Private Rented Housing

Part of Orders of the Day — Finance (No. 2) Bill – in the House of Commons at 3:53 pm on 9 May 1988.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Mr Norman Lamont Mr Norman Lamont , Kingston upon Thames 3:53, 9 May 1988

I hope that the hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mr. Beith) will forgive me if I reply briefly to his remarks, because some of the wider issues on which he touched might be more conveniently discussed in the clause stand part debate. The hon. Gentleman may agree that he went wider than the narrow terms of his amendment. None the less, I am grateful to him for the moderate way in which he proposed his amendment and did not express total hostility to the idea of the business expansion scheme being used to provide more privately rented property. Indeed, he went further and indicated that he felt there was a shortage of such accommodation, which was a great impediment to mobility in locking people into areas of high unemployment. That is one of the major reasons why we want to see a revival in the privately rented sector.

The hon. Gentleman was essentially trying to strike a different balance between the landlord and tenant than that being struck by the Housing Bill and by the concept of the new assured tenancies. I do not want to open up the whole Housing Bill debate this afternoon, but the tax relief in question is built upon the assumption that the Bill will be enacted. The proposals that we have put before the House try to strike a balance between the landlord and tenant that we believe is reasonable. The hon. Gentleman knows as well as I do that there have been many attempts by previous Conservative and even by Labour Governments—for example, by the late Richard Crossman—to alter that balance within an adminisrative framework and to try to achieve a greater, albeit regulated, supply of private rented accommodation. Those previous attempts all came to grief because they did not move far enough towards allowing genuine market rents to be charged in the private sector.