Renters’ Rights Bill

Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe Excerpts

Monday 12th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Coffey (Con)]

My Lords, I oppose this amendment. It is rare that I am out of step with my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham, but I am concerned that overregulation of aspects of employment is—how can I put it?—a solution waiting for an extensive problem. One of the things that these amendments do is to yet again give considerable powers to others to set all sorts of training expectations. Candidly, and certainly in the private market, there are simply too many sectors in which government and Parliament seek to rip away control instead of the individual having that engagement and relationship.

We already have the property redress scheme in place, of which letting agents and people who manage properties have to be a part. Do not get me wrong: there are plenty of landlords who are not necessarily doing what they should, at the moment, but there are already mechanisms to put this in place. I do not believe that qualifications, training schemes or similar will make a particular difference.

I am also conscious of what happened with social housing, particularly some of the significant failures that we sadly saw in aspects of local government and housing associations. There was a feeling that something must be done. I am conscious, however, that that does not mean that we need to paint every letting agent or property manager with the same brush. For me, this is overreach on behalf of Parliament and, again, I would like to see the evidence for why we need to go to this extent and why yet another profession that has minimal regulation today now needs to be heavily regulated.

It is again a barrier that would put up agencies’ costs. This is the reality of having to deal with this sort of regulation: the person who pays is the renter, not the landlord. We have to bear in mind that, with the cost of living challenge that we are facing—still the number one issue for the electorate in this country—we are here tonight considering an amendment that will continue to put costs on people who are trying to pay their rent. This is the sort of economic situation that we need to consider for every regulation where we are adding extra barriers to entry to make sure that we keep in mind the people who want to just get on with their lives and have good relationships. They can change in the private sector; that is much harder for people in the social rented sector but, even then, we may have gone slightly too far. We must continue to consider the economic impact on people in this country with every regulation that we pass in this House.

[Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly in support of the noble Lord, Lord Best. I declare an interest, which I recently gave up, as the chair of the Property Ombudsman board. Perhaps I can provide some of the evidence that the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, wanted because, in 30 years of dealing with complaints about property agents, the Property Ombudsman has seen many disputes that probably would not have occurred had those agents undertaken formal training and qualifications.

In 2023—the latest statistics we have—the ombudsman resolved over 2,200 letting disputes. Of these, over half concerned the management of tenancies where the main issues were the agents’ performance in organising and communicating repair and maintenance issues. For the majority, dissatisfaction in these disputes concerned simple and consistent communication around timescales and, in general, managing expectations. Training for agents on how to manage tenant and landlord expectations would have stopped many disputes arising in the first instance.

In addition, there were more than 500 disputes that related to complaint handling. Again, agents currently do not take a consistent approach to complaint handling, which often leaves both tenants and landlords frustrated. It became very clear to me in my time at the Property Ombudsman that to provide a professional and consistent level of service to tenants and landlords, many letting agents would benefit from formal training. It would not only help agents to provide a better service but set consistent expectations for consumers, meaning that relationships between agents, tenants and landlords would improve.

In my brief intervention, I reinforce the RoPA report recommendations of the noble Lord, Lord Best, indeed reinforced by the work of my noble friend Lady Hayter, that the elements required to implement a training and qualifications regime are already in place. I hope it would not be too significant a leap for the Government to make training and qualifications a mandatory requirement for all letting agents.