Transport for London Bill [Lords]
Debate between Jeremy Corbyn and Bob Blackman(9 years, 1 month ago)
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Bob Blackman
Indeed, Mr Deputy Speaker.
On new clause 2, the issue of securing consent for the disposal of land owned by TfL is well established in section 163 of the Greater London Authority Act 1999. It includes a statutory regime for the disposal of former operational land, including requirements for the Secretary of State’s consent. The sponsors of the Bill therefore consider that further consent would be unnecessary and undesirable.
Jeremy Corbyn
The hon. Gentleman mentioned housing in London and the disposal of assets to meet housing needs. Is he aware that under permitted development rights, the conversion of office or industrial property does not require local planning consent so there is no social housing content to it? Does he accept that the Bill would be strengthened no end if there was a requirement that the disposal of property for housing purposes must reflect local housing needs in the area where that property is disposed of?
Jeremy Corbyn
The stewardship of public assets is very important. As someone who believes in public enterprise and public endeavour, I have to concede that the London Passenger Transport Board was established under a Tory Government in 1933. Lord Ashfield was its first chairman and he did a fine job in promoting its development. So even then, in the depths of the recession in the 1930s, there was a consensus that the public ownership of assets mattered, and he stood up against a lot of private interests to achieve that. Let us preserve what we have got, and recognise that the future inevitably is very unpredictable.
I came into parliamentary politics at a time when London’s population was falling and bus and tube use was falling. I remember the then director of London Underground telling me how there were going to be fewer trains and fewer passengers and how LU was thinking about which assets it could get rid of because it did not need them. I cautioned against that, saying that it was a counsel of despair. I said that we needed more people on trains and buses and that fewer people in cars would lead to less congestion. That big public debate happened in London, and we moved into an era not of road building but of rail development and other improvements. London became the first capital city in which public transport usage started to go up; others have now followed.
I ask the Bill’s promoters to think more carefully about what they are doing and to think more carefully about the precious asset that they have and about how they can develop and protect it. I thank the Minister again for his preparedness to engage on the issues that I have raised tonight. I am really grateful to him for that, and I hope that we can make some progress. That is the kind of engagement that we would like to see on the Bill, instead of this peremptory refusal even to discuss the serious concerns that have been raised by a number of Members this evening.
Bob Blackman
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) and to hear his explanation of the new clauses and amendments that he has tabled. Amendments 21 to 29 would remove the requirement to consult or get permission from the Secretary of State on certain minor matters. There is a dilemma about whether it should be the Secretary of State who rules on these matters or the Mayor of London, with the assembly scrutinising what the Mayor and Transport for London do. A dilemma arises when we devolve responsibility and power: should we then recentralise it to the Secretary of State? We as London MPs face that challenge daily. The amendments would recentralise power to the Secretary of State.
Bob Blackman
I thank the hon. Gentleman for expressing that anxiety.
Hon. Members have mentioned TfL’s failure to engage with the objectors, but having gone through the Opposed Private Bill Committee and listened to the various proposals, my understanding is that they have been reflected. TfL has sought to meet the objectors and hon. Members to ascertain exactly the details of their objections, and it will have heard what has been said tonight. Clearly, we will not reach agreement on all the amendments, but TfL will no doubt reflect on them.
My concern on reading new clause 1 is that all such properties would have to be banded by value. In my judgment, that would lead to more speculation, rather than less. If TfL is disposing of assets, it should seek to maximise the value that it gets, but banding by value would play into the hands of property speculators. At the moment, the assets are all listed on a searchable website that can be seen by any member of the public, so we know what TfL owns. I therefore reject new clause 1.
New clause 2 would set in train a whole series of consultations and place heavy restrictions on the disposal of land. In my view and in that of the promoters, that would place an unnecessary encumbrance on TfL. There is already a statutory regime, set out in section 163 of the Greater London Authority Act 1999. TfL cannot avoid that; nor does it wish to do so.
Jeremy Corbyn
The hon. Gentleman will have heard my earlier comments on the parallels with the protection of rail land for future use. For example, the March to Wisbech line has been preserved even though it has not been used for many years. It is now going to be reopened because someone had the foresight to preserve it. I have the same concerns about TfL assets being put up for disposal. Does he not accept that having the Secretary of State in place to provide a kind of long-stop protection, as we are proposing, would be a good thing?
Private Rented Sector
Debate between Jeremy Corbyn and Bob Blackman
Bob Blackman
I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention, and the Committee will have to examine that matter further.
In the borough that I have the privilege of representing, there are twice as many privately rented homes as there are properties owned by registered social landlords. That dwarfing of the social rented sector gives rise to a series of problems. In London, and especially the outer London suburbs, owners no longer sell properties, but vacate them and rent them out privately. The properties are often rented as houses in multiple occupation, but without them being registered as such, which creates the problem that many single individuals are renting properties collectively. Such people are often young men from eastern Europe who live together in one big house. There are many properties in which beds are rented out for eight hours a day, meaning that three individuals will occupy one bed in a room in sequence when they are not fulfilling their jobs and roles in society.
The HMOs in this country that are registered are few and far between, so I want the Government to put in place much more stringent registration requirements for HMOs. There are only 89 registered HMOs in my borough, but I could take Members to a single ward in Harrow in which there are more than 89, but they are unregistered, and therefore unlicensed and unregulated. As the report shows, we clearly need to deal with the problem of standards, and the Government need to take more action on the registration and regulation of HMOs.
That takes me on to the problem of beds in sheds, because the fact is that unscrupulous individuals are using relatively high rents and high demand for housing—throughout the country, but especially in London—to force people to live in substandard accommodation. I made a long speech about the private rented sector in the pre-Christmas recess debate. I will not repeat some of the points I made about the condition of properties and the problems in the sector, but I commend what Slough council did to draw up a heat map of its borough to ascertain the number of properties in which it was likely that there were bed in sheds. My own borough, Harrow, was not given Government money for the purpose but has just done a heat map of the area. We discovered 329 properties with buildings outlying or adjacent to the main house that are occupied. I am told that, as a result of the exercise, the police have also found a number of cannabis farms, which are another threat, not only because the domestic properties in question are no longer available to rent, but because cannabis farms lead to illegal trade. Clearly we need much stronger government intervention and much stronger Government support for local authorities to ascertain all the unscrupulous landlords who are not registered with anyone, but who are cramming people into substandard accommodation and ripping them off in the rent they charge.
During the debate, we have heard about the problems caused by the lack of stock, but we should be clear: it is a scandal that the last Labour Government presided over the lowest level of housing development since the 1920s. The reality is that planning permission was granted for relatively few properties and, sure enough, few properties have been completed in the past three years because of the lack of investment and the failure of the Labour Government to make it happen. I commend the Under- Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, my hon. Friend the Member for Keighley (Kris Hopkins), and his predecessors for taking action to encourage new housing development, which will lead directly to improvements not only in the private rented sector but in all sectors of the housing market.
During the stages of producing our report, the Committee looked at evidence from a wide variety of sources. One of the concerns expressed was about the regulation of managing agents, and I want to draw out the absolute scandal of the charges that unscrupulous managing agents levy not only on landlords but on applicants for rental properties. Frequently those charges are excessive, going beyond reasonable costs, and are levied multiple times, as the agents charge both the landlord and potential tenants. For example, we heard evidence of hundreds of pounds being charged for credit checks that, broadly speaking, would cost between £8 and £10 to conduct. That is a scandal. There is a need for clarification and more regulation in that regard.
In certain areas, the bureaucracy involved in registering is also a problem. The borough of Newham has introduced a policy of registering every single private rented property and requires landlords to fill out the same complicated form for every single property they rent out. The Select Committee has not yet had a proper answer from the Government about whether that is actually a requirement. I would welcome the Minister stating his view, not necessarily at the Dispatch Box tonight but in the future, that people do not need to do that. If the landlord in question is a large-scale, reputable landlord, the simple fact of registering their ownership of a property in the borough should be sufficient, but there is no reason why a small-scale landlord—one with, say, fewer than 10 properties—should not fill in the necessary forms and register properly, because it will need to be checked and verified that they are acting in a particular way.
I remind colleagues that for most landlords in the private rented sector, the yield on capital employed is in the order of 3% or 4%. Most people who rent out property privately are not necessarily doing it for the income—the review—they gain, but for capital growth. At present, interest rates are historically low.
Jeremy Corbyn
I am interested in what the hon. Gentleman says. Where a former council property, which has often been bought with a very large discount historically, is let out at five or six times the rent charged by the appropriate local authority, that bears no relationship whatever to the capital employed and, frankly, is just plain greed.
Bob Blackman
Clearly there are issues around where there is greed and where there is not. I am coming to a particular issue that is of importance to the sector.
Given that the yield is relatively low—an average of 3% to 4% is true across London and may be true across the rest of the country as well—and given that that money can be borrowed at perhaps 3% or 3.5%, a single half of a percentage point increase in the Bank base rate would lead to an increase of almost 20% increase in the amount of money people are paying their lenders for their mortgages. Think of the effect of that on rents. Given that the yield is only 3%, imagine if there were a 20% or 25% increase in what landlords must pay in interest rates for their mortgages. The effect of that would be enormous on rents. It would have a knock-on effect on the housing benefit bill because, in many cases, housing benefit is paid to those in low-paid jobs, particularly in areas of London. That will be a clear concern in the coming weeks and months.
One of the things that I would stress—it is important that we send out this message—is that it vital that we have a Government who continue to bear down on interest rates and maintain reducing the deficit as key. That is one of the reasons why we cannot let the Opposition have any say in Government or on housing policy.
The final issue that I want to raise briefly is the key issue of the length of tenancy that applies. One of the key issues from our report was that we should have longer tenancies and more settled arrangements for families children in schools who are building up a community of interest, rather than potentially having families evicted after a six-month shorthold tenancy. However, that must go hand in glove with the ability of landlords to be able to evict tenants who do not pay their rent or who badly misbehave. That has to be one of the things where we will need intervention. We need the Government to take action to promote longer tenancies, and we need more responsibility from landlords and from tenants. We then need applicable rates where rents will rise with inflation so the position is more flexible for everyone in the housing market. We need lenders to recognise that longer tenancies are to their benefit, and to the benefit of their borrowers and of the people who reside in the properties.
Landlords will always say that a good tenant is worth keeping and worth keeping happy. A good tenant will say that they are happy in a property, that they want to stay and that they want a long-term relationship with the landlord. Bad tenants who do not pay their rent or who misbehave or cause antisocial behaviour clearly need to be evicted, and quickly, at the least possible cost to the landlord. If we can get some answers from the Minister tonight on those issues, that will be of great help to the sector and the rest of the market.
Finally, we have to be clear that this is a market. If we intervene in a market, it can have untold consequences and possibly consequences that one was not anticipating. This is one of the areas where we have to proceed carefully because we do not want to distort a market and cause further problems. With certain targeted interventions comes the potential for improving the market and for improving the lot of tenants and landlords combined.
Christmas Adjournment
Debate between Jeremy Corbyn and Bob Blackman(10 years, 4 months ago)
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Bob Blackman
(Harrow East) (Con): It is an honour to follow the hon. Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown). Last night I endured the great pain of West Ham inflicting a second home defeat on Tottenham in a season, which has not been known since I have been alive. At the beginning of her speech, I wondered whether the pain that the ladies she mentioned were going through was anything like the emotional pain I felt last night, but my pain pales into insignificance compared with what women are being put through at the hands of the NHS, and I thank her for bringing that matter to the House’s attention.
It is the great benefit of these debates that we can bring matters that otherwise would not be aired to the Chamber. At this time of year, when we often think of ourselves, our parties and our families, we should also think of those underprivileged people who are less fortunate than ourselves. I shall concentrate on the private rented sector, the overuse of beds in sheds and the massive overcrowding in many parts of the country, which is a growing menace to the whole of our society.
It is a fact of life that 9 million people now rent their homes right across England. That is fine and people make that choice—or alternatively, they have no choice. In my own borough of Harrow there are now twice as many privately rented homes as there are homes in the entire socially rented sector, whether it be council or housing association properties.
I am a member of the Communities and Local Government Committee. When we looked at the private rented sector, one of the problems highlighted in the evidence we received was that the poorer quality of the private rented sector housing damages the health and well-being of the people who live in those homes. The English housing survey conducted earlier this year shows that properties in the private rented sector have the lowest proportion of the three standard insulation measures—cavity wall insulation, good loft insulation and full double-glazing—and they are most likely to fall into the lowest energy efficiency bands. Over a third of private rented homes are not classified as meeting the decent homes standard. We would not expect people to live in socially rented accommodation of that standard, and the number of private rented homes is almost double that of socially rented homes. At the same time, almost one in five fail the housing health and safety tests, compared with just 9% of social sector dwellings. Also, damp is more likely to be found in private rented sector accommodation than in any other type of housing, and it is less likely to be dealt with by landlords. That is a scandal that must be addressed.
There are currently few requirements on landlords, and few ways in which tenants can complain about a property and get things put right. Tenants often refuse to complain about the quality of a property because the landlord could evict them rather than fixing the problem. These problems often befall those on the lowest incomes, who have the least choice about where to live. They and their families therefore have to live in unacceptable conditions. Landlords often evict tenants without reasonable cause, and the tenants have no right of redress, even when they have not caused a problem. Tenants do not have the rights that they probably should have.
Jeremy Corbyn
I am listening to the hon. Gentleman’s speech with interest. I intend to follow much the same theme when I speak later. Does he agree that one of the many problems associated with the private rented sector is the six-month assured shorthold tenancy? It gives the landlord no incentive to respond to a tenant’s demands and, because the tenant has no security of tenure after the six months, they are unlikely to complain. Also, the tenant has no incentive to do anything in the community because their prospects of remaining in the area are so limited.
Bob Blackman
When we were gathering evidence for our report, the Communities and Local Government Committee went to Berlin, where people have much longer tenancies and where a partnership approach is taken between the tenant and the landlord. That is a much more appropriate way of dealing with these matters. Unfortunately, the use of six-month assured shorthold tenancies has grown in this country, more often than not to protect landlords by giving them the right to evict a tenant and recover the property if they so choose. These concerns clearly need to be addressed. We need longer tenancies that give greater assurance to tenants and place greater responsibility on landlords. It would also be helpful if landlords became members of the housing ombudsman service. In that way, they would be more likely to carry out the necessary work and the tenant would have a means of complaining if that did not happen.
I am sure that all hon. Members have houses in multiple occupation in their constituencies. When five or more persons form two or more households in a building, it is a requirement for the landlord to register that property as an HMO. Unfortunately, there can be all sorts of issues involved, including whether fire safety standards are being met. It is a fact of life that, under the terms of the Housing Act 1985, the maximum penalty for operating an unlicensed HMO is currently £20,000. In my borough, there are 89 registered HMOs. I encountered a case three weeks ago in which a three-bedroom semi-detached property was found to be housing no fewer than 11 adults, none of whom was connected in a family sense. They were sharing bedrooms and all the other facilities, and they were each paying £160 a week in rent. That was a nice little earner for the landlord. The property was not registered as an HMO. There are now 100 such cases under investigation in Harrow, and I believe that they represent the tip of a very large iceberg.
Bob Blackman
Clearly, as the hon. Lady says, people who are here legally and have the proper status are often not aware of their complete rights and therefore are exploited by unscrupulous individuals acting as landlords.
One of the consequences of the changes in housing benefit has been to encourage young people under the age of 35 to go into shared accommodation because that is the only rate of housing benefit they will qualify for. I welcome that as a move towards ensuring that accommodation is used properly, but as more and more people share housing in the private rented sector, there is the unfortunate consequence of overuse and overcrowding of such properties.
Under the right circumstances a local authority may be able to force a landlord to repay rent or housing benefits if an HMO is unlicensed. Unfortunately, it appears that this is not well known among the public or even among London authorities or councils outside London. If it were known about, it would immediately dissuade landlords from taking in vulnerable people on benefits and exploiting them.
What do we do about the problem? It is up to local authorities to enforce the rules. If a landlord is operating an HMO—I have written to my council about a huge number of properties that I suspect are HMOs but are unlicensed—appropriate and stringent enforcement action needs to be taken to fine the landlord and to make sure that the properties are brought up to a decent standard. A clear attitude should be adopted towards rogue landlords who give good landlords a terrible name.
Proper advice needs to be given to people who rent properties so that they understand their rights, what they can demand and what they can take on. There should be accreditation and licensing for private landlords, particularly those that choose to operate HMOs. It should be for Government and the Department to ensure that tenants and landlords are educated about their rights and responsibilities.
There is hope on the horizon. There was a case in which a landlord, who happens to live in my constituency, was operating a property empire in the neighbouring borough of Brent, where he put 28 flats into four houses. He was prosecuted and ordered to pay £303,112 under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002. This demonstrates that local authorities can use their power to stop rogue landlords in their tracks and take appropriate action. Rogue landlords will listen to only one thing: losing their income and assets. We must ensure that the people living in those properties are given decent facilities to live in.
Jeremy Corbyn
The hon. Gentleman is making an important contribution. Does he agree that it would be a good idea to have much better co-ordination between London boroughs, perhaps through the Mayor’s office, on chasing down rogue landlords and, as the Select Committee recommended, to have a much simpler form of harmonisation for all the regulations so that landlords and tenants know their rights within the existing law, never mind those that might be introduced in future?
Bob Blackman
I completely concur with the hon. Gentleman. We must rationalise the regulations to make them simpler and easier to understand and to ensure that the responsibilities are clearly understood. We must co-ordinate action across the London boroughs in particular, but the whole of England—and beyond, I suspect—is affected by those activities. Whether that co-ordination is done through London Councils or the Mayor’s office, for example, should be determined outside this Chamber.
However, it is equally clear that one of the problems is the level of bureaucracy. The mayor of the London borough of Newham pointed out that a landlord has to fill out a form for each property when registering, which seems to make no sense for the landlords who operate a good service, compared with the rogue landlords, who ignore the rules anyway. We need to identify those landlords and the properties that are not properly registered and ensure that the rules, which should operate for everyone’s benefit, are implemented thoroughly and appropriately. I think that there is a potential for doing what the London borough of Brent did last year when it enforced the rules on a particular rogue landlord to ensure that all the others understand their responsibility and know that they will not get away with it.
In my borough I have called on the council to operate a similar heat map so that we can identify, in the early hours of the morning, all the properties that do not have planning permission and are not registered as HMOs but appear to have people living in them. Anecdotally, I know that in many parts of my constituency homes have been built in gardens. Of course, they have been built as garden huts to shelter lawnmowers and other items of garden equipment, but uniquely they have kitchens, bathrooms, beds, windows, curtains, central heating and double glazing. That is clearly an affront to the planning rules. It means that the council is losing council tax income and that people are frequently being forced to live in substandard properties.
It is clear that this is the tip of an iceberg. It needs Government action now. I welcome the fact that they have undertaken to fund a few local authorities that have a problem, but we need to encourage every authority that realises it has a problem to take enforcement action to end it and to bring the people causing it to justice.
I conclude by wishing you, Madam Deputy Speaker, the staff and all hon. Members a merry Christmas and a happy, peaceful, prosperous and above all, particularly from my perspective, healthy new year. I trust that we will all have an enjoyable time over the recess.
Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)
I am pleased to be able to contribute to this debate. Sadly, I start with a complaint. Although I welcome the opportunity of a Christmas Adjournment debate and the fact that a Member can raise any issue they want, the system that we have had in other times when there have been themed debates with a Minister replying is a far more satisfactory way of dealing with parliamentary business. I do not doubt that the Deputy Leader of the House will report in great detail to each Minister concerned and ensure that we get an answer, but the whole point of the House of Commons is to hold the Government and Ministers to account rather than using it as a sounding-board Chamber where anyone can raise anything they like and it then disappears into the ether.
I strongly compliment the staff here—as I am sure does everyone else—for their work, loyalty, and sympathy to both Members and the public. They often do a difficult job, and I admire them enormously and want to put on record my thanks to them. As a Parliament, we should value them a lot more. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) said, the treatment of the staff in the Tea Room, their change of contracts and deteriorating working conditions are simply not good enough. We should be much better employers and we should value the service and the loyalty that those staff give us. We need to remember that we should provide a good example of employment practices and not work on the basis of gross exploitation of people. Indeed, we should not be losing our very good and experienced staff. We should reflect on that. None the less, in the same spirit as everyone else, I wish all the staff here a good Christmas and new year and thank them for the work that they do.
Like the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman), whom I compliment on his contribution, I want to raise the issue of housing in London. I represent an inner-city constituency, which has somewhat different characteristics from those of Harrow. Nevertheless housing is a huge issue. Roughly speaking, my borough divides 40:30:30—council and housing association houses and social rented accommodation make up about 40% of the borough’s housing; private rented houses about 30% and owner-occupied houses 30%. The owner-occupation rate is well below the national average, and falling very fast. The private rented sector is well above the national average and rising very fast. The social ownership section is increasing a bit through the work of the housing associations and the council’s commendable building programme to try to provide homes for people who desperately need them.
The problem we have is an enormous housing list of people in often desperate housing need. The chances of them being housed in a council-owned house or a housing association place are very limited, so the council fulfils its obligations to them in the only way it can, which is by placing them in the private rented sector. Many of those private flats are not in the borough; they are some distance away. That in itself creates a problem. The applicants accept the accommodation because they have no choice. They aspire to return to the borough, so the large numbers of families who are placed outside the borough make very long journeys to ensure that their children maintain a place at the same school, which is important from the point of view of the continuity of education for primary school-aged children.
The other issue is that the benefit level cap on housing expenditure, the housing allowance, is way below the average rent in the private sector. The transitional money the Government approved on the introduction of the cap is drying up and disappearing. Frankly, what we are going through is nothing more than a process of social cleansing from inner London, as families on benefit—sometimes in work, and sometimes not in work, as it affects them almost equally—can no longer remain in the borough and must therefore be accommodated elsewhere. That exacerbates the whole problem.
We have a high degree of housing stress among those families. I meet families all the time and I am very worried about the impact of such a degree of housing insecurity on a whole generation of children as they grow up. Members of this House all earn a good salary, have reasonable accommodation to live in and do not feel a sense of housing insecurity. We should try and put ourselves in the mindset of young parents trying to bring up children in the private rented sector knowing that they have no security of tenure and could lose their flat within six months. If they complain, they are likely to find that their tenancy is terminated. The effect on the parents is extreme stress, but the effect on the children is great uncertainty about their place in life and the ability of their parents to provide for them. We are damaging a whole generation of people through the housing policies that are being adopted in this country.
I am not making a partisan point, because my party, when in government, certainly did not do enough to build the necessary new housing. It certainly did not do enough to bring in much tougher regulation of the private rented sector any more than this Government have. I applaud what my council is trying to do by developing new council properties of a good and high standard and what it has achieved through the decent homes standard. The estates are in a much better condition than they ever used to be. Nevertheless, we live in an area where property prices are rising fast. I think I am right to say that more than 80% of the borough does not earn enough money to be able to buy a property within Islington, so the only option for those people is the private rented sector.
There are areas in which the sector must be reformed, and quickly. I have with me a copy of the report by the Communities and Local Government Committee on the regulation of the private rented sector, which is an interesting, well-written document that calls for the simplification of the regulation of the private rented sector and better education of both landlords and tenants. I agree with all that. Sometimes, the report’s proposals are a bit too timid but I agree with the general thrust of what it is trying to say.
We must be a little bolder. I introduced a ten-minute rule Bill on the subject, and I want to see fundamental change in three areas of the private rented sector. The first is the role of the letting agents. At the moment, there is almost no regulation of letting agents. Anyone can set up a letting agency, there are no checks on them whatsoever and anybody can claim to be a letting agent and start renting out properties. I think they should all be regulated so we know who is working where, so that they have to provide proper information to all prospective tenants, and so that they are not allowed to introduce arbitrary and often totally unfair charges such as search fees, which are always non-returnable and often expensive. There should also be much clearer explanation for prospective tenants of what they are getting into.
Agents are also often deeply discriminatory. A sign in a window that reads “No DSS” shows first of all that they are deeply out of date with the structure of the social security system in this country—it is now the Department of Work and Pensions and it is a housing allowance, not DSS as it was about 20 years ago—and also fundamentally discriminates against somebody who is perfectly legally claiming what they are entitled to from the DWP. Why should they not be allowed to rent because they are claiming? The investigation by “Panorama” showed the race discrimination and racial profiling by the agencies, which are a scar on our society that deeply disfigures people’s lives and life chances. Discrimination is wrong in any aspect, whether it be financial in respect of benefit claimants or racial discrimination as operated by some agents. We must have proper regulation of these agencies.
A number of London boroughs are actively considering setting up their own letting agency to manage the number of people they place within in the private rented sector and offering the service to landlords and tenants alike. I think that would be a wholly good thing—it would be properly run, properly managed and probably a lot cheaper for everyone concerned than the present system.
The second area relates to points raised by the hon. Member for Harrow East about the condition and maintenance of private sector properties. Yesterday, I met an interesting gentleman from the Electrical Safety Council, who told me his concerns—they were held by the fire service and many others, too—about the lack of regular electrical checks in the private rented sector. It can often be an extremely dangerous place to be. There are supposed to be gas checks and all kinds of checks, but they are often never carried out.
I have had experience of tenants in the private rented sector making wholly legitimate complaints about the condition of their flat—the lack of insulation, the poor quality windows, the high energy bills they incur because of all that and infestation by vermin. They usually find that nothing is done about that, and if they contact the environmental health service, they might find their tenancy terminated at the first possible opportunity by the landlord. It is scandalous that if tenants try to exercise their rights, they lose their property. Although that might mean that environmental health can enforce better conditions for the next tenant, it is not much help for the tenant who has been evicted for having the temerity to try to exercise their rights.
The third area is probably the most controversial—the question of the rent levels charged. If I look across the whole country, I realise that the rent levels charged in the private rented sector vary enormously, often over quite short distances. The rent levels in central London are massive; if we move a short distance towards the outer London boroughs, the rent levels are a bit less; if we move a bit further out of London, they become much less; if we move to other regions in the country, the rent levels might not be the main problem, but there could be other areas of regulation.
My private Member’s Bill—I have no notion of whether it will ever become law; certainly not in this Parliament, although I hope the idea will become law at some point—is not only about empowering local authorities to set up letting offices and agencies, but about requiring simplified advice to be given to landlords and tenants about how the properties will be operated. Authorities will also have the power to impose a level of regulation on the rent levels charged in the private sector.
In that respect, a number of formulae could be adopted. One would be simply to take a figure and declare it to be a reasonable rent for the area. Rent levels could be based on the capital value of the property and the cost of maintaining its value if money has been borrowed to purchase it. Alternatively, because the structure of the private rented sector is changing fast, we could require large private sector landlords—there are some of them around nowadays—to provide at least 50% of their properties for rent at an affordable level, as we would require for any new large housing development.
If we do not regulate the private rented sector, we are condemning, in the case of my borough, a third of the population to a life of insecurity—and the numbers of private rented properties are likely to rise considerably over the next few years. All the predictions are that while it is around 17% nationally now, it will probably be 25%, if not more, by the end of this decade. Other countries manage to have a pretty fully regulated private rented sector. The hon. Member for Harrow East referred to the Select Committee visit to Germany, which has a very regulated private rented sector—often, interestingly, with much larger landlords, who often manage the properties a lot better.
One of the problems in my constituency is that it contains a large number of very small landlords who only ever think of the headline return in the form of the rent. They never think of the cost of maintenance, the cost of repairs, or the cost of simply managing a property. We need to devise a much better system. The Select Committee report was a good start, but the Government’s response was more than disappointing. No doubt we shall return to the issue in the future.
Let me end with this thought. We all want to enjoy a nice Christmas—who doesn’t?—but we also want to enjoy a degree of security in our lives, and I think that we should consider for a moment the very large number of people who live in the private rented sector. Not all landlords are bad; some are good, decent, generous people who look after their tenants in the way in which we would all want to be looked after ourselves; but, unfortunately, not all of them are like that. There are some terrible rogue landlords, and some terrible practices. We used to say awful things about Rachman and what he did in winkling secure tenants out of north Kensington all those decades ago, but there are very few secure tenancies now. Landlords no longer need to winkle people out. They can end assured shorthold tenancies after six months, move another tenant in, and charge the new tenant a higher rent—and so the whole situation continues.
If we are to maintain the social and cultural diversity of London, and indeed other cities, we must maintain the diversity of housing, and of housing options and opportunities. Like all Members, I visit hospitals, Royal Mail sorting offices, police stations and fire stations. I always ask people where they live, and I find that fewer and fewer of them can afford to live in central London. They are commuting for longer and longer distances, at greater and greater cost to themselves.
We must address the housing issue. Yes, we can do that by building more houses and providing greater security and better conditions, but what is crucially and urgently needed is proper regulation of the private rented sector, so that we can provide the sense of security that we would all want for ourselves.
Bob Blackman
On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. At the beginning of my speech, I inadvertently failed to draw Members’ attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. May I correct that through your good offices, and apologise to the House?