Andy Slaughter
MP for Hammersmith and Chiswick · Labour · United Kingdom
“I welcome the Bill, and thank the Government for introducing it and bringing it back to the House before the summer recess. It is the result of years of committed campaigning, led by the families of the victims and survivors of Hillsborough.”
“I know that case means a huge amount to the hon. Lady as a constituency MP, and I thank her for all the work she does on the Justice Committee. I think we have only begun to scratch the surface. This Bill will be a transforming piece of legislation. I will make one final comment.”
“This would be a new, independent public body that collated, analysed and followed up on the conclusions and recommendations made after official investigations into deaths and state failings, in order to improve oversight and implementation of them.”
“I think I have taken enough time, but I thank the Member for that intervention. This afternoon, the Justice Committee signed off a new major report on legal aid, which will be published on Friday. Those who are interested can read more there.”
“In the time that I have, I will focus my remarks on clauses 1 to 16, which create a new appeals body for immigration and asylum cases known as the independent immigration appeals authority.”
“From that visit, our diagnosis was that these are operational problems. There are two key questions for the House: will the IIAA fix the problems with the current system, and will it be truly independent from the Home Office?”
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“Let me begin by saying that it was indeed a pleasure to serve on the Bill Committee, not least because of its brevity. I think that the Minister alluded to that when she described it as a small Bill. It is a small Bill, but I am afraid it is also a rather inadequate and unsatisfactory Bill. I am not going to repeat the excellent speech made by my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford East (Imran Hussain), but he was absolutely right to say that there were no adequate safeguards, and that the nature of the delegation of functions has not been specified sufficiently for us to feel certain that we can support it. As my hon. Friend observed, the most disappointing aspect of the Bill is that it represents just the shards, or the remains, of the legislation on this subject that we were promised.”
“The date of 21 January is a long way in the future, particularly for those EU citizens whose lives are on hold and who are struck with uncertainty. The Minister said that he thought that the vote could be brought back a lot earlier than that. Could we hear a bit more of the Minister’s thoughts? Given that there are more than four sitting weeks until 21 January, why can we not have this vote before we break for the Christmas recess?”
“Dragging the decision on the Prime Minister’s deal into the new year for what looks like tactical advantage is unfair on everyone, but it is particularly unfair on businesses trying to plan for their future and for EU citizens who want to know their rights. Will she at least promise to bring the vote before the Christmas recess?”
“The Government have, in the middle of the debate, pulled the most important business this House has debated for a very long time. That is extraordinary. More extraordinary is the fact that the Leader of the House has given no indication about when the debate will be resumed. “As soon as possible” is not good enough when the futures of millions of people in this country, particularly EU nationals, depend on it. If she will not give us a day or a week, will she give us a month when the debate will take place?”
“Like his predecessors, the Secretary of State is kept in the dark about a lot, but he must know when he was first told that tomorrow’s vote was off. We know that it was not yesterday, when he said the vote would be on Tuesday. Did he know it was off when at 11.07 this morning the Prime Minister’s spokesman said that it was definitely on? Or did he know only when the conference call with the Cabinet happened at 11.30?”
“My hon. Friend is right that most landlords are responsible, but that is not really the point. The point is that the 1988 Act, and section 21 in particular, allowed housing to become a commodity. Landlords can simply treat it as an asset to be traded and sold to increase their profits or income. Housing has no structure as a home under that Act. That is the basic flaw.”
“The major trauma, of course, is for the tenants being evicted, but there is also an impact on local authorities, because if a landlord is using the section 21 process—often the notices are served at the beginning of the tenancy as protective notices—they are simply using it as a way of regulating their business, knowing that if the tenant is in priority need, they will be picked up in some way by the local authority, which obviously puts additional costs on the taxpayer.”
“To add to that interesting argument, section 21 has been abolished in Scotland, which is a different jurisdiction and a different housing market, and has been replaced by a regime in which there are mandatory and discretionary grounds for possession. As I understand it, the objections from many landlords are about the complexity and the expense of the court process as much as anything. It is quite a difficult argument to put forward—although I am sure that the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk) would do it well—that it is simply too difficult for landlords and it should be unrestricted for that reason.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone, more than ever when we have the luxury of time—such a rare event in this place.”
“That means that many families now have no expectation of ever getting a social tenancy. They are therefore at the mercy of a private landlord who may evict them. If they are still in priority need, they will go back to the local authority and ask to be rehoused. Due to benefit cuts and caps, that may be impossible in that area, and they may be moved a long way away. In any case, the process of recycling tenancies and moving on will occur on a regular basis.”
“I am not saying that having no security of tenure is good for anyone, but when, predominantly, those in private tenancies were those who would have chosen short-term rents—perhaps students or people waiting to buy properties—it was clearly less traumatic to be asked by a landlord to leave in a set period than it is for a family who want to stay and live in that area. Increasingly, it is families who are occupying private rented accommodation. What has also changed is where someone then goes. One of the worst things that the coalition Government did—I apologise to my Lib Dem friend over there, the hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse), but we have to remember the Liberal Democrats’ complicity in all these matters at all times—was to introduce a duty to permanently discharge into the private sector those in housing need.”
“Interestingly, there has been a decline in owner-occupation from 57% to 48% and in social rent from 29% to 22% over that period. For my borough of Hammersmith, the situation is different again. Again, the most recent figures I can get are census figures from 2011, but I am not sure things have changed much since then. A third of properties are private rented, a third are owner-occupied and a third are social tenancies. There has been a significant decline in owner-occupation and a significant increase in private rented from 23% to 32% over that 20-year period. That is a massive change in how the housing market operates. I suspect therefore that the sort of people who become private tenants now are different, too.”
“The balance had always been that way to some extent, but then it became massively so. One reason that was not noticed was that the private sector had got itself a bad name, partly for the conditions, but partly because it was no longer seen as desirable as compared with owner-occupation or a social tenancy with a council or a housing association. In 1988, 9% of homes were in the private rented sector in England. That has more than doubled to 20%. That is mainly accounted for by a decline in social tenancies across England. If one looks at London specifically, it is even more dramatic. The best figures I have are census figures. In 1991, 14% of homes were privately rented, and that is now 30%. Again, it has more than doubled.”
“It is very few now, obviously, because we are 30 years on, but it is usually about landlords trying to get rid of them to maximise the value of the property for sale or rent. The majority of our casework will be for social tenants or private sector tenants who are living in poor conditions or are subject to eviction because they have no security, but it is always interesting to look at the cases of protected tenants. It puzzles me why we did not notice the fundamental change that the 1988 Act made to the way the housing market operated. One reason, which my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North alluded to, is that the private rented market was very different 30 years ago. I suspect that the Government knew what they were doing in legislating to shift the balance of power wholly in favour of landlords.”
“The irony is that the rights of social tenants have been substantially weakened under Conservative Governments, both in terms of so-called affordable rents, which generally are not affordable, and in terms of the end of lifetime tenancies or fixed-term tenancies. Actually, social tenancies have gravitated towards that lack of security and affordability at the same time as they have declined as part of the housing sector. I make those observations not to suggest that we simply repeal the 1988 Act and go back to the pre-Act regime, but to point out that it is within living memory —it is within my memory of my time as an elected representative—that that was the norm. Indeed, I am sure that other Members will still have protected tenants coming to them.”
“So how can you recognise when a property is being sold with a protected tenant? Here are three tips for recognising protected tenancies. 1. The property is being sold for a low price…2. No tenancy agreement is available…3. Check the Valuation Office rent register” to see whether a fair rent has been registered. What could be worse than for a landlord to end up with a tenant who has protected rights? That was the norm, however, prior to the 1988 Act. Most tenants would have rights of that kind: rights of succession, rights to a fair rent and rights to be shown cause before eviction took place. In many ways, a private sector tenancy had more in common with a social tenancy than with an assured shorthold tenancy now.”
“Not unless you are able to provide another property for them to live in. And even then, only if it is considered ‘suitable’…The main effects of this are…The tenant can register a ‘fair rent’ which is then the only rent the landlord is allowed to charge…The tenant can normally only be evicted if he is in arrears of rent (sometimes) or if the landlord is able to provide ‘suitable alternative accommodation’, and”— shock horror!— “If the tenant has a spouse or family member living with them at the time of their death, they will inherit either another protected tenancy (if they are a spouse) or an assured tenancy (which also has long term security of tenure!) The effect of all this is that you are stuck with a tenant who you cannot evict and who is usually entitled to pay a rent which is considerably lower than the market rent you could have charged had the property been an AST.”
“That was the case for decades before, but many would have been protected tenancies under the Rent Act 1977. The first thing that came up when I googled “protected tenancies” was the Landlord Law Blog. I read from it not to be sarcastic—perish the thought—but because it gives insight into how landlords view assured shorthold tenancies. The post is titled, “Three ways to recognise a protected tenancy under the Rent Act 1977 (And avoid buying a property with a tenant you can’t evict)”. It states: “If you work in property, particularly if you are an investor, it is important that you are able to recognise a protected tenancy when you see one. Why? Because protected tenants have long term security of tenure. This means that you will not normally be able to evict them if you want vacant possession.”
“I became a councillor in 1986 before the Act came into effect, and that was probably when I first started to get involved in tenancy matters and tenants’ rights, but it was probably not until I became a housing law practitioner from 1993 onwards that I fully understood just how dramatic a change had been wrought on the private rented market. It was quite an audacious piece of legislation. That was appreciated by practitioners and experts—there was quite a lot of fuss about the 1988 Act at the time—but it probably did not register so much with politicians or tenants, although it possibly did with landlords, just what a change we had made. Perhaps the best way I can illustrate that change is from what I found by googling “protected tenancies”. Most tenancies before the 1988 Act would have been some form of regulated tenancy.”
“Exploitation of tenants for financial reasons has certainly been very much on the increase with house price rises, but he correctly points out that that is a problem across the country. In some ways, we are lucky in London, in that properties tend to be valued and perhaps kept in a better state of repair. What one does not tend to see now, because the properties are such valuable commodities, is whole areas that have fallen into disuse. On 15 January next year—just over a month’s time—it will be 30 years since the Housing Act 1988 came into effect. Assured shorthold tenancies are now, as was anticipated under the Act, the major form of tenancy in the private sector. That is not something we need to celebrate.”
“Settle down, everyone. I do not need to speak for very long, because my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) has done the heavy lifting for us by clearly setting out why section 21 should be banished. She has even persuaded Members from the Government Benches; let us hope that she has persuaded the Minister. I am sure that we will listen carefully to what the Minister has to say on this issue, having heard those arguments. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Easington (Grahame Morris) for his speech, because the property market in his constituency is very different from that which we experience in London. Quite rightly, a lot of attention is focused on London because it is a hothouse of a market.”
“My hon. Friend is right. It is almost tormenting people, and these are the people in a preferential situation—in temporary accommodation rather than permanently discharged to the private rented sector. They may have been waiting 10 years, and just as they are getting ready to receive their one offer of accommodation—”
“Friend the Member for Westminster North—the Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation) Bill—is necessary to give tenants that power, because often local authorities are no longer able to take such action.”
“I do not want to paint a rosy picture of the world in the 1980s. I remember some dreadful, terrible private-sector accommodation then, but at least there was sometimes redress. When local authorities were better resourced, there were housing action areas, so we could go mob-handed, if I can put it that way, into a particular ward with environmental health officers and housing advisers. Also, legal aid was still available—actually, they were quite good days now I come to think about it. If private landlords took the mickey in terms of the conditions their tenants were in or the way in which they treated their tenants, enforcement action could be taken. How different the situation is now, as evidenced by the fact that the Bill introduced by my hon.”
“Having decided that they did not want to build any more affordable homes—indeed, they started selling off and demolishing the ones that we had—there was obviously a difficulty in rehousing people, so the waiting list and the locator scheme were abolished. Suddenly, 10,000 people were no longer in line to be accommodated at all. Once the borough came to its senses and returned to Labour control, the list was opened again, but what happened created a hiatus of several years in people’s lives that they will never recover. In addition to the long waiting periods that people face in any event, they were not on a waiting list of any kind during perhaps the prime years when their children were growing up and going to secondary school. Again, many of them are languishing in over- crowded accommodation or unsuitable private rented accommodation.”
“Yes, take it or leave it. At that point, one of the children turns 18 and is not in full-time education. Suddenly the family is either told, “You can have a two-bedroom flat rather than the three of four-bedroom property that you need,” or, “Sorry—you’re not in priority need at all any more.” It is extraordinary that whole generations have had to grow up in wholly inadequate housing and temporary accommodation. My hon. Friend has tempted me to digress, so I will give just one example. Many boroughs and housing associations use the locator scheme, which is the bidding scheme. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it does not, but something extraordinary happened in my borough. When the Conservatives took control of the council—I am pleased to say only temporarily—they simply abolished the waiting list.”
“Without the benefit of legal aid and legal advice, it is difficult to expect the tenant to know the process, but often the landlord does not either and it is, in fact, defective. However, it is an indictment of the way in which the housing market runs if we are reliant on catching landlords out on such procedural matters to give people security.”
“Systematically, over many years, they indicated all the areas of housing law where practice was changing and precedents were being set in the higher and lower courts. A whole industry developed around section 21 notices, which are actually quite difficult to get right. Landlords who think that they can do it themselves often get them wrong. Although they cannot be challenged on the basis that it is a no-fault eviction—the tenant has been a model tenant, and all the other things that we have heard—they can be challenged if they have got it wrong procedurally. Often they have, but it does not get found out. That should be spotted, frankly, by the judge, even if they are looking at the case on paper—the accelerated procedure for section 21 notices means that often such matters are not heard in court at all.”
“My hon. Friend is right. We tend, rightly, to focus on bad landlords. I think we all agree that they are a minority, but there is some shocking practice out there. That is nothing new—some of us can still remember the age of Hoogstraten and Rachman. However, I do not think that that is what the debate is primarily about. As I said in my intervention, it is about changing the climate in the private rented sector for good and bad landlords. It is about changing the way in which the private rented sector operates, which is long overdue. I am often asked to act both for landlords and for tenants in relation to assured shorthold tenancies. A whole industry grew up, partly fuelled by the excellent housing columns in the magazine Legal Action by their honours Nic Madge, who recently retired, and Jan Luba, who is still a sitting judge.”
“Friend is right that the advice should always be to stay put, to try to get what legal advice is available and to talk to the local authority housing adviser, one thing that the landlord will say is, “If you don’t go now, there will be costs when, at the end of the two-month period, I issue proceedings, or after that when I issue the bailiff notice, and you’ll have to pay them. It will be several hundred pounds at least, and if you challenge, or attempt to challenge, the action it could be more than that.””
“I know that my hon. Friend is, like me, a great rooter around inside plastic carrier bags when they are brought into her surgery. Often one can find, among many other papers, half a dozen possession notices. Social landlords are better at this—or worse, depending on how one looks at the matter—because they often rather lazily issue notices seeking possession with no intention of pursuing them, the only purpose perhaps being to terrify the tenant. However, private landlords do it as well. They will issue section 21 notices like confetti, either as protective notices, or to try to scare the tenant off or something of that kind. Although my hon.”
“There is a fourfold or fivefold discrepancy in rent levels and landlords are being tempted to increase their income substantially simply by evicting tenants and replacing them with others. Alternatively, they may be thinking, “I don’t want to make more of a profit than I make already, but with benefit caps and restrictions on the rent that the tenant can pay”—given London rents, tenants will inevitably be partially reliant on housing benefit, even if they are working full-time—“I cannot afford to rent to them any more, so I’m evicting them.””
“Only the other day, we were talking about the difficulty of building affordable homes. I am proud to say that my local authority is now building 1,500 new affordable homes, rather than knocking them down as it did when it was Conservative. However, the rent for a new social rented home is about 20% of the market rate, which means that building it requires a huge subsidy, which is very difficult to obtain. [ Interruption. ] I can hear the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk) tutting, but he knows that that will just encourage me. In 2010, all the support for subsidy for social rented homes was removed, so it is no wonder that there has been a huge decline in availability and more reliance on the private rented sector.”
“My council acts as responsibly as it can to try to keep families together and ensure that people are rehoused in the borough or as close to it as possible, but as we all know, schooling, employment, support networks and caring responsibilities are all disrupted by the process—that is very common now. I hope that nobody here has experienced eviction at first hand, but I am sure we have all met many constituents who have. It is one of the most traumatic things that someone can go through. The humiliation, the cost, the uncertainty, the rejection—the whole process is just appalling, and it is now accelerating as a consequence of simple greed or commercial practice. Unfortunately, with the growth of buy-to-let and temptation in the private rented market, rents are escalating at a huge rate.”
“What my hon. Friend says is absolutely true: tenants are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. If they leave too early, they can be criticised by the local authority; if they leave too late, apart from the cost risk, they may find that time has literally run out. Increasingly, tenants are coming to me and saying that they have been evicted and lost their belongings, which were in the property after the bailiffs arrived, and that they and their children are sleeping on somebody’s floor, sofa-surfing or in wholly inadequate hostel accommodation and being moved on night by night.”
“I thought I was making one of my most conciliatory speeches in the past 13 years. I am sure that when the hon. Member for Cheltenham hears from our Front Bench, a lot more of the Rottweiler tendency will be on show.”
“There is a willingness to look at the issue again and to effect change, whether through rent-to-buy schemes, which are a big part of the Mayor of London’s platform, through longer-term tenancies or through wholesale reform, as has happened in other jurisdictions within the United Kingdom—Scotland is the example that we have used. Labour party policy has moved on beneficially, not least since I was sacked as shadow Minister last year and somebody far more radical and impressive has taken over.”
“In a moment. I should not look a gift horse in the mouth, because the hon. Member for Cheltenham has come here to be conciliatory and supportive, so I will move on. Although I regard Labour Governments as scrupulously honest, fair and absolutely on the ball in many respects, I agree that there are one or two aspects of housing that past Labour Governments have not got 100% right. Shall we leave it at that? [Sir Graham Brady in the Chair ] I think there is now a realisation that things have shifted too far in one direction.”
“Whatever the merits or demerits of the 1988 Act, it is time we took another comprehensive look at housing legislation and redressed some of the obvious unfairness in the private rented sector.”
“We will hear from the new shadow Minister in a moment, but I hope she will not take it amiss if I say that I am particularly looking forward to hearing what the Minister has to say and finding out how far policy has moved on within the Government—not just on the rabble-rousing Conservative Back Benches where the hon. Member for Cheltenham sits with the radical, provisional wing of the Conservative party. Can the Minister give us some indication that the issues of balance and no-fault eviction are understood? May we look forward to some beneficial changes that give security to families, particularly in high rent areas, but also—as we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Easington—across the country? Those changes are long overdue.”
“The Minister highlights important and hard-won preconditions for taking eviction proceedings, but that does not alter the fact that, in the generality of cases, we are talking about no-fault evictions. Opposition Members are anxious to hear what the Government will do about no-fault evictions. Do they still maintain that that is the right general approach or do they think that its day has come to be removed?”
“I am sure the Minister is sincere in her intention. My experience is that there is increasing delay. Part of that is caused by inexperience, perhaps because of the use of lay magistrates as opposed to district judges, who do not take command of the issue and do not timetable matters correctly. I am concerned about any decline in the level of experience. This is perhaps a question not of legal qualification but of experience in being able to manage and seize control of cases. I would rather see the greater control and scrutiny that the amendments would introduce.”
“Given the Government’s view, which I know the Minister shares, that Israeli settlements are illegal under international law, why do the Government allow the import of goods from those settlements and investment by British companies?”
“I realise that it is asking a lot for the Prime Minister to look as far ahead as January in all this chaos, but if, as seems likely, she has to put her deal to a second vote and loses that as well, what happens then? Will she have to step down? Will she seek a general election? Or is that the time, finally, to give the people a choice between her deal and staying in the EU, to see which they prefer?”
“If the Prime Minister is so proud of this document and the withdrawal agreement and believes that it is what people voted for, why does she not seek to strengthen her really terribly weak negotiating hand by putting it to a people’s vote, along with the alternative of staying in the EU? And before she gives another glib answer about this being what politicians want, I should say that almost 3,000 of my constituents have written to me with their concerns about Brexit. They deserve the courtesy of a proper answer.”
“All those points are made again and again with increasing frustration by teachers, parents, governors and headteachers. This is also happening against the backdrop of an underfunded salaries budget. In conclusion, I simply say to the Minister that of course there are good things going on in education, and I am sure that he and his colleagues are committed to education, but unless they actually identify the real and genuine lack of resources in our schools, they will never improve standards and they will never turn the corner in a way that I hope all of us here would like.”
“The cancellation of Building Schools for the Future means that redundant old buildings that are not fit for teaching in are still just about standing up, while brand-new schools, which have been built alongside them, are half empty. How is that sensible planning in the education system? We have talked about fair funding a lot. I am not here to try to take money from other parts of the country, but inner London increasingly gets the worst deal. The Minister will say, “Yes, but historically there has been a higher level of funding in that area.” There are reasons for that—it is because of mobility, because of English being spoken as a second language and because of the real need that does not occur elsewhere except perhaps in other inner-city areas.”
“Post-16 education is another area under threat—I have been a governor of the excellent William Morris Sixth Form for the past 25 years, in fact since it was set up. It has had to cut back on staffing in a way that it has never had to do before. These are incredibly difficult decisions to make. In addition, we have a lack of planning for places. We still have the temporary classrooms that were put up a few years ago for bulge classes. At the same time, because we became the free school capital of the country, we have primary schools that are half empty. This may make me slightly unpopular with my own party, but I have never minded the investment in capital that we have seen—but at what cost?”
“What that will mean is that schools such as Burlington Danes, which has 56% on free school meals, will face a loss of £614 per pupil over that time; Hammersmith Academy, with 60% on free school meals, will face a loss of £644 per pupil; and Phoenix High School, which, with 67% on free school meals, has the most deprived intake of any school in London—probably in the country—will face a loss of £834 per pupil over that five-year period. Those are really unsustainable figures. In addition to the pure numbers, there are particular losses in particular areas, as we have heard today in relation to early years provision. In nursery schools—yes, we still have some nursery schools in Hammersmith—budgets are under threat.”
“Nevertheless, not only at the school gates but when I was knocking on doors, the anger over school funding was something that I have not experienced in 35 years of being active in local politics. Only today, I replied to a headteacher to address some of these points. Let me identify two or three issues from that letter. One, obviously, is the issue of cuts per se. Each one of the 30 schools in my constituency will be losing money over the period 2015 to 2020 because of the disparity that we have heard about this evening between funding and costs.”