I shall come to them in due course.
The average private landlord will be keen to avoid committing the new offence of allocating a tenancy to someone who is not meant to be in this country, and to avoid being fined up to £3,000. They will want to play safe and not take anyone as a tenant who might just possibly turn out to be an illegal immigrant.
It will not be an offence not to check the status of a potential tenant; it will be an offence not to have checked only if it is subsequently discovered that the tenant is here illegally. So if someone is obviously not an immigrant, there is no need to go through the process of checking them out. How much easier, therefore, to turn away anyone with the appearance of being foreign, including perfectly legitimate applicants, using any number of excuses—most often that the property has already been let. Despite the guidance being prepared by the Home Office on how landlords can avoid acting in a discriminatory way, in those markets of high demand—London, much of southern England and hotspots everywhere—I fear that the Bill could mean that anyone who could remotely be thought to be a migrant will find it very tough to get decent rented accommodation. Frankly, it is difficult enough already for anyone who is not a young UK professional to persuade landlords to take them on. Remember that there are over 1.5 million private landlords, 78% of whom, as the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, said, own just one property; they are amateurs and they are going to be highly risk-averse.
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In the less pressurised areas, landlords might be more willing to check out the status of applicants, but few will be prepared to wait while queries are dealt with by the Home Office where, I suspect, there may be insufficient staff and delays could follow. If there is any doubt, the vast majority of landlords will always choose, I suggest, another prospective tenant. As for the bad landlords, and there are some, they will take no more notice of this new requirement than of the existing obligations they already ignore. These landlords will see demand rise for their low-quality accommodation at inflated rents because perfectly respectable would-be tenants who are entirely legal migrants or, indeed, not migrants at all, but who might be thought to be so, will find the better accommodation is not available to them. I fear it is often overseas students who have every right to be here who may suffer the worst.
If the landlord uses a lettings agent, and the agent is willing to take on the legal responsibility of checking the migration status of potential tenants, the agent is likely to charge at least £50 per applicant. While in Scotland it is illegal to pass on this charge to the tenant, in England and Wales agents could impose it on the tenants, another burden on tenants who are likely to be already worrying about the affordability of their accommodation.
Neither tenants nor landlords are pleased with this requirement in the Bill, but we are where we are, and the amendments I am supporting and proposing are intended to moderate and mitigate the effects of this measure. In supporting Amendments 50 and 51, which call for pilot schemes to assess just how workable the arrangements may be, I add to the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, that evaluation of the impact in pilot areas needs to establish not just whether any illegal migrants have been identified by landlords but whether the new measure has distorted the selection of new tenants. Certainly we need to know from the pilots how much the new measure has cost in hard cash and in time and effort for tenants, landlords and local authorities and to what effect. I support these amendments.