Housing: Section 21 Evictions

Lord Cromwell Excerpts

Tuesday 20th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, the position since the White Paper and the introduction of the Bill has been that we will need to give six months’ notice on the implementation of Section 21 for new tenancies. We are committed to passing the Bill before the end of this Parliament and putting in place the resources we need to get everything in place during that six months’ notice period, so that we can implement the ban on Section 21 as soon as possible.

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

My Lords, to avoid asking the same question for the fourth time, has any assessment been made of the impact of this legislation, well-intentioned though it is, on the availability of rental accommodation? Does the Minister accept that the truly bad landlords, at whom this is presumably targeted, do not bother with Section 21 but use men in balaclavas with baseball bats to get rid of tenants?

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Lord Cromwell Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 6th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords, I refer to my registered interests, particularly that I chair a company that advises people on sustainable planning. I must say to my noble friends, with whom I very often agree, that I find this debate extremely difficult. First, this Bill should never have been in this form at all. No previous Government would have provided a long title for a Bill that means that it takes this long to go through Parliament and that, every time they think of something, they can add it to the Bill. We must be very clear about this Bill. Historically, we used to have the tightness of a title which enabled you to keep responsibly and respectably within the subject. So I start with this difficulty.

Secondly, this concentration on the numbers misses the point. Since the Government got rid of the net-zero requirement for houses, we have built over a million and a half homes that are not fit for the future. Every one of them has meant that the housebuilders have taken the profit, while the cost of putting those homes right has been left with the purchaser of the home. That is a scandal which is shared between the Government, who were foolish enough to get rid of the net-zero requirement, and the housebuilders, who knew precisely what they were doing. One of them made so much money that it offered its chief executive £140 million as a bonus. He did not get all that in the end, but that was the situation.

My problem is that in the absence of a proper policy, we are talking about the wrong thing. We should not be talking about the numbers, except to say that we need significantly more homes. We should be talking about the quality of the homes and the places where they should be. I go back to my own experience as Housing Minister. We were very interested in ensuring that we built homes on already used land. We thought it important to recreate our cities. We thought that was just as important a part of this as the numbers. At the moment, I can drive back from my local railway station and see every little village, every little town, spreading out into the countryside, homes being built on good agricultural land and homes being built which are, by their nature, the creators of commuters, as there is nowhere else for people to work.

If I may say so to my noble friend, it is no good ignoring that many district councils have a real problem with the number of places in which they can build the homes that they were asked to build. A lot are NIMBYs, and some I quite agree you would not like, but if you are faced with building homes in a council where most of the area is green belt, areas of outstanding natural beauty or historic areas, you find yourself in a huge difficulty. I agree that many of them do not try as hard as they ought to, but let us not kid ourselves as to what the local issue is—not just wanting to win that particular ward but a matter of real difficulty.

For that reason, I say to my noble friend that I am sad that in this elongated, extended, overblown Bill, we have not had time to do four things: put in the future homes requirements to raise the standards of housebuilding so that they are fit for the future; create a system whereby housebuilders should provide the resources for rebuilding the insides of many of the homes that they built over the last five or 10 years; and understand that we should reuse land and think about place-making where people are within a quarter of an hour of the resources they need. Then, we can talk about how we can have a relationship with local authorities that can build the number of houses that we need.

I intend to support the Government on this amendment because I am not prepared to be put into a position where the answer to our problems is numbers. That is not the answer. The answer is a housing policy which looks at sustainability, the ability to buy and the future, not a collection of odd clauses stuck together and added when it happens to be convenient.

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

My Lords, I have a much less eloquent and much less exciting question to the proponents of Amendment 195, and certainly no fairy dust. If you are linking national targets to the local plan, what happens when national targets change during the five-year plan period? Does the plan have to be rewritten, do parts of it have to be rewritten, or do you have to wait until the end of the period and then apply the new target? It is a purely technical question and, as I say, much less exciting than some of the material we have just heard, but I would be grateful if the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, could help me with that.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

I know that we are on Report but in response to that, it is exactly the structure that we have seen before. Essentially, in the five-year period between one local plan and the review of that plan, clearly, the housing delivery test is applied to what is adopted in that plan in the first instance. When it is reviewed after five years then clearly, as the amendment would say, the local plan must then be reviewed, taking account of the Government’s targets and standard method as applicable at that time.

Residential Leasehold

Lord Cromwell Excerpts

Wednesday 17th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

I thank my noble friend. That is perhaps exactly what I should have said: they need to just wait until we have clarification, and it will not be long, because it will be in this Parliament.

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

My Lords, is not one of the obstacles to movement forward on this that landlords are going to find that the leaseholders have become freeholders, and that they are going to seek compensation? If so, from whom?

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

I have had no indication that they will do that, but if they do we will have to look at that issue.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Lord Cromwell Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 24th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

My Lords, I have an amendment in this group that I shall speak to, but I will first make a few comments about the amendments in the name of the noble Earl, Lord Lytton. I thank him for his extremely detailed and thorough introduction to what is a very complicated issue.

As we have heard, the noble Earl proposed similar amendments to the then Building Safety Bill, which the Government rejected in favour of Schedule 8 and the other leaseholder protections that were eventually included in the Act. I commend him for his continued efforts in the work he does to support leaseholders, and the noble Lord, Lord Young. They have been absolutely unassailable in not wanting to give up on this.

I am sure that the Minister will repeat some of the reasons given during the passage of the Building Safety Bill as to why the Government are unable to accept these amendments in this legislation. My recollection of the reasons given is that the amendments would require a sizeable bureaucracy to be set up to deal with the thousands of buildings that would potentially be caught, and concerns about litigation risk. However, the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, is absolutely right to press that something should be done for buildings that are under 11 metres and resident-owned buildings. As was said during the passage of the Building Safety Bill, part of the problem is the number of buildings. Something has to be done to help all these people. During the passage of that Bill, the Government promised that something would be done. The noble Lord, Lord Young, quoted from the debate on the building safety Statement the Government’s continued promises to help those leaseholders who have still been left out, but this has not been done.

If the Government are going to push back again on this issue, when are they actually going to address this, as they have has previously promised to do? As the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, said, there are still significant numbers of leaseholders unprotected from often huge costs, and the situation is not resolved until everybody has proper protection. The noble Lord, Lord Young, asked the very pertinent question, “Have the Government done enough?”—and then I think he answered his question, and the answer was no. The Government need to fulfil the promise made during the passage of that Bill and look at how that issue can be resolved.

It has been said that building safety remediation is very complicated. But it is not complicated at all and is actually something the Government could do very quickly and easily to improve the safety of buildings in multiple occupancy. My Amendment 504GJD states:

“Within 60 days of the passing of this Act, a Minister of the Crown must make a statement to each House of Parliament outlining their position on whether building regulations should require the installation of more than one staircase in large multiple-occupancy residential buildings for the purposes of fire safety”.


This has been a concern for some time, and Grenfell made issues of fire safety even more important. But the reason I want to bring this up is because the National Fire Chiefs Council has argued that second staircases should be mandatory in blocks above 18 metres in height. It states:

“In the event of a fire, a correctly designed second staircase removes the risk of a single point of failure, buying critical time for firefighting activities, and providing residents with multiple escape routes”.


It points to London Fire Brigade figures which show that from

“1 April 2019 to 31 March 2022 … 8,500 residents chose to evacuate buildings rather than stay put”.

We are really pleased that the Department for Levelling-up, Housing and Communities has been carrying out a consultation to mandate second staircases in new residential buildings above 13 metres. The consultation paper states that

“the provision of a second staircase can provide some benefits for very tall residential buildings such as added resilience for extreme events and reduced conflicts between emergency responders entering a building and those trying to escape, reducing the risk of the smoke ingress into an ‘escape’ stairwell”.

It also states that a second staircase would provide a second means of escape if one route were filled with smoke.

We welcome the fact that the department has been carrying out this consultation. It closed very recently. I would be very pleased if the Minister could give some update on when we are likely to hear the outcome and the Government’s response to the consultation, but, in the meantime, if she were inclined to accept our amendment, it would help progress.

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

My Lords, I apologise to the Committee for not speaking in previous stages of the Bill: commitments elsewhere made it impossible. I shall speak briefly in support of Amendments 274 and 318 from the noble Earl, Lord Lytton. Reading the email circulated, citing powerful support for these amendments from expert commentators, government figures, individual leaseholders and associations from across the whole world, not just the UK, the rest of us can only look on in envy at the level of support that he has generated for his amendments. I congratulate him and the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, on championing this cause and on the powerful and detailed speeches which they gave us earlier, along with the right reverend Prelate.

The approach taken in these two amendments, which are founded on the polluter pays principle, make complete sense in putting right work that was in breach of building regulations at the time across a wider range of premises and a wider range of defects. I have some sympathy with the points raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, about looking after the construction industry. The fact is that, in a way, the polluter pays principle does not quite work here because, if building works were not done in accordance with the building regulations, it is quite clear who is responsible, whereas you could argue more widely about, for example, a leak from an oil tanker being a pollution incident. But, fundamentally, what this comes down to is, if not these solutions, what do the Government propose? I look forward to hearing.

Voter Identification Regulations 2022

Lord Cromwell Excerpts

Tuesday 13th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

My Lords, I spent probably the last 30 years organising election monitoring missions around the world. At the Brexit vote, which some noble Lords may remember, I had a group of young Europeans from right across new and old Europe come to look at how we did that vote. When I asked them afterwards what they thought could be improved, unanimously they said that they could not believe that people could go and vote without some form of identification as to who they were.

I do not think that is the problem we are trying to solve. I think we should have to produce identification; the problem to solve is how we make sure that everybody has it. The Northern Ireland example has been extremely instructive in that regard, and I hope that the Front Bench and the Government will be listening to some of the things said about the need for advertising and the need for ensuring that there is no excuse for people not having an ID card.

If I may finish, I remember many years ago saying to some students I was talking to who had come from Greece—I was a student myself—that I was not sure that I was going to bother to vote. They had grown up with the memory of the colonels, with a military dictatorship running their country, and gave me hell for saying that I was thinking of not going to vote. Now, if we can get that sort of mentality, the thing of “Oh dear, I can’t find my ID card,”—provided you had got one—would be a pretty lame excuse.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, I thank noble Lords for their thoughtful contributions and say that I do not intend to rerun the arguments for voter identification. That argument has been won and it is now in legislation. But I will take a little time to further detail some of the points raised by noble Lords on the actual implementation, which is the important thing this evening.

I thank the noble Lords, Lord Browne of Belmont and Lord Weir of Ballyholme, for saying what it is like on the ground. These two noble Lords have lived with this over the last 20 years. They have seen it introduced. They have seen how it works for local authority and general elections and I thank them for that. I think the rest of us who are not living in Northern Ireland can never have that knowledge of how it works and how we can make it work in this country.

There was quite a lot of talk from the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, and others on support for local authorities to deliver this. Of course, we are aware of the pressures faced by local authorities—and the concerns that the Local Government Association brought up, I think, only yesterday—and their ability to deliver these changes. But we have been working very closely with them and, as I think my noble friend Lord Hayward said, this is not the beginning of it; this has been going on for a good seven months with the legislation there and they knew that this was coming along the line. We have been working with the sector. We have been planning the implementation of this policy and not only that we have been giving additional funds to local authorities so that they can carry out the new duties. The Government remain confident in their ability to successfully deliver these changes.

The noble Baronesses, Lady Pinnock and Lady Fox, and many others, said that the Electoral Commission’s budget would be inadequate for communications. The Electoral Commission’s budget for the January communications campaign is over £5 million, which will be supplemented by £4.75 million in funding for local communications—for local authorities to communicate in their own areas.

If this legislation goes through, the Electoral Commission will start its campaign in the middle of January. It will be national and across all types of national media, but local authorities will also have the money to do local campaigns. Along with national government, they do local campaigns very well to get voters to register for voting. This will be added to those campaigns, and I have every confidence that with the money they have, local government and the Electoral Commission will be able to deliver that.

My noble friend Lord Strathclyde is absolutely right. As I said, these arguments have all been had, but, as it came up again, I will repeat the point about the manifesto commitment. Voter identification was in the manifesto, and photo identification became a government discussion because it was found in our pilots to be the only approach that increased voter trust and confidence, which are key aims for this policy. We talked about it a lot during the discussions on the Bill, and I reiterate it now in case noble Lords think that we got it wrong again. We know what we said, and we know why we put in photo ID.