My Lords, I disagree with an awful lot of what the noble Lord, Lord Deben, said, and in particular his comments on the so-called bedroom tax. But we will not go into that at this hour of the night.
During the passage of the Immigration Bill 2014 through the House of Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Holbeach, made some important concessions from the original drafting. One of those was to set up the pilot scheme that turned out to be in the West Midlands. I was subsequently asked to chair the consultative group that would follow the pilot scheme and see whether all was well or everything fell apart as a result of this measure. I jointly chair this with the Immigration Minister, James Brokenshire, and we have been meeting monthly or bi-monthly for the past year or so following the story as it has unfolded.
This has not been a trivial exercise. I assumed when I was joint chair with the Minister that he would come in at the beginning of the meeting, shake everyone’s hand and then clear off. It has not happened like that at all. The Minister has attended every meeting from beginning to end. My role has been very subservient to that, but it has given me an insight into how this pilot has worked out. I have also been to the West Midlands, met various landlords and talked to them about how they worry about these things. From that perspective, let me therefore report back on the pilot and the things have been going on in the Home Office.
There has been quite a considerable investment in this. A YouGov survey was carried out in the fairly early stages of the pilot. It was not awfully large, but then none of the surveys has been very large. It definitely indicated that landlords were saying how reluctant they were to get involved, that it was a nuisance, a bureaucratic nightmare and how they were more likely to turn people away if they suspected something from their accent or whatever. They said all those things. “Grumpy landlords” was the message coming back.
To take an important ingredient of that, discrimination, the pilot set up by the Home Office looked at the area of the West Midlands where the right to rent was being implemented and also looked at a comparison area elsewhere. I am not meant to say where the other area was. We kept it a secret so that the people there did not know they were being looked at in this particular way. But we had a series of mystery shopping exercises in which people phoned with funny accents or with the Oxford English referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Deben, and saw how they compared. In the comparison area, the discrimination existed as well as in the right-to-rent area. I am afraid that this does indeed prove that people—landlords and agents—take discriminatory attitudes towards the people whom they might accept as tenants. But it did not show that where right to rent had been introduced, the landlords behaved any differently than in the comparator area.
We did discover that some of the documentation that could prove that you were indeed entitled to be in this country was hard for landlords to understand and get their heads around. At the end of the process—and we only just have the final version—we developed a right-to-rent guide with pictures showing how documents relating to various aspects of identity from different countries looked for real. You would have to be pretty stupid not to be able to find in the guide the document that you are checking, if it exists. If landlords doubt whether the documentation is indeed genuine, they should—it would be unwise not to—phone the Home Office helpline.
We have asked Home Office officials what kind of resources are going into this helpline and how real it is. They have been extremely fast about answering calls, often within minutes. But if the scheme goes national, is the Home Office going to be able to fulfil the commitment that if a landlord or agent has not had a definitive response within 48 hours, the answer will have to be, “Yes, you can go ahead”? The Home Office is given 48 hours to say whether a particular person is here legally or not. If it does not get around to giving that answer because it is too busy, after 48 hours a landlord is absolutely in the clear to let to that individual. We wanted to make sure that the staffing was up to muster and that the helpline was properly serviced—and it is.
The steering group includes representatives from the landlord organisations who have been on both the main group and on sub-groups which have been looking at the discriminatory code and our code of conduct as well as at the evaluation exercise. We have had people from the Residential Landlords Association, the National Landlords Association and bodies that represent tenants’ interests. Shelter has joined, while Crisis has been there since the beginning. We have the GLA and the four local authorities in the West Midlands. These have been big and articulate meetings where people have been able to make the case and say the things they wanted to say.
We have been concerned throughout that the message would not get through. We need to communicate the fact that there is a right to rent and that both landlords and tenants have got to expect this little process to happen, as indeed it does for employers. Let us remember that this is only a parallel to employers being required
to check the status of people who come to them for a job. We wanted to know that the communications exercise has been undertaken seriously. There has been a respectable budget for this work. A pretty good website has been set up so that people can see pictures of all the documents they need. There is social media networking using the landlords associations and showing the codes of conduct. Here I declare my interest as chairman of the Property Ombudsman. We have changed our code and we are publicising that. We have to get it out through the landlord networks, which have been co-operative.
From the beginning to the end, absolutely no one, either landlords or tenants, has welcomed this scheme. It is an imposition on them. But it has been an imposition since the passing of the 2014 Act and people are getting used to the idea that it is part of what you do before you undertake a letting. Landlords already need to take references because they want to know that people are going to be able to pay the rent into the indefinite future. They want to know that people really are who they say they are. Passports are regularly required by letting agents, so someone would already not get much further without one. The extra documentation may make life a bit easier for people now that it is clear what designates an individual as being in this country legally or illegally.
When we get to the penalties for offences, I am again interested because rogue landlords are a major problem in all of our big cities. There are people who exploit the tenants who come to them, and in particular they can exploit those who are not here legally. So far, these landlords have not been deterred from doing all kinds of horrendous things, so I welcome the Home Office having joined in and taking an interest as a major additional enforcement agency when it comes to knocking on the doors of landlords who are letting appalling properties at high rents and definitely exploiting the occupiers of those properties. The Home Office has been joining in with local authority enforcement officers, who have often felt rather bereft of the powers they need. They have found that landlords who have been behaving very badly come away from the magistrates’ court having been fined £500 and writing that off as a business expense because they are taking £5,000 a month for a house that is grossly overcrowded and where people are being treated abysmally.
Having the Home Office there adds another dimension to this. It is a powerful extra ally for those of us who are very much opposed to rogue landlords up and down the country, and I welcome its presence. This partnership between the Home Office and local authorities is now a hallmark. When people from the different local authorities in the West Midlands were asked how they felt the exercise had gone at the end of our last meeting, the comment was that there is now a new kind of partnership between the Home Office and local authorities at the local level in areas where they have been targeting rogue landlords.
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Yes, no one wanted extra bureaucracy to have to go through, and this is another hoop and it is not convenient. I opposed it the first time around but we have to learn to live with this additional measure. The Government
got their legislation through, and the right to rent is part of the legal system. The evaluation that has gone on in the West Midlands is quite difficult to make definitive from beginning to end—we have not had many months in which to do this, as Governments always go faster than one would like, and one would like a pilot with even more expenditure on it—but I can say, from having watched this on the inside, that this has been taken extremely seriously. Yes, another few months of seeing whether we could learn more might have been good, but there have been significant changes in the way in which we have packaged the arrangements, including the codes, the publicity and the documentation. Along the way, the requirements have changed. As far as I can tell, landlords who did not like it when the YouGov survey, sponsored by Shelter, came out in the early days now understand that this is what they are going to have to do and that it is not so bad after all.
In terms of big fines and going to prison, it is absolutely clear that no one who makes an innocent mistake is going to be hounded. The Minister has said that. The Minister in this House said earlier that rogue landlords who are serial offenders, and who persistently break the law and could not care less about the legislative framework in which they operate, will now have the Government coming down on them like a ton of bricks. This is not about people doing their best and making a mistake. We had a meeting at which we discussed fraudulent and very beautifully and carefully prepared documents. Some people may think, “Aha, we can fool the landlord”. If they should not really be there, was the landlord at fault? No one is thinking that that is what the law is about. It is about the big-time criminal elements within the landlord sector.
Without ever thinking that this was a great piece of legislation and that it was a burden on everyone concerned, I have to say that the Government have taken it very seriously. Having sat through all the meetings on the pilot, I am satisfied that, for better or worse, we can live with this.