It is four months since the Bill concluded in Committee and five years since the Government promised to legislate for renters’ rights, so I start by saying that it is totally unacceptable that it has taken so long for the Renters (Reform) Bill to be on Report. It is deplorable for nearly a million renters to have been issued with section 21 eviction notices in England since the Government promised to abolish them, according to recent YouGov data. Renters have been badly let down by this delay, and aspects of the legislation before us continue to let them down.

My amendment 12 would require energy performance certificates for properties to be provided to the database operator and for the details to be recorded in the portal. This simple amendment would make a big difference. It would recognise that information is power and allow tenants to know whether the home they are about to rent will be damp and leaky or warm and efficient.

Amendment 12 also builds on the existing rules that require EPCs to be commissioned before properties are put on the market and for them to be clearly displayed in adverts in commercial media. Fairness and logic demand that renters should be able easily to compare energy efficiency information when considering properties to rent. A cold and damp home can end up costing renters dearly, both in high energy bills and health and wellbeing impacts.

Renters in cold and damp homes run an increased risk of problems associated with mould and of health conditions such as asthma and heart disease, as well as of poor mental health. We all know that the UK has some of the leakiest homes in Europe and that tenants are particularly exposed to high global gas prices, because the private rented sector is the least energy efficient of any tenure. A staggering quarter of renting households are living in fuel poverty today, so urgent action is essential to improve standards across the sector and to ensure that all renters have a warm and decent home in which to live.

It therefore beggars belief that the Prime Minister announced last September that he was scrapping the requirement to upgrade energy efficiency standards in private rented properties to EPC grade C. That was despite it being essential to deliver on our climate and fuel poverty targets. That upgrade would save tenants more than £250 a year, even at so-called normal prices, according to the Climate Change Committee. As well as harming renters, that regressive move was also contrary to the wishes of landlords, 80% of whom are in favour of stricter energy efficiency regulations.

My amendment 13 seeks to tackle the crippling private rents that so many people are paying. In Brighton and Hove, in which my constituency rests, a new study of more than 50,000 renters found that tenants in the city were spending a scandalous 56.9% of their pay on rent, making it the most expensive city in England in which to rent. As the Bill stands, the measures on rent increases are wholly inadequate. They rely on a resource-intensive and time-consuming appeals process that could even see tenants worse off at the end of it, because the tribunal would have the power to impose a higher rent than the one the tenant is appealing. That is frankly outrageous and goes directly against the promise made in the Secretary of State’s White Paper, which said:

“We will prevent the Tribunal increasing rent beyond the amount landlords initially asked for when they proposed a rent increase.”

Amendment 13 would simply make good that broken promise by ensuring that the rent payable after a tribunal determination can be no higher than the rent initially imposed by the landlord in the notice served on the tenant. One would have thought that that would be pretty straightforward. Given that the landlord is proposing that rent level in the first place, that must surely be the upper limit of what the tribunal can determine. The Secretary of State obviously understands that principle, since he put in in his own White Paper.

The removal of this commitment in the Bill shows the Government are determined to bend over backwards to tip the balance of power even further in favour of landlords. In short, amendment 13 would get rid of what seems to be a deliberate disincentive to discourage tenants from using the process that is supposed to protect them from unfair rent hikes. In the absence of a national system for rent controls with local flexibility, which is what we really need, amendment 13 is a modest rebalancing of the rent tribunal process, and I would welcome the Minister’s consideration and response in summing up the debate.

There is limited time in the debate, but I very much support the amendments seeking to prohibit evictions within two years of the beginning of a tenancy where the landlord wants to sell or move family in. As the Bill stands, tenants can be served two months’ notice just four months after a tenant has moved in, making a mockery of ministerial claims to improve security of tenure. I also sincerely hope that Ministers will accept amendment 14, which addresses the deeply concerning fact that the notice period for eviction under the new landlord grounds is just two months. This amendment extends it to four months in recognition of the huge difficulty many people face in finding somewhere suitable and affordable to rent when they are evicted, which, as we know, is a major cause of homelessness.