Immigration Bill

Lord Best Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, the points I am raising on the Bill relate to the extension of the right to rent provisions introduced through the Immigration Act 2014. When we considered the previous Bill, I spoke against the right to rent measures which place a requirement on landlords or their agents to check the immigration status of potential tenants. Landlords saw that as an unwelcome new regulatory burden, and the representatives of tenants saw it as being likely unintentionally to exclude people with every right to be in this country but who might be suspected of being illegal immigrants.

The noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Holbeach, was then the responsible Minister in this House and, thankfully, he won the approval of his Home Office colleagues to make a number of improvements to that legislation as it went through Parliament. It was agreed that, in effect, student lettings should be excluded from the rigours of the legislation and that a localised pilot scheme would be organised from which lessons could be learned before the right to rent was rolled out nationally.

Subsequently I agreed to chair, jointly with the Minister for Immigration, James Brokenshire, a consultative panel comprising representatives from the local authorities in the pilot area of the West Midlands, representatives from other government departments and representatives of landlords, tenants and agents. This role has enabled me to observe the Home Office both putting considerable energy into its efforts to communicate the new duties for landlords and agents through conferences, newspaper articles, social media and so on, and approaching the enforcement of the new measures carefully and methodically.

This Bill now toughens up the sanctions against landlords who fail to check the immigration status of tenants subsequently found to be in the country illegally. Instead of a civil penalty with fines after the second offence of up to £3,000, as in the 2014 Act, this Bill would mean that the landlord or their agent could be charged with a criminal offence, with the possibility of an unlimited fine and/or up to five years in prison.

In response to the concerns of the landlord bodies on the consultative panel, the Government have introduced in this Bill new powers for landlords which make it easier to evict a tenant found to be an illegal migrant without necessarily needing to go through the courts and with a new grounds for possession where the courts are involved. In some instances, the Bill provides for landlords to engage the services of High Court enforcement officers. I recognise that these provisions can themselves create concerns but I have also noted the following points from the consultation panel discussions.

First, the legislation does not affect any existing lettings. It relates only to future lettings, where landlords, or their agents, must now check the status of the applicant before granting the tenancy. Secondly, if the landlord is in any doubt about the legal status of a potential tenant, the new Home Office checking service, with its telephone hotline, is properly geared up to give a yes or no answer within 48 hours. If the landlord does not receive the Home Office’s response within this timescale, they can go ahead with the letting without fear of breaking the law. Thirdly, the experience of the arrangements in the West Midlands has not demonstrated special problems for either landlords or tenants, and it has fostered new and better working relationships between councils and the Home Office. Fourthly, unsurprisingly, in an earlier YouGov poll conducted for Shelter, private landlords said that they would be less likely to let to people who did not hold British passports or appeared to be immigrants. However, the pilot has led to simplifications in the requirements on landlords, spelled out in a code of practice which sets out all the documents—of which a passport need not be one—that will satisfy the right to rent criteria.

Finally, I have noted potential gains on the housing front from these new measures. They involve the Home Office devoting extra resources to target areas in which rogue landlords who prey on the vulnerability of illegal migrants are known to be at large. Local authorities very often lack the resources needed to pursue bad landlords who let abysmal slums at high rents, with accompanying overcrowding and sheer exploitation. Moreover, the penalties currently imposed on landlords who offend have proved trivial set against the income that the landlords have been extracting. Joint working between councils and the Home Office can greatly enhance the potency of any drive to enforce proper standards at the bottom end of the private rented sector, and the serious fines and threat of imprisonment for serial offenders contained in the Bill should make the worst of these rogue landlords wake up and take notice.

Therefore, while I recognise entirely that neither landlords nor tenants are likely to be positive about any new requirements on them, I do not believe that this legislation will create major problems for decent landlords or legitimate tenants. Nevertheless, the Residential Landlords Association still has fears that innocent landlords could be caught up in potentially heavy-handed action by Home Office officials. The Immigration Minister has made it clear to the consultative panel that there is no likelihood of prosecutions being pursued against landlords who, through no fault of their own, find themselves breaking the law, and only in extreme circumstances—where the landlord repeats the offences knowingly and persistently—would a criminal prosecution be pursued. To put the position beyond doubt, I ask the Minister to repeat this reassurance on the record today as explicitly as possible and to keep a watchful eye on whether the “right to rent” leads to problems for entirely legitimate tenants. I ask the Minister to commit today to a future evaluation of this measure, building on the Home Office’s helpful research for the pilot stage.