Renters’ Rights Bill

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

Monday 28th April 2025 Lords Chamber

My tabled Amendments 80, 80A, 82 and 83 make small technical changes to the language used in new Section 13A(2) and 13A(3). I will certainly not be pushing these to a vote; instead, I am asking the Minister for clarification around the wording of these new sections to avoid future difficulties for social landlords that could affect their ability to provide services to tenants or create unfairness in rent setting.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, Amendment 87 in my name proposes that the Government adopt a screening procedure for rent appeals. It draws on and is prompted by current Scottish practice. The approach works well there and could make a substantial contribution to addressing the growing pressure on court capacity, which we have been discussing.

My amendment does not, in any way, reduce the right of tenants to appeal against a rent increase. I am not sure that it even reduces the incentive to appeal on the off chance, but it certainly reduces the likelihood that the courts will be overwhelmed by appeals and, in particular, appeals that do not succeed and therefore swamp the courts, to the detriment of important and merit-worthy cases.

Under the Government’s current proposals, tenants will enjoy a number of new and important rights: rents cannot be increased as often as at present, for example, and the notice period is increased. Most importantly in the context of this group of amendments, all tenants who wish to challenge what they see as an excessive rent increase have access to an independent tribunal. The tribunal cannot propose an increase that is any higher than the one initially proposed by the landlord; it can endorse the landlord’s proposal, in effect, or rule that a lower rent should be charged. Obviously, these changes will be of great assistance to tenants whose landlords are proposing major increases that are out of line with inflation or the market.

The problem is that, from most tenants’ point of view, appealing against an increase becomes something of a no-brainer. Why on earth would you not? What would you lose? At worst, you get a delay in the date when the increase takes effect. In that situation, the courts are bound to be faced with a tsunami of appeals with which they cannot possibly cope.

As many noble Lords are aware, Scotland reformed its rental legislation quite recently and it therefore provides us with useful indications of how contemporary rental markets respond to various types of change. Some Scottish developments are not very encouraging, as we have heard: there seems to be an ongoing decline in the number of rental properties and a sharp fall in the construction of properties for rent. However, one aspect of the current Scottish regime seems extremely sensible and successful. It does not reduce Scottish tenants’ rights but it does protect their court system.

The first stage in an appeal against a proposed rent increase goes to Rent Service Scotland. Apparently, it takes Rent Service Scotland, on average, just five days to respond. In almost every case, things stop there; very few cases then go on to a tribunal hearing.

The National Residential Landlords Association obtained information under a freedom of information request, which showed that, in the four months from April to July 2024, 928 applications were made to Rent Service Scotland to appeal a proposed rent increase. While there do not seem to be any summary statistics available that show exactly how numbers have evolved and changed over time, the Scottish tribunal is certainly not dealing with anything approaching that number. In fact, only about 30 decisions relating to rent increases were published between August 2024 and March 2025. The full 2023-24 Scottish tribunals report also shows that, while private rental sector cases were the large majority of property cases, they were overwhelmingly to do with evictions, deposits and repairs and not rent appeals.

Obviously, the Scottish situation is very different from ours, notably in adopting rent caps, but it is also obvious that that system is effective in giving tenants and landlords very quick feedback rather than months in limbo. It is also obvious, given the volume of appeals, that without this system the Scottish tribunal would be spending a lot of time and resource on a very large number of cases that were, in effect, a waste of its time.

It would be very easy for us to introduce a similar first-stage process in England. There is a large amount of expertise on rents outside the tribunals and courts. The Valuation Office Agency already gives the Government the valuations and property advice they need to support taxation and benefits. Rent officers set rents for the remaining group of protected tenancies. So, all the basic infrastructure we need is in place.

My amendment therefore proposes that all appeals against rent increases should go in the first instance to the Valuation Office Agency and progress to the First-tier Tribunal only if there is a clear case to answer. Obviously, if the Government chose to embrace the general idea, as I very much hope they will, the details would be in their hands—this is a probing amendment.

To see how important such a screening process could be in protecting our court system from near-complete collapse, it is worth doing a little bit of back-of-the-envelope arithmetic. If appeal rates from private sector tenants in England were at the same level as we currently see in Scotland and they all proceeded to the tribunal, we would end up in England with over 40,000 cases a year. That compares with 909 rent increase cases heard in the year 2023-24. We would be looking at an increase that is more than fortyfold, or 4,000%. As we have heard from noble Lords, it can already take months for the First-tier Tribunal to rule, so how can it possibly respond to this sort of increase? Of course, under the Bill’s provisions, the longer the delays, the greater the incentive is to appeal, so I am afraid that fortyfold might just be the start.

It is no wonder that even very strong supporters of the Bill, such as the Local Government Association, are expressing concerns about the potential impact of the new appeal rights on the capacity of the First-tier Tribunal to make decisions in a timely fashion. This timeliness matters not just because of the direct impact on changes in rents but because our judicial system also needs to deal with other property issues, including anti-social behaviour. It is worth emphasising that anti-social behaviour is not just an issue for landlords; it is at least as much of an issue for surrounding residents, many of whom will be tenants. If you live next to a property which is being used for intensive drug dealing, it is not much consolation to be told that this occurs only with a tiny minority of properties.

We already have very long delays in the court system, as other Lords have pointed out. Those delays seem to be growing and not reducing and we as a Chamber must, for the sake of tenants just as much as landlords, take the potential impact on the courts into account in scrutinising the Bill.

I therefore urge the Government to consider following and learning from the Scottish example and introducing a first-stage screening of rent appeals outside the court system. Is the Minister willing to meet me to discuss that suggestion?

[Lord Hacking (Lab)]

My Lords, my Amendments 88, 91, 94, 97, 100 and 101 appear in this group. Before I speak to the individual amendments, my general observation is that I do not have great enthusiasm about several of them, but they have been put to me and I thought it necessary to have them aired in this Committee.

Amendment 88 would enable landlords to claim costs against the tenant when the landlord succeeded after the tribunal confirmed the rent increase. This follows the normal rule in front of all tribunals and courts in our land of costs following the event, the event being who won the dispute, and the costs therefore have to be picked up by the loser. Having said that, I have a reservation about this amendment, because it could be a deterrent against tenants challenging an increase in rent, which is undesirable.

In speaking to Amendment 91, I will speak also to Amendments 94, 97 and 100. All these amendments seek to establish that the increase in rent should be calculated from the expiry of the landlord’s notice for the increase rather than the date of the tribunal’s decision. I tabled this amendment because there is quite a noticeable delay in decisions of tribunals, which means the landlord does not get his increase in rent until several months later.

Amendment 101 moves to a different subject: that the rent payable on the decision of the tribunal should be paid in equal monthly instalments within six months of the tribunal’s determination—that speaks for itself.

I am just looking at my list of amendments to speak to and I think I have got there; I have completed my comments on all of them. I say again that I do not speak to them with great enthusiasm. I spoke with great enthusiasm on Thursday in supporting Amendment 60 from the noble Lord, Lord Carter of Haslemere, and my own Amendments 165 and 166. Unfortunately, my enthusiasm for these amendments has not so far permeated to my noble friend on the Front Bench, but I hope that they will do later.

Renters’ Rights Bill

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Willetts (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 40 in my name. This is the moment when students and higher education enter the housing and rental market debate. I am never totally sure whether the department responsible for housing welcomes this interruption from the higher education sector, but I hope the Minister will accept it in the spirit in which it is meant. I declare an interest as a visiting professor at King’s College London, and a member of the council of the University of Southampton.

I understand the arguments that the Minister makes about the need for tenants to have security and be able to put down roots in the long term, but so many of her arguments for this legislation do not apply to students who are seeking reliable accommodation for an academic year. The model that she proposes is clearly not in their interests.

If I may say so to the Minister, the link between housing policies and higher education is very important. The previous Labour Prime Minister, Tony Blair, set a target of 50% of people going to university. There are different views about the target; I do not personally believe in targets, but nevertheless that 50% target was achieved and it was achieved only because of the use of the private rented sector. It is impossible to have imagined that that target would have been secured without the way in which the private rented sector has developed for student accommodation. This is not just a historic achievement; if the Government have opportunity as one of their core objectives, it is surely important that students who could benefit from higher education have that opportunity, and that includes being able to access accommodation that meets their needs.

The Government have clearly accepted that there is a need for some special arrangements for student lets. The exact form they take is open for discussion. My noble friend Lady Scott made very powerful points in support of her proposed amendments, which try to secure that. The Government have made some concessions to recognise the student market. There is already one exemption from the legislation, which is for purpose-built student accommodation. That tends to be high-cost and involves students making a very early commitment. It is possible almost at the beginning of the previous academic year for the student to enter into a special academic year contract in this high-cost, purpose-built accommodation. To put it crudely, the Government are looking after the elite: the students who plan a year ahead, can afford the high rents and go into the —by and large—very high-quality purpose-built accommodation, which often has business investors behind it.

There is now a second category that has been added, and that is ground 4A, which is essentially for HMOs with three bedrooms or more in the private rented sector. They are also now going to be exempt from the burden of the legislation, with a different start date for making a commitment—about January before the academic year starts. That is the next group— I feel it is a bit like that famous “three classes” sketch, since we have got a second group that will now be looked after.

But that leaves a third group for whom the Government are not currently providing any exemption. These are students in smaller accommodation, maybe one or two-bedroom properties, for whom none of the special exemptions are going to apply. It is therefore very odd that, in the Government’s model to tackle this problem, you could have three university students who are friends and are in three totally different rental regimes because of the structure of the exemptions which the Government are trying to offer.

What I am attempting in the amendment in my name—I welcome the support of other noble Lords—is to say that these smaller rented accommodations of one or two bedrooms should also be exempt from the general provisions of the Bill and instead be recognised as academic accommodation, with its special needs. What do we know about these students in one- or two-bedroom properties? The evidence is limited. There seem to be quite a few of them. There are different estimates as to how many students in the rented sector are in these smaller accommodations. One estimate is 24%; another is a third. Several hundred thousand students are currently in this sector. So, if landlords pull out from it because there is no way they can be confident of being able to offer a tenancy for an academic year and the accommodation enters the mainstream market, several hundred thousand students currently renting in this sector will lose out.

One view is that they may be students who go for particularly low rents. I do not know. An alternative account of these students is that this smaller accommodation is basically for students who wish to live more quietly. It is less social. One suggestion is that it tends to be final-year students who move out from the bigger, more crowded accommodation so that they can properly study and revise for their final year. The Government’s education policy appears to be, “It is okay to have a special arrangement if you are going to be in a large, sociable environment, but if you want to move into a studious, quieter environment, we are ceasing to recognise that you are a special student and your kind of accommodation is going to go”.

I very much hope that the Minister will recognise, as the Government have already made concessions, that we need a wholehearted attempt to preserve an academic year student rental market. My attempt to extend the exemption on ground 4A to one- and two-bedroom accommodation is an attempt to do that. The interesting proposals from my noble friend Lady Scott are an ingenious attempt to do that.

Finally, and briefly, I will refer to another amendment that attempts to do that: Amendment 189, in the name of my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham, who is in the Chamber but currently appears unable to participate in this consideration of his excellent amendment. It is another attempt to resolve this issue with an ingenious proposal that there should be a special code of conduct for private sector residential landlords letting to students. If landlords sign up to that code of conduct, they would then be exempt.

To be honest with the Minister, I do not have particularly strong views about exactly which mechanism should be used but I hope that at the end of the consideration of these amendments, she will accept that there needs to be a wholehearted recognition that the student academic market is different and, instead of slicing it into these particular sectors—some parts of it to be recognised and others not to be—there needs to be a complete solution for students renting for academic terms because, otherwise, the Government’s commitment to opportunity will be in jeopardy.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

I have added my name to Amendment 40 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, and declare an interest as an academic employee of King’s College London. As such, I am acutely aware of the accommodation and living costs that students face if they study away from home. London is particularly expensive, as I am sure noble Lords have noticed, and the level of maintenance loans available and the total absence in England of maintenance grants mean that many UK students conclude that a London degree is simply out of reach.

At King’s, we manage to offer first-year undergraduates a place in hall and we have an affordable accommodation scheme that helps a subset of students obtain accommodation at below market rates, and other universities are similar. However, over time we have seen our student body change. On the one hand, we have far more international students, many of whom are able to afford the rents charged in high-end, purpose-built student accommodation or to pay market rents in the private sector; on the other hand—this is far less well known—we have seen a strong growth in the proportion of our UK students whose families live in or close to London who live at home, and a corresponding decline in the number of UK students who are in student accommodation in London.

If your family lives in the London area, you can live at home and be a commuter student and still have access to a huge range of institutions and degrees, but that is not true for people in a very large part of the country. You do not need to believe that young undergraduates should all go away to do their studies to be aware that for many people, it is absolutely central to social mobility and to their future. If it is only wealthy students who can move geographically, our best faculties and specialist degrees will not be able to recruit the best students.

Holocaust Memorial Bill

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 4th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, many speakers have already referred to the mess we seem to have got into on this, and the number of speeches we have listened to bears witness to that. It also seems to me, as the debate grows close to its end, that there is a common belief in this Chamber that it would all be soluble and the project would be easily realised if we could just move everything to another site. I think that is completely wrong.

Take, for example, the Imperial War Museum, which came up a number of times and is often cited in this context. The noble Lord, Lord Black, speaking in a personal capacity, said this seems to be an excellent idea. As a south Londoner, I strongly disagree. I invite noble Lords who still possess an A-Z to take a look at the pages that cover Lambeth and Southwark. They will see that if you start at Lambeth Palace, which has its own gardens, and go east, you basically do not get anything until you are way east of Tower Bridge at Rotherhithe and Southwark Park, except for one small piece of green, which is the gardens of the Imperial War Museum. It seems to me that, far from being an obvious and simple site for a number of reasons, there is rightly going to be considerable opposition and unease at having built around with steel and effectively losing one of the few, tiny parts of green that the whole of Lambeth and Southwark possess.

I talk about the Imperial War Museum simply because that is the part of London that I spend a lot of my time in and know very well, but the point is much more general. If you look across the river to this side, you will see that as well as Victoria Tower Gardens, which noble Lords all know well and value, which is on our doorstep, there are a lot of pieces of green here. There is the wonderful St James’s Park. There are also Whitehall Gardens, Embankment Gardens, which I love, with its playground and Vincent Square. Would those be fine? If we put the memorial there, would that solve everything? I beg to disagree. The point is that any green space in any part of London is going to have all sorts of pressures upon it, and you cannot simply say “Don’t put it in Victoria Tower Gardens. Let’s just move it. That will solve the problem”.

The other thing that I was slightly taken aback by during the debate is the idea that the security problems mean that we should put the memorial somewhere else and that if we put it in another site, there will not be an issue. I think that if we had been having a debate like this nine years ago, we would not have spent as much time on security. The awful 10 months we have just completed have made this an issue in a way that it was not when this was first discussed. After all, this has been a period in which the Wiener Holocaust Library has been vandalised, and the Anne Frank statue in Amsterdam has been vandalised twice, so there is an issue. It is an issue that we must face wherever we think about putting the memorial and learning centre, but it seems to me that, first of all, as Bob Blackman MP said in the other place, the threat to any memorial is not an argument for why the memorial is not needed, but the opposite. It is an argument for why the memorial is needed. I certainly feel that it is and that successive Prime Ministers have been correct in feeling this.

Whether or not the memorial is in Victoria Tower Gardens, Westminster has surely to be the place that can offer security as well as being a place where we make a statement. I am sorry to keep harping on about the Imperial War Museum, which I adore, but it is not the same. Westminster is the centre of London, and if we want to make this statement and have this memorial, the real centre of London is where it belongs. This is a place which knows about security. I am deeply impressed by how well we manage to bring thousands of people through this precinct day after day.

Finally, I feel listening to this that the memorial and the learning centre are quite rightly separated in discussion and that that is probably somewhere where a lot of thought is needed, but I feel strongly that we are kidding ourselves if we think that everything will be fine if we just look for a brand-new site somewhere open and away from Westminster.

Intergovernmental Relations Within the United Kingdom

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

Thursday 18th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, I join others in thanking the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, for securing this debate and for his wonderful opening speech. I will focus on some specific matters, rather than the overall architecture of intergovernmental relations, and in particular on the lowest tier of the interministerial groups that focus on specific policy areas.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, noted, we can easily get so focused on process that we do not notice that devolution has meant growing divergence. Devolution means that things have happened and I am not sure that we take enough note of this happening or build it into our relations between Governments.

No one will be surprised that an example I want to focus on is education, but I apologise for the fact that my examples will be English and Scottish, because those are the two systems that I know well. We have always had major differences in our school systems. That is not only entirely acceptable but, in theory, a source of strength, because we can look at what works in different systems and they are alike enough that one can draw some useful lessons. We do not always do that, but it is a real opportunity.

But we have to remember that the United Kingdom has a national economy. Different parts of it may have different strengths, but we have a mobile labour force and young people take it for granted that they will have the freedom to move easily around the entire UK. This starts to be relevant when we think about our professional, vocational and technical education systems. Sometimes you have to have differences—for example, legal education has to be different in Scotland—but there are areas in the older professions where we have either natural or government-mandated mechanisms to ensure adequate alignment. The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges is the membership body for 24 medical royal colleges and faculties across not only the United Kingdom but Ireland, and the Nursing and Midwifery Council is UK-wide. But, once you go beyond the traditional professions, there is a surprising lack of join-up.

Ours is a world with a growing number of licences to practise. In England, we are trying very hard to revitalise apprenticeships and we have the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education. But there is no formal provision for IfATE or the Scottish Qualifications Authority to take note of each other’s standards. IfATE certainly has no resources explicitly to work with the SQA on aligning training expectations. Equally, the English Government are trying to develop a range of higher technical qualifications, but I do not know of any explicit attempts to take account of the much stronger provision in Scotland of higher national diplomas, over a wide range and with a lot of experience. There might be some informal discussions but there is nothing formal. This is something we should worry about.

The other example I will use briefly is higher education, where I must declare an interest as a professor at King’s College London. Here too we have a national system that we are not taking enough note of as things diverge. We have a national system of application to university in UCAS and a national body for student loans in the Student Loans Company. Again, the systems are diverging. That might be perfectly all right, but there is an assumption among all young people in all four of our countries that they can apply to national institutions—I think UCAS is an institution—and that they will be able to move around.

There is also the research economy, which is very relevant to our economic future because, if we do not maintain real research strength in this country, our future is genuinely grim. The UK Government recognise this by funding a large research budget, and specifically by running the research excellence framework: a four-country, UK-wide exercise that provides a periodic intensive review of the quality of research provision. It has certainly been a spur to action in universities and a major source of our international reputation as a very strong provider of higher education. It is run jointly by Research England, the Scottish Funding Council, the new Commission for Tertiary Education and Research in Wales, and the Department for the Economy in Northern Ireland. England uses it as a way to target money into high-achieving universities to ensure that a certain number have the strength to maintain an international research reputation. In England we have to target because we now have 416 registered providers of higher education compared with the, in my view, more reasonable numbers of 18 in Scotland and 11 in Wales.

Devolved Governments do not have to spend any of that money on research; it comes under the Barnett consequentials. Again, that is fine, but it is also true that divergence is increasing, which has—in quite a short term, let alone the long term—some real knock-on effects for movements of staff between universities within the United Kingdom and for the future of a joined-up national UK-wide university system.

My point is not that the London Government should take back control, but that we are not discussing those growing divergencies in any systematic way. I was therefore extremely concerned to learn that the UK Education Ministers Council met only once in 2023.

In conclusion, I echo the comments of my noble friend Lord Kinnoull, and ask the Minister if we can please have some more information on how those meetings are organised, and whether there is any systematic effort to make sure that the four Governments take note of and address divergencies that may be very fruitful, but which, when they impact on the economy of a single nation—the United Kingdom—need to be addressed consistently and in depth by all four Governments.

Local Enterprise Partnerships: Funding

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

Monday 11th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My noble friend is absolutely right. In taking this decision, we conducted an information-gathering exercise with local authorities and LEPs to understand the impact of our plans. That identified great overlap between some of the functions discharged by LEPs, local authorities and combined authorities, as well as confirming a high level of integration of LEP functions in mayoral combined authorities. That is why we are taking the direction of travel that we are. The Government’s view is that there is likely to be scope for both greater join-up and efficiencies, and clarity for the private sector, by these functions being discharged in a joined-up way, and greater local accountability.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, LEPs and RDAs had in common that, while they referred to “local” and “regional”, they were, in fact, Whitehall appointed and Whitehall controlled. If their functions are gradually transferred to mayoral authorities, that will clearly take things closer to local enterprise, but it is not necessarily a great improvement if you move from a Whitehall bureaucracy to a mayoral bureaucracy. What is being done to ensure that these functions respond actively to local enterprises and to local and regional organisations, which are membership organisations and directly represent enterprises, businesses, communities and, indeed, consumers?

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, the Government have published guidance for the transfer of LEP functions to local authorities. Further guidance will be issued in January. As part of our devolution settlements in different areas, there are also clear conditions around how business engagement should take place to ensure that the voices of local businesses and their representative organisations are well heard in those areas.