Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 72A and support the case made by the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, for legal aid in housing cases to go beyond those where someone faces imminent loss of their home. I have made the case that the private rented sector has no regulator and no ombudsman. Therefore, private rented tenants are in a different position from consumers of other necessities such as electricity, gas, water, telephone or even financial services. If tenants are in dispute with their landlords, the only way of obtaining redress may well be to go to court. That being so, legal advice can be of enormous help, not least in explaining to some tenants that they do not have a case and that it would be a waste of the time of the tenant and the courts to go down the route of litigation. Thanks to the current legal aid system, a publicly funded solicitor can advise tenants at an early stage that they should not pursue a hopeless case. If legal advice is not available, more tenants will try to proceed through the courts with ill advised cases as litigants in person, causing the courts and landlords—both private and public—to incur irrecoverable legal costs for wasted time litigating nonsense. My barrister colleague, Peter Marcus, who specialises in housing, tells me that he handles cases where, even if the landlord makes a successful application to have the tenant’s case struck out, the landlord none the less incurs significant irrecoverable legal fees. Of course, the case for legal aid for housing matters goes much deeper than that. Justifiable cases against landlords, regrettably, are only too common in this sector. There are some 1.2 million private landlords and some are ignorant of their responsibilities, while a minority are deliberately exploitative. However, while legal aid is currently available to even the poorest tenant, the threat of litigation has teeth. Landlords know that, despite the absence of regulation or dispute resolution by an ombudsman, tenants advised by law centres or citizens advice bureaux can pursue them through the courts, with the landlord facing considerable costs when they lose the case. Without Amendment 72A, however, the disreputable landlord would see that threats from landlords of legal action would be empty, as tenants would not be able to take the matter forward unless the case concerned the likelihood of the imminent loss of their home. Informing bad landlords that, however awful their behaviour, they will not be taken to court is like telling Somali pirates that they will never be held to account if they board ships and demand fantastic ransoms. It seems bound to lead to an escalation of criminality. Removing recourse to legal aid removes the capacity of tenants credibly to threaten litigation, leaving them with no way out of the misery of living in a property where the heating system does not work, where there is no management of anti-social neighbours, where disrepair is a major issue and where landlords simply refuse to answer letters or phone calls. As we all know, acute shortages mean that tenants, unlike consumers in other areas, do not have the luxury of being able to shop around and find a better property elsewhere. The other way in which housing differs from other services lies in the legal complexities that surround it. Quite apart from the extensive body of landlord/tenant legislation, the ever changing entitlements to benefits—for example, to local housing allowances—are fiendishly complicated. Social landlords very often provide expert welfare benefits advice but private landlords, of course, do not. The ordinary consumer—the tenant—cannot be expected to have full knowledge of the legal niceties to deploy in a tribunal hearing; hence the need for professional advice, for which legal aid provides the funding mechanism. Take this away and not only will landlords be able to break the law with impunity but tenants who are ignorant of their entitlements or who are victims of incompetence at the hands of bureaucrats will never see justice. The noble Lord, Lord Shipley, has made the case for legal aid housing advice preventing problems escalating to homelessness, and legal aid help for housing cases has to go much wider than stepping in at the last minute when possession of the home is imminent. Of course, many cases are not about eviction. Moreover, some of the cases where eviction has occurred may be about ancillary aspects of the actions of the landlord—it is not uncommon for tenants who are unlawfully evicted to have all their possessions thrown out of the property. If the landlord has previously exercised violence or harassment, the tenant may have no wish to get back their former home but merely to get back their belongings or obtain compensation for belongings destroyed. It would be perverse if a tenant could not get legal aid in such cases unless they declared that they wanted to go back into a property to which it would be unreasonable, if not unsafe, to return. Regrettably, although we now depend on the private rented sector to house many poorer households, it is fraught with conflict that often requires a legal input to get sorted. With benefits advice being taken out of scope and the likely closure of many citizens advice bureaux as a result, housing is badly affected by the Bill. This surely is one area of our national life where legal aid is essential. Its withdrawal will not only cause misery but will cost central and local government money in picking up the pieces. I support the amendment.