Mortgage Repossessions (Protection of Tenants Etc.) Bill

My Lords, I support the thought that lies behind the Bill and I have one or two short points to make about it. The first point is that the Bill achieves for unauthorised tenants the sort of delay that has been available under rules of court for a long time in relation to squatters and their unauthorised occupation of premises. There is an important distinction between an order for possession and a warrant for possession. An order for possession is binding on the parties to the litigation—in the ordinary case where it is a mortgagee’s application, the party will be the mortgagor—but it is not binding on anyone else. A warrant for possession, on the other hand, is binding on everybody in occupation of the property. A litigant, a claimant, who gets an order for possession has then to go and obtain a warrant for possession in order to execute the order that he has. All one really needs in order to control an unreasonable use of the eviction procedure is to require notice to be given to everyone in occupation, with a delay to allow them to intervene in the proceedings and to assert, if they wish to do so, a right to be there which the claimant—in the case we are considering, the mortgagee—is bound to respect. Of course, there will be some who cannot do that, and the Bill provides for a delay of up to two months in that category. However, all of this could, I respectfully suggest, have been achieved quite easily through amendment to rules of court. It may be that it is simpler now to proceed with the Bill, but it could have been done by rules of court without bothering Parliament to legislate on the matter. My second point is that the Bill is directed to the position of persons claiming to be tenants but not to have tenancies which are binding on the mortgagee. The persons in occupation may claim to be tenants, but the putative landlord through whom they claim may have nothing whatever to do with the mortgagor. It is not necessarily going to be the mortgagor who granted the tenancies; it may be some unauthorised person, some squatter in the first instance who, finding the property empty, has moved in with friends and then purported to grant tenancies to others. The Explanatory Memorandum proceeds on the footing that it is going to be the mortgagor, or somebody claiming under the mortgagor, who has granted the unauthorised tenancies, but it is important to recognise that that may not be the case. The tenancies may have their origin in some other source; from a squatter or someone who has simply moved in, finding the property empty. The language of the Bill draws no distinction between those two categories, but the Explanatory Memorandum and the Short Title to the Bill appear to do so. I wonder whether the drafting needs to be looked at again, either to make it clear that it comprehends both types of unauthorised tenants—those claiming through the mortgagor and those claiming through a person unconnected with either mortgagor or mortgagee. Those are the only two points I wanted to make on this otherwise entirely supportable Bill.