Housing and Regeneration Bill

moved Amendment No. 98A: 98A: After Clause 79, insert the following new Clause— ““Extension of remit of regulator (1) The Secretary of State may make regulations to extend the remit of the regulator in circumstances described in this section. (2) Subsection (1) applies, notwithstanding the definition of social housing in section 69, where a dwelling has left the social housing stock under the circumstances referred to in any of sections 74, 76, 77 or 78 and if nevertheless there remains in respect of that dwelling residual landlord functions with the social landlord or other charges still due to the former social landlord or services owed by or to the former social landlord. (3) Such functions include, but are not limited to, ground rent, services and service charges, amenity and amenity charges, district heating and other communal services provided by or on behalf of the former social landlord or other charges and liabilities owed by the lessee or occupier to the former social landlord.”” The noble Lord said: This amendment is intended to take one stage further the arguments put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Best, in support of the first amendment we discussed this afternoon, which I strongly support. I apologise to the Committee that I am having to Box and Cox and did not manage to get up to support that amendment. This amendment is a way of getting on to the agenda an issue that we have not addressed hitherto in relation to what areas the regulator should cover. I am sure that these clauses as drafted do not do what I intend and—as the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, admitted with his amendments—I am sure there are some serious technical problems with them. However, they put on the agenda the fact that social landlords, whether they are councils, ALMOs or, in some cases, registered housing associations, manage large estates. On those large estates there are not only tenants in the strict sense of the word—direct tenants of the social landlord—but also ex-tenants who bought their flats, who are of the first right-to-buy generation and very similar in demographics and attitudes to the tenants, and those who bought the flats as the second generation and live on the estate of relatively low-cost housing, but not that low cost these days. There are also flats that were bought to let and are therefore occupied by sub-tenants who may be sub-tenants of other registered social landlords. This achieves the kind of mixed communities that we are all after in that there are owner-occupiers and direct tenants, often short-term tenancies fulfilling priorities in housing allocation priorities. However, certain services, charges and relationships are still with the main landlord. On a large council estate a lot of things are dealt with on a more or less equivalent basis for tenants, sub-tenants and lessees, yet the Bill does not allow the regulator to intervene in the areas relating to non-direct tenants: for example: cleaning services; environmental services—the gardening, to put it crudely; big bills that relate to major works; smaller episodic bills relating, for example, to the introduction of digital television, which I have had cause to raise in other contexts in this House; and issues such as additional heating where charges are imposed by the landlord or the ALMO on tenants and lessees alike and will ultimately fall on the sub-tenants as well. They are calculated on the same basis and the services are the same for all forms of tenure. While accepting the priority in the Bill on those areas that were previously regulated by the Housing Corporation—and housing associations essentially—and the assumption of the noble Lord, Lord Best, that we could later extend this to ALMOs and local authority tenants, it needs to be recognised that there are residual landlord functions that also relate to other forms of tenure on that estate that will not be allowed within the purview of the regulator. The noble Lord, Lord Best, used the word ““domain””, which to me is not just a status issue but a physical one, where the later landlord is covering all these different forms of tenure. Many quality of life issues, some expense and value-for-money issues and some fairness and equality issues arise in relation to all these forms of tenure. That is not a particularly acceptable message to some of the representatives of tenants and lessees who often see things through different lights and who are very much in the domain of improving the quality of life and genuinely creating mixed and sustainable communities in these areas. If nothing else, I hope that the Minister will give some indication that the department is prepared to take on board in this context, and in other parts of the Bill, that there are issues to be addressed that are appropriate for regulation and regulatory intervention. The general regulation on lessees or in tenancies in the private sector will not cover these. Like the noble Lord, Lord Best, I would have preferred the regulator to have a very wide function in the first place. Down the line we will have to address the situation; otherwise we will create another form of inequity and inflexibility in housing provision by restricting the regulator to dealing with only one channel of communication between the provider and the occupier when there are multiple forms of relationship. I beg to move.