Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

I have given the Minister notice that I will speak to Clause 238 stand part as I want to try and get in something sensible about registered social landlords. The preamble to the Bill states that it will make provision for local government and the functions and procedures of local authorities. Yet one area is missing—the function of local authorities in respect of registered social landlords. I think we have all agreed during the Bill’s proceedings that local authorities should be the community champion in their area. It is up to them to ensure the quality and delivery across all housing providers and tenures, including resident social landlords. For local authorities to meet their targets on housing, they need to be able to ensure that resident social landlords are performing against agreed local set targets and priorities, as set by the local authority. In particular, there are two key omissions that we feel should be addressed. First, there is a need to give local authorities powers to ensure that social housing providers conform with important local strategies that have a bearing on housing. We touched on this throughout the other stages of the Bill. Secondly, a local authority should have the power to serve a notice on a poorly performing registered social landlord, so that he would have to explain himself to the local authority and so that the local authority could recommend what action the registered social landlord needed to take. Currently, local authorities do not have powers to ensure that social housing providers, housing associations or other social landlords engage with and contribute to local strategies. Despite the key importance of these organisations—we have all agreed that they are important in delivering the targets at local level—problems with poorly performing social housing providers are particularly evident where those providers have only a few units in a particular area. They tend to focus more on managing areas in which they have more stock at the expense of their tenants who live outside those areas. We have given these figures before, but I shall repeat them: there are 390 registered social landlords in London, of which 266 have fewer than 10 units in some local authorities. One can easily imagine that poor management of housing association homes or registered social landlords and failure to deal with anti-social behaviour can have a knock-on effect on other residents living nearby. We do not believe that local authorities have adequate powers that would enable them to take action against poorly performing RSLs who let housing in their areas. All social housing tenants deserve a good service and a landlord who is responsive to their needs. While council landlords have to perform against national performance targets and are always in the lead in improving tenants’ quality of life, RSLs do not have the same obligations. Local authorities are accountable to their communities, so they should also be accountable for RSLs. Given that RSLs are an important part of housing provision and receive a large amount of public money, does the Minister accept that local authorities need to have powers to ensure that they meet priorities and targets? Although my remarks are probing for today, it might be helpful if I table amendments at a later stage for the Minister to consider so that we might get this issue, which we have discussed all the way through our deliberations, into the Bill.