My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, and the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, for giving us this chance to consider how a Covid-related rise in homelessness can be avoided. I declare my interests as on the register.
The pandemic has revealed how insecure and vulnerable is the private rented sector. Tenants, who can be paying over 40% of their income on rents, can lose their homes if they lose their jobs. Landlords, and there are over 2 million of them, can lose much of their income if they lose their rent. Therefore, the problems now faced by tenants and landlords call into question whether halving the size of the social housing sector—councils and housing associations—and doubling the size of the private rented sector, has been a sensible switch. We can now see the necessity not only of promised renters’ reforms but of rebalancing the two rental sectors, so that more households once again have the greater affordability and security of council and housing association accommodation.
The immediate necessity, however, is to avoid thousands of households with rent arrears losing their homes, not least because temporary accommodation for homeless families is already costing £1 billion a year. The annulment Motion by the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, seeks to do this by addressing one unfair anomaly in the current arrangements. The Motion of the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, points to the lack of discretion for the courts in England—unlike their equivalents in Scotland —to refuse or delay a possession order where this is clearly justified.
I recommend that the Government also top up councils’ Covid hardship funds and reconsider the Spanish tenants’ loan scheme: a government-guaranteed, interest-free bank loan, repayable over six years or more, that pays off the arrears so the tenant is not evicted. The landlord is happy, the cost to government is very modest and to the tenant, bearable; and a rise in homelessness and misery is avoided.
1.48 pm