is clearly in the landlord’s favour, and many tenants are suffering as a result.
One of those tenants is my constituent Mr P, who has been subjected to ongoing leaks and regular ceiling collapses for the past nine years. He is not one of the short-term, complaining tenants that the landlord who wrote to me was referring to, because he has been in the property for nine years. The first collapse occurred eight years ago and produced 20 kg of debris. Most recently, the ceiling gave way in two places, missing my constituent by only a few feet. The landlord is fully aware of the state of the property, but he appears to be very reluctant to carry out repair work.
On two previous occasions, the landlord initiated eviction proceedings against my constituent after he complained about his living conditions. However, I am told that the notices were withdrawn when my constituent threatened to involve Brent council’s private housing services. I want to mention Brent private tenants rights group, which is a wonderful organisation, and Jacky Peacock, who is known not only to the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman), from his time as council leader—he is nodding in his place—but to my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing North (Stephen Pound) and the hon. Member for Brent Central. Jacky has been sticking up for private tenants in the Brent, Harrow and Ealing areas for many years, and she is wonderful. I understand that on both occasions Mr P’s landlord agreed to undertake the repair work on the condition that he accepted rent increases. Those rent increases were imposed, but the repair work was not subsequently carried out.
The landlord whose letter I read out earlier feared that all the tenant needed to do was damage the property and make a complaint, and then section 21 could not be enforced. That is not correct. It is important that Members who support the Bill make it clear that that is not possible. He refers in another part of his letter to the many ways in which the local authority can already get involved. In fact, on 9 April this year, Mr P received a fresh notice to quit, and on that occasion he was rather surprised, because he had not made any recent complaints about the property. He realised that the notice to quit was triggered by the enforcement action that Brent council is now planning to take with regard to the property. Of course, if an officer from the council’s private housing service is to visit and make an assessment, it is a requirement that the landlord be notified of an impending visit and assessment. Otherwise, any enforcement decision cannot be taken against the landlord. It is really important that the hon. Member for Brent Central has incorporated into the Bill a reasonableness clause and a reasonableness agenda, because that gives succour to good landlords, reassuring them that they will not be subject to frivolous, vexatious or aggressive action on behalf of tenants. In my dealings with tenants in Brent over the past 17 and a half years, I have come across fewer than 20 vexatious tenants in that entire period. As for the number of retaliatory evictions—we are probably dealing with 20 such ongoing cases in my office at present. The balance is clearly out of kilter and needs to be rectified.
Stephen Pound (Ealing North) (Lab)
I, too, may be divided politically from the hon. Member for Brent Central (Sarah Teather), but I am entirely united with her on this occasion. Does my hon. Friend the Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner) agree that if a landlord were a vendor and the tenant were a purchaser—a consumer—the existing consumer protection legislation would provide that equity? Why do we have such a fundamental imbalance? Section 21, which was supposed to be a sensible measure, is a great threatening blunderbuss before which many of our tenants, our constituents and our friends and some of our family have to cower. Why this imbalance?
Barry Gardiner
My hon. Friend is right. There is a huge imbalance, part of which the Bill seeks to address. I welcome that. The imbalance exists because power and money usually side together, and that is what we need to pull apart by ensuring that the Bill progresses.
I have a number of other cases which highlight the problem of retaliatory evictions. One tenant had lived in the property for 11 years amid lots of disrepair, the possession order coming once a complaint had been made. I shall not detain the House with further cases because I want to see the Bill progress. It is good, but it is limited. The hon. Member for Brent Central will know that in the House of Lords on 5 November my party introduced an amendment on retaliatory eviction to the Consumer Rights Bill. Hansard records who supported that amendment.
My party has also set out plans for a much more fundamental reform of the private sector because of the need to get a fairer deal for those who are renting and to remedy the imbalance identified by most Members who have spoken in the debate. I would very much like to present more cases, but I do not believe that for some of those who will follow me in this debate, more cases will be more persuasive. We need to let them make their remarks and let the House move to a conclusion.
Lyn Brown
Trust me—I am not suggesting he does; it is just that I know the hon. Gentleman of old, and I know he will come to those figures in due course. The figures I am using are robust, and he knows it.
It is estimated that one in eight renters has chosen not to ask for improvements or to challenge a rent increase because of fear of eviction. This reduces the incentives for landlords to improve their properties. Rather than pay for repairs, unscrupulous landlords can take a short cut by evicting their current tenants and replacing them.
Philip Davies
I cannot speak for the hon. Gentleman’s constituency. He had the opportunity to speak earlier, but he cut himself short; he could have expanded at greater length on the problem of land-banking in his constituency. I do not want to be drawn off course. I am being dragged away and asked to speak at length about something, but I would rather stick as closely as I can to the meat of the Bill. I am sure that everybody would want me to do that.
Philip Davies
If the hon. Gentleman has other areas he wants me to expand into, I will be happy to indulge him, but I am not sure I want to go down that route.
Stephen Pound
On the subject of meat, the hon. Gentleman is well known for his prodigious appetite for research. Where in his last comment is there any link to the wording of the Bill? I cannot see any connection between his comments and what the hon. Member for Brent Central (Sarah Teather) is seeking to help with.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
I do not think we have to worry about that.
Philip Davies
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. That is already a big problem for landlords. Many landlords also worry about not being paid for weeks on end and, for example, being unable to have any benefits paid directly to them.
The issue with which we are dealing today is what is described as “retaliatory eviction”. The House of Commons Library says:
“Retaliatory eviction, also sometimes referred to as revenge eviction, is used to describe the situation where a private landlord serves a section 21 notice on an assured shorthold tenant (seeking to terminate the tenancy) in response to the tenant’s request for repairs, or where they have sought assistance from the local authority’s environmental health department.
Retaliatory eviction is said to be a by-product of the fact that private landlords can evict assured shorthold tenants without having to establish any ‘fault’ on the part of the tenant.”
The problem is that unless one knows the specifics of the case, or is in possession of an admission that that is what the landlord has done, it is difficult to know whether an eviction falls into that category. A landlord could, for example, coincidentally need the property back at the same time as the issuing of a complaint or a request for repairs.
I know of an example of a woman who went to Australia with her then boyfriend. They let their property in Clapham to go off on what was supposed to be a three-year secondment. Unfortunately, the woman’s boyfriend decided to end their relationship after just a few months. Her visa was dependent on him, so she had a very short time in which to leave Australia. She was homeless on her return to the United Kingdom, as the property had been let to cover the mortgage while they were out of the country. She had no choice but to give her tenant notice so that she could at least have somewhere to live and regain part of her life back in the UK.
Under the Bill if, by sheer coincidence, the tenant—who had been dealing with managing agents—had given notice of a problem, the woman would have had to wait a further six months. Given that she would be the one moving back into the property, she would hardly have not wanted to do whatever work was needed, because such work would have been to her benefit. The delay would have made an already upsetting situation even more distressing and stressful. Such a situation could well be just one of the Bill’s unintended consequences.
Similarly, if someone wanted to move back into a property to be near an ill or dying relative and to help with that relative’s care, in the event of the same coincidental timing of a notice or complaint, that person could be prevented from regaining his or her property, with the obvious emotional problems that would naturally arise in such distressing circumstances. Moreover, the tenant’s complaint might not be genuine. In the cases cited by the proponents of action, such as the Bill’s proposer, complaints are always genuine rather than bogus or spurious, although such complaints obviously occur from time to time.
Landlords already have obligations in relation to repairs and maintenance under the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985, so they have a legal duty. We are talking about tenants who complain about a landlord who is not carrying out his legal duty. Resorting to evicting tenants would not remove the legal duty in section 11 of that Act, which states:
“In a lease to which this section applies…there is implied a covenant by the lessor…to keep in repair the structure and exterior of the dwelling-house (including drains, gutters and external pipes)…to keep in repair and proper working order the installations in the dwelling-house for the supply of water, gas and electricity and for sanitation (including basins, sinks, baths and sanitary conveniences, but not other fixtures, fittings and appliances for making use of the supply of water, gas or electricity), and…to keep in repair and proper working order the installations in the dwelling-house for space heating and heating water.”
The Communities and Local Government Committee considered retaliatory evictions as part of its 2013-14 report on the private rented sector.
Stephen Pound
On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. I would never dare for a moment to suggest a course of action that you should take from the Chair, but surely, Sir, you would agree that this is utterly, totally and completely irrelevant. We will be on to episodes of “Rising Damp” next. Is it in order for the hon. Gentleman to seek to read out a list of necessities including “sanitary conveniences” in his pathetic attempt to talk out a good and decent Bill?
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
That is not a point of order, but we have heard the hon. Gentleman’s view and his opinion. My opinion is that the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) is in order. However, I agree with the hon. Member for Ealing North (Stephen Pound) on one point: we do not want to be given too many more examples.