Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation and Liability for Housing Standards) Bill

Catherine West Excerpts

Friday 19th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Lyn Brown]

Excellent. My office will be in touch with the hon. Lady’s to see if we can get a date.

Enabling local authorities to take tough action against rogue landlords is very important and can be a real help in driving up standards. The Bill would tackle the problem at the root by clarifying, updating and strengthening the right of tenants to live in a rental property that is fit to be called a home. As we have heard, a minority of landlords make huge profits from their tenants, who sometimes live in appalling conditions.

Before Christmas, I mentioned the case of a man who was found living in a 1 metre by 2 metres space under some stairs, in a property with 11 other people and with electrical and fire hazards to boot. On the same day, that Newham enforcement team also found three people who were paying £200 a month for a space in an outside shed, and four other separate families who had been crammed into the main house. I believe that it will begin to solve the problem of abused tenants if all landlords, from the beginning of a tenancy, have a clear duty to provide those tenants with basic liveable conditions, and that should be enforced not just by our councils, but by the courts.

[Catherine West (Hornsey and Wood Green) (Lab)]

Will my hon. Friend join me in praising her local authority for leading the way? Other boroughs such as Haringey are now coming on board, with exciting new schemes to crack down on poor landlord practices.

[Lyn Brown]

Newham Council was absolutely right to take the action it did, and the Government were right to support it further. Only through such schemes, which are paid for by landlords, can we ensure that there is money for enforcement activity and that tenants can live in homes that are fit for them.

All our constituents deserve to have workable and realistic legal redress against landlords whose properties are dangerous, cold or damp. Giving tenants that help will ensure that the horrifying conditions we have heard about today will not be allowed to continue. I am delighted to support this Bill. It is about time that it progressed through the House, and I hope that will happen this afternoon.

--- Later in debate ---

[Rebecca Pow (Taunton Deane) (Con)]

I commend the hon. Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) for bringing in this important legislation for debate, and I know how much work she has done on this issue. I welcome the Minister—a former Whip—to her new position. I am a private landlord, so I refer the House to my entry in the register.

As we have heard today, everyone is entitled to a clean, safe and comfortable home. Indeed, one would have thought that that was a given, but the fact that we are discussing this legislation today illustrates that it clearly is not. Home really should be where the heart is, but there are long-standing concerns about property standards in both the social and private rented sectors. I have been made particularly aware of the issue not just through my work as an MP and my involvement in the Bill that became the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017, which was guided so well through the House by my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman), but through supporting so many Adjournment debates, which you probably sat through, Madam Deputy Speaker, with a former Housing Minister, the previous Member for Croydon Central, in which I heard so many harrowing cases of rogue landlords forcing people to live in squalor and making their lives hell. I am therefore pleased that the Bill will address some of those issues.

[Catherine West]

Given that the private rented sector is composed of a plethora of small landladies or landlords, such as the hon. Lady, does she accept that people can be good landlords? We need good landlords and landladies, but we need good legislation and good enforcement.

[Rebecca Pow]

I thank the hon. Lady. I will be touching on that later. It is important that we do not make private landlords—the good ones—feel that we are outlawing them. We need to help them, but we also need everyone to have good standards.

In England, the private rented sector currently houses more people than the social rented sector, and that is borne out in Taunton Deane. Last year, the English housing survey found that 40% of homes in the private rented sector had at least one indicator of poor housing.