Mortgage Repossessions (Protection of Tenants Etc.) Bill

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I believe that we can achieve consensus around the idea that both parties have perhaps not done enough work on the arcane legal and financial rules about, for example, residential investment trusts, which have been very successful on the continent and in North America. Perhaps all the parties need to address to the Treasury the idea that we need to increase provision in the private rented sector. If my party is fortunate to be elected to government, it might look at that issue. Unfortunately, despite a consultation in the late summer months, substantive Government action to help unauthorised tenants was not forthcoming, in spite of our being in the midst of a deep recession, with an increased number of landlords defaulting on their mortgage payments. So we must now work hard to get this private Member's Bill on to the statute book as quickly as possible. My hon. Friend the Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps) made a commitment to the hon. Member for Bolton, South-East on that some months ago. The hon. Member for Bolton, South-East is right to draw to our attention the significant scale of the problem. A major issue here is that no data are available on how many unauthorised tenancies exist in England and Wales. Based on the Government's own figures, it is estimated that 324,000 so-called RTL—residential turned let—households are currently renting from landlords without the lender's permission. The tenants therefore have no rights and would be at risk of short-notice eviction if their landlord were repossessed. It is important to realise that there might be more unauthorised mortgages than anyone imagines, simply because borrowers with buy-to-let mortgages might not have gone through all the required formalities. We know that from anecdotal evidence. We owe it to all such tenants to give them some security. The importance of this issue is laid bare when we consider that there could have been up to 3,000 cases of short-notice eviction in 2009 alone. The Government need to do more work on this, and to undertake quantitative and qualitative research to ascertain the scale of the problem. It might be appropriate for them to liaise with Citizens Advice on this issue. Even those lower estimates still represent a huge number of households, many with young children, being thrown out of their homes through no fault of their own.