My Lords, it is always a pleasure to act on behalf of my noble friend Lord Wallace of Saltaire, in whose name this amendment stands. I may be doing a bad impersonation of him but it is always a pleasure to respond in his name.
A number of amendments relating to retaliatory evictions have been grouped together. For clarity, I will address government Amendments 46A to 46J before moving on to Amendment 52 and, finally, Amendments 46AA, 46AB, 46BA and 46HA.
The private rented sector is an important and growing part of our housing market. It has overtaken the social rented sector in terms of size and is now the second largest tenure with 1.9 million properties housing 4 million households throughout England.
The quality of privately rented housing has improved rapidly over the past decade. The Government are committed to promoting a strong, thriving professional private rented sector where good landlords can prosper and hard-working tenants can enjoy decent standards and receive a service which represents value for money for their rent. However, the behaviour of a small number of rogue landlords has a detrimental impact on tenants. Also, some tenants do not act responsibly, and it can be difficult and time-consuming to evict such tenants where it would be legitimate to do so—for example, because of mistakes made when serving a Section 21 eviction notice.
This amendment to the Bill is designed to be a balanced package of measures that will benefit both tenants and landlords. It covers four areas, which I shall go through briefly. First, it will protect tenants against the practice of retaliatory eviction where they have raised a legitimate complaint about the condition of a property and a local authority has issued a notice confirming that the repair needs to be carried out to avoid a risk to health and safety.
Secondly, the amendment will ensure that tenants are always given at least two months’ notice before they have to move out of their home. This will be done by providing that a Section 21 notice may not be given in the first four months of the tenancy and by introducing an expiry date after which a Section 21 notice ceases to be valid if possession proceedings have not been brought. The purpose of this measure is to deal with an approach adopted by, I stress, a small minority of landlords and letting agents in which they serve an eviction notice at the start of a tenancy. This disreputable practice can result in a tenant having to vacate a property with virtually no notice.
Thirdly, the amendment will make the eviction process more straightforward for landlords where the tenant can legitimately be evicted. It does so through the introduction of a prescribed notice to reduce errors and by removing the need for the date specified in a notice served under Section 21(4)—which relates to the
notice to be given in relation to a periodic assured shorthold tenancy—to be the last day of a period of the tenancy, while retaining the requirement to give two months’ notice. We estimate that this measure alone will deliver savings to landlords of about £3 million a year.
The fourth element is to provide that, where a landlord has failed to comply with certain legal obligations, the tenant cannot be evicted using the Section 21 procedure. We envisage that this will apply to existing legal obligations such as the requirement to provide a new tenant with an energy performance certificate and to obtain an annual gas safety certificate. This restriction on the service of an eviction notice would be lifted as soon as these documents were provided.
While some of these changes will involve small one-off costs to landlords, primarily due to the need to familiarise themselves with the legislation, we estimate that this provision will deliver savings to landlords of, as I said, about £3 million per year.
The first part of the amendment introduces much needed protection for tenants against a very small minority of unscrupulous and rogue landlords who knowingly rent out unsafe and overcrowded accommodation and then evict any tenant who makes a complaint about the condition of the property—as I have said, a practice known commonly as retaliatory eviction. The amendment provides that a tenant cannot be evicted for a period of six months where they have requested that a repair is carried out to their home and the local authority confirms that the repair is necessary to prevent a possible risk to the tenant’s health and safety. The landlord will also be required to ensure that the repairs are completed.
As noble Lords will know, this amendment originally started out as a Private Member’s Bill in the other place. The amendment is very similar but there are some differences, which I wish to highlight. One is that we have decided to remove hazard awareness notices from the list of documents that can confirm a health and safety risk. The other notices are an improvement notice and a notice of emergency remedial action. A hazard awareness notice is a document that alerts the building occupier to a potential minor hazard—for example, a cracked window or uneven steps on a staircase.
We took the decision to remove hazard awareness notices from the list as they are normally issued only where there is a relatively small risk to the tenant’s health and safety—for example, in the case of uneven steps on a staircase. It does not require the landlord to actually do anything to rectify the problem. Local authorities will not be prevented from issuing hazard awareness notices. However, doing so would not give a tenant the protection against eviction that they would get if an improvement notice or a notice of emergency remedial action were issued. Local authorities would be aware of that and could be expected to take that fact into account when deciding what action to take following an inspection.
The local authority will also have a crucial role to play more generally. The protection against eviction which this amendment introduces will apply only if the local authority has confirmed that there is a potential health and safety risk. In addition, the tenant must have requested a repair before the serving of a Section 21
eviction notice. The amendment will not cover situations where a landlord serves an eviction notice and the tenant subsequently requests a repair. In addition, the amendment will not apply where a local authority determines that the issue being complained about has arisen because the tenant has breached their duty to use the property in a tenant-like manner. These measures will help to ensure that unfounded complaints are kept to an absolute minimum.
However, we want to ensure that landlords, and indeed tenants, are not left waiting for months and months for a local authority to inspect a property, which I know to be a concern. Therefore, the amendment provides that, by the time that the possession case comes to court, a local authority will need to have carried out an inspection or, where it has carried out an inspection, will need to have decided whether there is a defect that poses a risk to the tenant’s health and safety. If the local authority fails to do so, a tenant will not have a defence to the proceedings on the grounds of retaliatory eviction.
This should not be an onerous burden on local authorities. A tenant must be given at least two months’ notice of eviction under the Housing Act 1988. Typically, it would take a further two months for a possession case to go to court. So, on average, a local authority will have four months to carry out an inspection and decide whether the complaint by the tenant is legitimate. This should be ample time.
Retaliatory eviction is wrong and its continued practice is unacceptable. No tenant should face eviction because they have made a legitimate complaint to the landlord about the condition of their home. These are important amendments which introduce protection for tenants against rogue landlords, but they also contain provisions which we believe will benefit landlords and make it more straightforward to evict tenants in legitimate circumstances.
I move on to other amendments in this group. Amendment 52 is very similar in parts to the Government’s Amendments 46A to 46J. The amendment would protect tenants against the practice of retaliatory eviction where they had raised a legitimate complaint about the condition of a property and a local authority had issued a notice confirming that the repair needed to be carried out to avoid a risk to health and safety. The amendment would introduce protection for tenants against a small minority of unscrupulous and rogue landlords who knowingly rent out unsafe and overcrowded accommodation and then evict any tenant who makes a complaint about the condition of the property.
The amendment provides that a tenant cannot be evicted for a period of six months where they have requested a repair to be carried out on their home and the local authority confirms that the repair is necessary to prevent a possible risk to the tenant’s health and safety. Amendments 46A to 46J are designed to tackle exactly this problem, and in fact they go much further by introducing changes in several related areas. First, they ensure that tenants are always given at least two months’ notice before they have to move out of their home. A small minority of landlords and letting agents have adopted the practice of serving the eviction notice at the start of a tenancy—a point that I made earlier.
This disreputable practice can result in the tenant having to vacate a property without notice.
Secondly, as I have already said, the eviction notice makes the process more straightforward for landlords in situations where the tenant can be legitimately evicted. It does so through the introduction of a prescribed notice to reduce errors and by removing the need for the date specified in a notice served under Section 21(4) to be the last day of a period of the tenancy, while retaining the requirement to give two months’ notice. The Government are keen to ensure that we take forward a balanced package of amendments that will help both landlords and tenants.
Thirdly, the amendments provide that where a landlord has failed to comply with certain legal obligations, a tenant cannot be evicted using the Section 21 procedure. We envisage that this will apply to existing legal obligations, as I have already mentioned, in relation to energy performance certificates and the annual gas safety certificate. The government amendment provides protection for tenants against retaliatory eviction. It also, as I have explained, delivers a range of other benefits for landlords.
Amendment 46AA would require tenants to wait for up to 28 days before they could expect their landlord to simply respond to a request by the tenant for repairs to be carried out to the property. At that stage the landlord would be required only to inform the tenant what, if anything, he proposed to do in response to the request. The Government have set a time limit of 14 days for the landlord to respond. In our view this strikes a fair balance between ensuring that landlords are given a reasonable time to respond to a complaint while not expecting tenants to put up with the disrepair in their property for an unreasonably long time. Renting out property is a business transaction and tenants, like any other consumer, have a right to expect their landlord to respond promptly to a request for repairs. In our view, 14 days is a reasonable period in which to require a response. Indeed, in many cases, a much earlier response could and should be expected—for example, if there is a leak in the property or a problem with the heating during the winter months.
There may be situations where a landlord is genuinely unable to respond within that timescale, but even if that is the case, that does not mean that the landlord would automatically be prevented from evicting the tenant for a period of six months. The local authority would still have to inspect the property and determine whether there was a potentially serious health and safety risk. However, it would be open to the landlord at any stage, before the inspection is carried out, to contact their tenant, assess what work needs to be done and arrange for it to be completed. If that has happened by the time of the inspection, and as a result there is no longer a potential risk to the health and safety of the tenant, the local authority will no longer have any role to play. In that scenario, the proposed restrictions on the service of a Section 21 eviction notice would not apply.
Amendment 46AB has the potential to reduce the length of time during which a tenant would be protected against retaliatory eviction. The Government propose that a tenant should be protected against eviction for a
period of six months starting from the date that the local authority has determined that a property contains significant health and safety hazards, and has issued either an improvement notice or a notice of emergency remedial action. However, this amendment would reduce that time. Local authorities have a lot of competing demands on their time and it is very unlikely that they could inspect a property instantly, as soon as they have received a complaint from a tenant. If, for example, a local authority did not inspect a property until two months after it had received a complaint, even if a serious health and safety hazard was discovered, a tenant would then be protected against eviction only for a period of four months. That reduction would significantly weaken the protection that the Government have decided tenants must be given against the actions of the very few rogue landlords.
On Amendment 46BA, we are absolutely clear that tenants should pay their rent on the date that it is due. The Government’s proposals do not in any way undermine this central principle. When a tenant has fallen behind with their rent, landlords can use the procedures under Section 8 of the Housing Act 1988 to evict the tenant. Those procedures will remain unchanged and will not be affected in any way by the proposed restrictions on the use of a Section 21 order of the 1988 Act. We do not believe that a tenant should be denied protection from a retaliatory eviction when there are already adequate provisions in existing legislation for dealing with non-payment of rent.
Finally Amendment 46HA would apply to a situation when a tenant is entitled to repayment of any rent they have paid in advance for a period when they no longer occupy the property because the landlord has served a Section 21 eviction notice. It provides that the amount of rent repaid will be offset by an amount equal to any money that may be owed by the tenant to the landlord. The amendment is unnecessary, as there is nothing in the Government’s proposed legislation that would prevent a landlord offsetting any debts owed to them by the tenant against rent that they are liable to repay to the tenant. Therefore, I commend Amendments 46A to 46J and hope that, in the clarifications and assurances, noble Lords who have tabled Amendments 52, 46AA, 46AB, 46BA and 46HA will be minded not to press them.
Amendment 46AA (to Amendment 46)