I will check that but my notes tell me that it is six months before they can serve their notice.
I reassure the House that we are exploring potential exemptions to this six-month period in extreme circumstances, such as where there are serious health hazards, the death of a tenant, for victims of domestic abuse, and other such important issues. We will bring these forward as the Bill progresses.
With regard to domestic violence, as many noble Lords raised, we recognise that domestic abuse can be interpreted as anti-social behaviour by neighbours—for example, frequent shouting and intolerable noise. It would be wrong to evict victims, which is why it is important that the judicial discretion is used in ground 14 eviction cases. To consider eviction would be a reasonable step in these circumstances.
Many noble Lords raised the issue of a longer notice period for possession grounds, and powerful arguments for that have been made today. However, we believe that the notice periods for the grounds are set at a length which balances the needs of both tenants and landlords. They give tenants time to find a new home while ensuring that landlords can manage their assets when they need to.
Noble Lords have called specifically for tenants to be protected from the moving and selling ground for a longer period at the start of their tenancy, and we are already protecting tenants’ security by ensuring that landlords will not be able to use these grounds in the first six months of a tenancy. We believe that six months strikes the right balance between improving security and, of course, allowing landlords to continue to feel confident in the market.
The Government are committed to preventing homelessness before it occurs. The Bill will help to do that by abolishing Section 21 evictions, giving tenants greater security of tenure and, we hope, reducing the risk of homelessness. We are also providing total support of £108 billion over 2022-25—an average of £3,800 per UK household—to help households with the high cost of living. This includes increasing the local housing allowance to the 30th percentile of market rents from April, which will mean that 1.6 million low-income households will be around £800 a year better off on average in 2024-25, and over 740,000 have been prevented from becoming homeless or supported into settled accommodation since 2018 through the Homelessness Reduction Act. Between 2022 and 2025, we are investing over £1.2 billion into the homelessness prevention grant, which funds local authorities to work with landlords to prevent evictions and offer alternative sources of accommodation.
With regard to Awaab’s law, I am grateful for this being raised. We agree that no tenant should have to live in dangerous housing conditions. We are taking steps to ensure that hazards in rented homes are dealt with, but how we achieve this needs to take into account the differences between the private and social rented sectors.
Awaab’s law was developed for the social housing sector, in which landlords manage large portfolios of usually between 1,000 and 10,000 properties, and have dedicated repairs and maintenance teams. We believe that it is not the right approach for the private rental sector, in which 82% of landlords have fewer than five properties. Instead, we are strengthening enforcement against hazards in private rented homes. Local councils will be able to issue immediate fines of up to £5,000 if a dangerous hazard is present in a privately rented property and the landlord has failed to take reasonably practical steps to address it. We are also introducing the decent homes standard in the private rental sector for the first time, providing local councils with enforcement powers to require landlords to remedy failures to meet requirements.