Housing and Planning Bill (Second sitting)

Stephen Hammond Excerpts

Tuesday 10th November 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Peter Dowd]

Q 152 Do you agree that if only 5% of people in those tenancies were affected by that, that is 125,000 people? That is 125,000 people too many.

Campbell Robb: It is, absolutely, and every day we see people coming into our surgeries and phoning up our helpline who are really at the hands of some very bad behaviour, and we would absolutely support doing more to stop that type of behaviour.

[Stephen Hammond (Wimbledon) (Con)]

Q 153 To follow on from that, you both give an unequivocal welcome to part 2 of the Bill. Presumably you are also keen that the database is effective. Looking at Criminal Records Bureau checks and their successor, it seems to me that a database mechanism has been as effective in driving up standards. Are you optimistic that it will do the same in this area?

Jon Sparkes: Yes, I think it will. I think the Bill can actually go even further. Certainly, sharing information about banned landlords and banned letting agents is absolutely crucial and will have an impact. You can see landlords going across local authority boundaries. Once a landlord or letting agent is banned, the professionalising of the sector by making sure they undertake accredited training before they are unbanned is important, so there are areas where we would even support amendments that would take it further—all of which is caveated with proper protections for tenants. If you are the tenant of a banned landlord, you need an awful lot of protection, otherwise you just become evicted by default.

Campbell Robb: I agree with all that. I want to put on record that we have one caveat to unequivocal support, which is about the clauses about abandonment. It may not be the time, Chair, but I would like to share that there are potentially some unintended consequences of bringing that forward and of the lack of court oversight or local authority oversight in making sure that the proposals achieve what is wished but that they do not give a licence to some landlords to use them in a way that we would not support. I just want to put that on record.

[Teresa Pearce (Erith and Thamesmead) (Lab)]

Q 154 On abandonment, is legislation not already available for landlords to reclaim abandoned premises?

Campbell Robb: There is. Under section 21 of the Act.

--- Later in debate ---

[Teresa Pearce]

Q 207 So without further investment in local authorities, do you have confidence that local authorities could actually undertake this work?

Carolyn Uphill: If local authorities had the ability to keep the proceeds of any fines or civil penalties they levy, we would fully support that; we would like to see them ring-fenced to be used on housing matters, so that there is a real incentive to make the polluter pay—make those causing the problems pay for them. Perhaps they should be able to refund or rescind some of the licensing schemes, which are just a cost on the good landlords. Get the polluter to pay and use that money to improve standards. Then there would be a strong incentive to do it. The evidence is that in the last six years, 2,006 landlords were prosecuted under the Housing Act, whereas every week we are fining 3,000 people for not having a TV licence. Somewhere, we need to put more emphasis on this.

[Stephen Hammond]

Q 208 Ms Uphill, in your written submission you raised concerns about privacy. First, can you set out in depth what you think those are and, secondly, following on from your last answer, do you think that local authorities have the ability to construct the database so that privacy is protected?

Carolyn Uphill: Are we talking about the database for rogue landlords?

[Stephen Hammond]

Correct.

Carolyn Uphill: I would hope that it can be constructed so that privacy is protected—it is not the sort of information we would like to see left on a train—as long as it is properly protected and controlled and used for the right purpose. It should not be a fishing exercise for matters outside housing issues, but if properly used to stop the sort of people being involved in the industry who do not do me as a landlord any service, then it should be feasible.

[Stephen Hammond]

Q 209 Mr Smith, are you confident that the local authorities will be able to maintain an accurate database?

David Smith: We are concerned about accuracy. The difficulty will be that a local authority, having gone through potentially quite a bruising prosecution process, is then going to have to repeat the process to achieve a banning order and face further appeals. We are concerned that local authorities might get a prosecution, be satisfied and stop there without carrying through a full ban to remove the landlord.

[Stephen Hammond]

Q 210 But the obligations placed on them in the Bill to do so should be strong enough, should they not?

David Smith: Yes, they should, but the other side of that is the secondary database of merely bad landlords, as opposed to banned landlords. The problem will be moving people effectively from that database so that it stays a live database. Up to now that has been a mixed process.

[Stephen Hammond]

Q 211 I notice from your written evidence that you think the Bill will provide a good opportunity to support and encourage longer tenancies in the sector, which presumably you would all welcome. Can you explain why you think that?

David Smith: Our members—not all our members but a significant percentage—are quite happy to grant longer tenancies. The fire, in a sense, is targeted in the wrong direction from our perspective. The two biggest barriers to longer tenancies are mortgage companies, which tend to put restrictions on mortgages—we feel the Treasury is in an historically strong position to do something about that if it wanted to—and long leases of flats, particularly in the capital where there are a great many more blocks of flats. Ironically, many of those blocks are in the hands of local authorities or housing associations but almost all of them include a restriction on leases of more than 12 months.

It is an area that is very difficult for a landlord with 1,000 leases to fix themselves, because they would have to go and re-sign a couple of thousand leases. So we think it is an area uniquely suited to legislative intervention, by simply acting to replace such a clause with one that allows a tenancy of up to three years, which is already more than the vast majority of tenants have indicated that they would like.

[Stephen Hammond]

Q 212 Mr Cox, if we turn to part 3 of the Bill on recovery of abandoned properties, do you think that the provisions of the Bill will remedy the shortcomings of the current system?

David Cox: Yes, I think that they will. It is quite a complicated process that has been set out in the Bill. The issue of abandonment is not a massive problem—the problem is that, when it does happen, it causes a huge amount of confusion, concern and, effectively, a great loss of income. It takes up a huge length of time. We also have to factor in the deposit, which is not mentioned in the Bill, particularly if the custodial scheme, DPS, is used. It is difficult for the landlord to regain the deposit when it is in the custodial scheme because it requires both sides to agree to the deductions from the deposit, if there are any. If one party has disappeared and abandoned the property, there is no way of getting that party’s agreement. The deposit therefore sits in the deposit scheme.

Generally, the process is welcome. It is following the same path as under the Renting Homes (Wales) Bill in Wales and the Private Housing (Tenancies) (Scotland) Bill in Scotland. We would not recommend any changes at all, merely the inclusion of a clause on deposit protection.

Carolyn Uphill: We have long campaigned for this and we are very supportive of it. As Mr Cox said, it is not a very common problem but when it happens it is very costly and problematic for the landlord; plus there is a property tied up with nobody in it that somebody else could be occupying. It is only right for this legislation to speed up the process. There is no need to be worried about some of the scaremongering that this will cause a disservice to tenants, because the clause requires there to already be rent arrears of at least eight weeks, usually two months, and for the landlord to have made great attempts to contact the tenant. If a tenant is paying the rent and is contactable there will be no problem at all, but if neither of those is happening the landlord would, in any case, be seeking possession. It simply speeds it up and puts a home back on the market for somebody else.

David Cox: May I make one final point? Looking at clause 52 on reinstatement, it talks about an application being made up to six months after. This is exactly the same as its respective clause under the Renting Homes (Wales) Bill. Six months will allow a tenant to leave a property, take up an entirely new six-month tenancy and then come back to the property and demand it back. We would ask for that period to be shortened, so that it prevents that prime example. Someone may be living up in the midlands and has a six-month contract to work down in London, they come to London, do their contract then go back and demand their property back, which they will be able to do under these clauses. We would ask that it be shortened—I would suggest to two months, because they have at that point probably already abandoned the property for four or five months. Six months will allow, potentially, a rather perverse situation and unintended consequences. We would ask that, under clause 52(3), it be reduced to two months instead of six.