The proposed change will lead to more evictions at a lower threshold; it will lead to families leaving their property before going to court, as my hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich says; it may lead to landlords actively avoiding tenants who may pose a risk; and it will lead to more applications to local authorities, which will then have to source more temporary accommodation, inevitably in the private rented sector, to house them.
The Minister has to ensure that there is a proper backstop. If the Government want to house people—particularly those with vulnerabilities and families—in the private rented sector at scale, as they do, getting the balance right is essential. The weakening of legislation in this respect is one way in which they are failing to do that.
]]>There is one other category the Minister needs to address, which is what we do about families who have already been evicted from social housing. Clearly, families cannot be on the street. Getting landlords to provide accommodation to households in those cases is essential, but already extremely difficult.
]]>We are saying that a balance has to be struck between the genuine need to deal with serious antisocial behaviour and the consequences of that. It will mean additional pressures on households, on local authorities, which inevitably end up having to deal with the consequences of it, and indeed on the courts, which will be expected to make judgments with a much looser and more nebulous definition of antisocial behaviour. I am not sure that the Minister’s argument works there at all.
I reinforce the point that the proposed change will apply disproportionately to certain groups of people, as we heard in the evidence sessions. It will affect people who are vulnerable, people with mental health problems, people with learning disabilities, people who are neuro-divergent, people in crisis, and obviously people experiencing domestic violence. We heard compelling evidence from the Domestic Abuse Housing Alliance last week. I have had cases of parents who have had to deal with adult children with drug addiction or severe mental health problems, whose behaviour undoubtedly has negative consequences for them and their neighbours. We wish it were not so. We wish none of these social problems existed, but they do. The change will also affect people in the grip of a psychotic episode, which are not uncommon, particularly in inner cities.
The proposed change will affect people with children, as my hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich mentioned. A woman wrote to me recently saying, “My neighbours are complaining about the noise of the kids—too much noise, running around. I am in a block with no other children, so my neighbours are now complaining and the landlord is complaining, but what can I do about it? They are 20-month-old twins. I should not have to deal with complaints about children making noise.” Under the Minister’s proposals, just having little babies running around could be enough to trigger—
]]>There is a continuing theme of the Government looking at this world as they want it to be, rather than at the rather messier reality. In respect of private tenancies, it is a world that they have quite deliberately created. No one likes being exposed to any form of antisocial behaviour or inconvenience. Some antisocial behaviour can literally ruin lives. Many of us will have dealt with casework relating to harassment; stalking; deliberate making of noise at antisocial hours; people running small businesses in flats, which can create noise; behaviour arising from the often illegal use of accommodation for short lets; people stealing post; and abuse, including homophobic and racist abuse. All those things can occur, and they can be extremely damaging to people’s lives.
One of the problems, which my hon. Friend addressed, is that these things are often not dealt with not because the threshold is too high for such cases, but because, in many instances, it is extremely difficult to gather the evidence. People are often extremely reluctant to act as witnesses and support evidence, and a lot of evidence is one-on-one and, to some extent, highly subjective.
Managing antisocial behaviour requires landlords to be part of the solution, and it is completely right that we are encouraging the consideration of that. Social landlords spend considerable time and resource trying to do that, with varying degrees of effectiveness, but in the private rented sector—with honourable exceptions—that often simply does not happen. The reduction in the threshold that the Government are proposing will make it even easier for landlords to choose to go down an eviction route or to hold the threat of eviction over the heads of households, in such a way that they themselves do not have to take a great deal of responsibility.
The Government must anticipate consequences from their change to the definition, or one would like to think that they would not have done it, but we need the Minister to spell those consequences out. Obviously, we must expect that more people will risk eviction for behaviour that is below the current threshold; that is a consequence almost by definition. In how many instances do the Government think that is likely to apply? Who might be affected by it, and under what circumstances not currently covered by legislation? What will happen to people who are at risk of eviction with a lower threshold?
]]>Ground 8A is both disproportionate to the scale of the problem and unnecessary, because there are powers in the system to deal with rent arrears anyway. It will inevitably lead to further evictions, which will be concentrated among those people who have the biggest problems, who will end up making claims for homelessness support from local authorities.
The Minister does not need to go down this route. As my hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich said, if the Government do not want to go all the way to removing the reformed ground 8A, which would be the simplest way, there are layers of protection that could be built into the system. The Minister should trust the courts: that is what they are for. They are good at this, they are experienced at this, and they know how to tell a charlatan from somebody with genuine and complex problems. The measure will place an unnecessary burden on the most vulnerable people, and I genuinely believe that the Minister will have cause to regret its implementation.
]]>I concede that there are undoubtedly some people who persistently fail to pay their rent. That is absolutely the case, and it drives landlords mad—rightly so. I think the rumours of it create a much larger problem than actually exists, but there are people who do it, and it is essential that there are powers for the court to deal with that. The people who are doing that will frequently disappear before the case ever gets to court anyway, and will try their luck not paying their rent with another landlord. We need powers to deal with that, but so many of the people who end up in this situation do so because of a set of very, very difficult circumstances that have thrown them into chaos.
Here are just some of the cases that my office and I have dealt with over the course of a few months. There is the small shopkeeper and private tenant who was burgled; he lost his stock and his income, and it took him a while to sort out the insurance claim, during which time he got into very serious arrears. There is the young father on a zero-hours contract who found himself, several times during the year, expecting to have an income but finding that he was not called into work for two or three weeks at a time. Each time, it caused a set of problems.
The Minister may say that that is what social security and housing benefit are supposed to be for. I do not know whether the Minister has ever tried to claim universal credit or housing benefit on a variable income, with all the documentation that has to be prepared. It is an absolute living hell.
One of the safeguards in the Bill is supposed to be that the ground will not affect people who have a benefit entitlement that has been delayed, which, as we know, reflects a structural problem with universal credit. However, many of the difficult cases involve the entitlement to benefit being disputed in the first place, and that is a whole different ball game.
I had a case not that long ago in which a mother and her three children were days away from an eviction, not because they were deemed not to be entitled to benefit, but simply because after a relationship breakdown the benefit claim had for some reason not been transferred, despite repeated efforts. Over three years, that led to huge arrears. Each time, it was settled, but then the same structural problem occurred yet again, which left the family vulnerable. We were able to sort it out, but the case would not have fallen under the safeguards that the Minister will no doubt claim apply in this case.
]]>We will no doubt be talking more about the changing grounds for possession in the context of antisocial behaviour and rent arrears but as has been reinforced—we just need to keep saying this—the people in the private rented sector who we have the most concern about are those whose equivalents were not in the private rented sector 20 or 25 years ago. Their patterns of need, the patterns of demand they place on the sector and the risks they have to face are also quite different.
Families with children, families experiencing domestic violence and those with all kinds of vulnerabilities, including serious mental health problems, addictions or learning disabilities, would for the most part not have been in this situation before, but they are now having to be accommodated. It is not only that they are in the private rented sector in a way that they were not before, and are at risk, but that they are disproportionately impacted by harsh decisions that cause them to lose their homes. They face a higher risk and are worst affected.
I do not know whether all Members have experience of this, but any Member of Parliament with a larger private rented sector will be experiencing the consequences and will have traumatised families coming to them with problems who will perhaps be facing eviction and be in distress. That is often for completely trivial reasons or because of circumstances that arise simply out of misunderstandings or the failure of the bureaucratic and social security systems to catch up.
It is the most basic and sensible thing to do to ensure that there is a proper data review and that we make up for the fact that we have spent several decades now trying to understand a system about which we have too little information. The Minister has a chance to put that right.
]]>The Government are missing a recognition that the private rented sector, and moves within it, are not as they were, as we touched on earlier. The profile of renters is now completely different compared with the situation a decade or two ago, so the needs of households need to be accommodated in the management of the sector. There are more families in the sector and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Brighton, Kemptown said, we need to ensure that families with children are given sufficient lead-in time to move their children between schools. For families with two or three children, that can involve finding a way of moving children in primary school and secondary school and between nurseries. These are major logistical tasks.
A large cohort of people who are now in the private rented sector have disabilities. Some people have had to undertake adaptations to their properties, or need adaptations, and that is also true of a proportion of older people. The Government are thinking of young footloose renters who are able to up sticks and move within a couple of weeks.
Section 21 evictions—we argued earlier that this will also be the case with the loopholes in the grounds under the new provisions—are the single largest driver of homelessness. That is acutely true in London, but it is increasingly true in other cities and in some rural areas. One in every 50 Londoners, and one in every 23 children in London schools, are homeless as a consequence of the end of a private tenancy.
The Government also completely fail to understand that the private tenancies that are available to people are not 100% of all private rentals. We heard from Julie Rugg in the evidence session last week, and her excellent study of private rental confirms that we are talking about not a single private rented market but many. The properties available to those on lower incomes, and particularly those who need Government housing support to access them, are a very small proportion of the total available. Shopping around and being able to move within eight weeks is fine if 100% of the properties are available, but they are not.
We hope the Chancellor will make some concessions tomorrow on the critical issue of financial support to low-income renters, but as things stand, in higher-cost areas fewer than one in 20 properties are available to those renters. It is simply unrealistic to expect people on low incomes with access to only a limited proportion of the total rental market, those with higher needs, those who need a particular type of property, and those who need to manage a move to accommodate their caring or childcare responsibilities, to move within eight weeks.
My hon. Friend the Member for Brighton, Kemptown briefly touched on the cost. People need the time and capacity to marshal the resources to fund a move. In many cases, these people are frequent movers, and it is estimated that in the private rented sector the move alone costs an average household £1,500. That is simply not money that people on lower incomes have lying around.
I urge the Minister to bear in mind that we are not talking about an idealised tenancy—a fantasy tenant in a fantasy private rented sector: we are talking about real, complex lives, which will be damaged if they are not afforded proper protection, and there will be consequences for very hard-pressed local authorities. That is one of the big drivers that is tipping some of our local councils into severe crisis. The Minister can do something about that and ensure that the process is more realistic, better managed and in everybody’s interest. I urge him to reconsider.
]]>The second theme is that it does not need all landlords, or even most landlords, to be in this position for such abuses to become a major problem—one that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich alluded to, is already a significant driver of evictions. As we have touched on this morning, we know that a substantial minority of private rented properties are in a very poor condition indeed. We also know that it is disproportionately the most disadvantaged tenants who concentrated in the worst accommodation. When those tenants, already disadvantaged by their lack of power vis-à-vis the landlord, seek to take action against that landlord—even in the simple form of raising a complaint about the conditions in their property—those landlords are particularly likely to take action against them, currently under section 21, and the statistics reinforce that message. Private rented tenants who complain about conditions or disrepair are two and a half times more likely to receive a no-fault eviction order than those who do not.
The trouble with the Government’s proposals for grounds 1 and 1A is that they could simply replicate those loopholes. That is a real worry. As we know, most landlords will not behave in this way. However, without a stronger burden of proof, which falls on the landlords in this case—not the tenants or on already exceptionally overstretched authorities, which have to be called on to take enforcement action—thousands of vulnerable people could be evicted under grounds 1 and 1A, rather than section 21.
I urge the Minister to think very seriously about ensuring stronger safeguards. We already have some experience of this in the Scottish system to draw upon. My hon. Friend’s amendments will close those loopholes and help to ensure that the positive developments from abolishing no-fault eviction are not inadvertently undermined by the weak protections in these clauses.
]]>Regarding court reform, the evidence we heard last week from the Law Society, the Housing Law Practitioners Association and other expert lawyers is that it is simply not a prerequisite for abolishing section 21. I hope the Minister will respond specifically to the evidence we heard that the median time between claim and possession has fallen back to pre-pandemic levels, meaning the courts are performing better than in recent years, so the assertion that they are incapable of dealing with the consequences of the abolition of section 21 is not a valid argument. As Shelter told us, the pressure is overstated, in part because most evictions are concluded with tenants vacating before court proceedings; demands on the courts are therefore not as presented. In addition, many possession cases under section 21 would not be legitimate claims under section 8.
We also heard evidence that court digitisation is, if anything, adding to the delays affecting the civil court system. The speed of transformation, the scale of change and the multiplicity of changes happening simultaneously may place an additional burden on the courts system, rather than facilitating speed over the next couple of years. The National Audit Office and PAC reports made much the same points. I argue that the Bill is being delayed because of a flawed and rushed digitisation processes, and unwillingness to recognise that the civil courts as they stand are perfectly capable of dealing with the consequences of the abolition of section 21.
I hope the Minister will respond specifically to those points. The Opposition are desperately anxious to get on with the abolition of section 21. We want families to have security and stability and the pressure on local authorities of homelessness to be reduced. We do not believe that the arguments advanced by the Government for failing to speed ahead with implementation are valid.
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