Mr Clive Betts
MP for Sheffield South East · Labour · United Kingdom
“I wholeheartedly welcome the Foreign Secretary’s statement, both its content and its tone. I would like to ask about his discussions with our colleagues and allies in other countries who are looking to implement similar sanctions.”
“I offer two congratulations: first, to my right hon. Friend and constituency neighbour, the First Secretary, on her well-deserved promotion—I am sure she will do an excellent job. Secondly, I congratulate her and the Prime Minister for their real commitment to devolution, which I have wanted to see for an awfully long time.”
“I apologise for the fact that—as I have explained to you, Madam Deputy Speaker—I will have to leave straight after my question to chair Westminster Hall. I thank my right hon. Friend for doing this very challenging piece of work. I think that the theme of fairness, for the people who need benefits and for taxpayers, is right.”
“On the other hand, so many constituents with really serious conditions get turned down for PIP, and can get it only if they struggle through the appeal system, sometimes without any help at all. So the system is not fair to anyone at present.”
“When the previous Government let the contract, we were in a situation in which procurement could not properly take account of the past record of companies, and I understand that the Government have now changed that.”
“I will dive very deeply into the question, Madam Deputy Speaker. The Chair of the Committee sends his apologies for his absence; he is presently in a Committee meeting.”
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“I know that the police have their own scrutiny arrangements for local police panels—I do not know whether they are quite the same—but certainly, lots of public services, such as those delivered by the DWP, are very important at local level. They do things that affect the public locally, but there is currently no local oversight. We suggested that they should be put in a similar position to health service bodies and that officials should have to provide information and evidence and be available to appear before scrutiny committees. The Government seem to have missed that out altogether in their response, as though they were a bit uncomfortable about it.”
“Okay. Clearly, I think it is an important issue. Who else is going to oversee the spending and work of the LEPs if not council scrutiny committees? That is very important. There is something that somehow got lost altogether in the Government’s response. Currently, councils have a right to oversee their own activities and the officers who perform them, although they need to do more about commercial companies. There is a very good set of rules for the health service. The service can be scrutinised by local council scrutiny committees and the health service bodies have to provide information. Officers have to come to scrutiny committees and be questioned about that. What about the other important public services? The Department for Work and Pensions provides a lot of services at local level. So do the police.”
“My hon. Friend makes a good point about how councils work. Their challenge is greater than ours here in the House of Commons, where not only do we have independent Select Committees, but even Government Members are a little more removed from Ministers on a daily basis than councillors are from the cabinet members. Councillors are often in the same room with cabinet members, or part of groups that make the decisions for which cabinet members are responsible, in a way that does not happen in the House. It is a bigger challenge, so getting that culture right is key.”
“I thank the Minister for that reassurance. We will get a letter in short order saying that something will happen in the coming months. Could the Minister be more precise about what “the coming months” might mean?”
“I am not sure whether the Minister covered this point. He spoke about the importance of access to information and about considering how that can be improved, but he did not make it clear whether that applies just to information held by councils themselves or to information held by other public bodies, such as the Department for Work and Pensions, the police service and the fire service, just as it already applies to the Department of Health and Social Care and its bodies at local level. Does he accept that scrutiny committees have a right to scrutinise and access information and witnesses from those other public organisations?”
“I thank the Minister for giving way a second time on this point. I hope that, having looked at that and talked to the sector about it, he will write back to the Select Committee with his findings. It is difficult to see where the Department for Work and Pensions has a spotlight shone on it often and effectively at local level. I recognise his point about putting burdens on local government. This is intended to be not a burden but an opportunity, which local authorities may take up if they wish. There would not be a requirement to scrutinise other bodies, but authorities would have the opportunity to do so if they wished.”
“Hopefully the Committee’s report and—eventually—the Government’s collective response can mean not just an improvement in scrutiny, which of itself is not the endgame, but an improvement in the public services that our constituents receive from their local authorities. Question put and agreed to. Resolved , That this House has considered the First Report of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, Effectiveness of local authority overview and scrutiny committees, HC 369, and the Government Response, Cm 9569.”
“I thank the Minister for his response—whether it was positive or not will depend on the outcome of those further consultations. He gave us a general indication that he recognises the important role of scrutiny in local government, which is done well in many councils and not so well in others. Improvement is down to the sector, working with the Centre for Public Scrutiny. We look forward to receiving the guidance, which will be really important, and further information about how LEPs might be more effectively scrutinised. The Minister has clearly got the message about information for scrutiny committees, which is very important, both within the council and hopefully more widely as we look at providing information to other public bodies. We look forward to his coming back to us on that point.”
“Will the consultation on a ban apply to regulations for new buildings and the refurbishment of existing buildings, or does he intend to apply the regulations retrospectively to all existing buildings, so that if the consultation goes in such a direction, combustible materials will be taken off all existing buildings to make people safe?”
“I thank the Secretary of State for his statement. As he knows, the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee is taking evidence from Dame Judith this afternoon. Once we have heard from her and had a chance to read the report in detail, I am sure the Select Committee will want to let him have our comments, and we will pass them on before the deadline of 25 July that he has set for such comments to be received. May I ask about the specific issue of combustible materials used in cladding on high-rise buildings? Shortly after the interim report, the Select Committee called for such materials to be banned. We took up that issue with Dame Judith, and we wrote to the then Secretary of State and other Ministers about it. I welcome the fact that the Secretary of State is now going to consult on banning combustible materials.”
“I wish the Secretary of State all the best in his new role and for his future health. Despite the figures that the Minister has given, the Local Government Association says that there is a £5 billion funding gap in local government finances from 2020, and the National Audit Office says that the position is financially unsustainable. Will he therefore look carefully at the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee’s recommendation about business rate retention? When business rate retention changes from 50% to 75%, instead of using that to cut public health grants and other grants, we say that local authorities should be allowed to keep the extra money so that they can properly meet the rising demand for social care for the elderly, for looked-after children and for people with disabilities.”
“We do not know what that impact will be because the Government have not given us their workings on this, but can the Minister at least give us an indication that he is prepared to look at this again and give us his assessment of the impact on individual authorities? Will he give us an indication that he is prepared to do something about this?”
“I want to return to the issue of the staircase tax, which the Committee looked at when we examined the draft Bill. We were generally content with the objectives and policy goals, but we raised a particular issue to which we have not yet had a satisfactory answer. It relates to the Government’s commitment that local authorities would be compensated for any financial costs incurred due to this measure. That was what the Government said they would do when they announced that they were bringing in this legislation but, since then, all we have had from them is, effectively, a nil. It seems that they are going to do nothing whatever about this, even though they accept that there could be an impact on individual authorities.”
“We accept that the legislation takes the position back to what people thought it was before the court decision. In the meantime, however, we have had the court decision and local authorities will have done their estimates based on that decision, so the Government are effectively changing local authorities’ financial positions from what they thought they would be a few months ago. Given that the Government initially said they were going to compensate local authorities, why have they gone back on that commitment?”
“I thank the hon. Gentleman for the work he did in scrutinising this legislation in my absence, and I agree with the point he is making now. Would it not be a lot more convincing from the Government when they say they are not going to compensate because the likely effect is small overall if they were to release to us their detailed calculations, which presumably they have done, about the impact on individual authorities?”
“Why, at the time, did he not give the House the full facts instead of leading us to believe something that possibly was not true and was corrected only when the NAO produced its report?”
“In the written statement that the Secretary of State made on 20 July, he promised, when cancelling electrification of the midland main line, “a brand new fleet of bi-mode…trains from 2022”. —[ Official Report , 20 July 2017; Vol. 627, c. 72WS.] We seem to have gained a year somehow. The National Audit Office then said in a report from 29 March: “In the case of Midland Main Line, bi-mode trains with the required speed and acceleration did not exist when the Secretary of State made his decision”, and that the Department had informed him of that. I ask the Secretary of State or the Minister why the Secretary of State promised in his written statement to deliver bi-modal trains, which he knew not merely did not exist but had not even been developed. That is the situation.”
“As the private rented sector continues to expand and people remain in the sector for far longer, the Government need to address the clear power imbalance between tenants and landlords, and to ensure that local authorities have the resources they need to enforce the even stronger laws that we are recommending, to protect the most vulnerable tenants living in the worst conditions.”
“Even local authorities that had decided against implementing a scheme felt that the decision should rest at local level. In our view, decisions to implement such schemes should be made locally, where there is greater understanding of local needs and politicians are directly accountable to their electorates. We recommend that the Government remove the 20% cap; however, the Secretary of State should retain a power to require local authorities to reconsider a decision to implement a scheme that does not meet the strict criteria already set out by the Government.”
“In recognition of the particular interests of some Members, we supported the findings of the all-party group on carbon monoxide, which has called for landlords to install carbon monoxide alarms in the rooms of private rented properties that contain any fuel-burning appliance. We also supported the call for the Government to implement mandatory five-yearly checks on electrical installations in private rented property—an issue on which the Government have been consulting. Finally, we looked into selective landlord licensing schemes. Since April 2015, local authorities have had to seek approval from the Government for selective schemes that would cover more than 20% of their area or more than 20% of privately rented homes in it. We heard that decision making was too slow, lacked transparency and was over-bureaucratic.”
“To deal with the worst of the criminal landlords, we call for local authorities to have the power to take action to secure the confiscation of properties from landlords who commit the very worst offences, and to break their business model, which relies on the exploitation of vulnerable tenants. Aside from the adequacy of resources or the severity of penalties, variations in enforcement between councils indicate that some local authorities have placed a higher priority on standards than others. We have called for authorities to publish their enforcement strategies and for a national benchmarking scheme, so that residents can compare enforcement between authorities. Ultimately, we believe that the disparity can be addressed only through political leadership.”
“As part of our inquiry, we went to Newham to look at the enforcement activity there. I saw a garden shed configured to accommodate not one, but two households. We heard of about 25 people being accommodated in a small three-bedroom house. People were living in a walk-in freezer. A family was living in a chipboard construction in a garden, with a fridge and a washing machine powered by a wire from the kitchen. These are shocking conditions, and the fines and civil penalties should be increased. However, the very worst landlords, whose business model relies on the exploitation of vulnerable tenants, can make hundreds of thousands of pounds a year. To them, a civil penalty of £30,000, however large an amount that is, is merely a business expense.”
“The Government have rightly introduced civil penalties of up to £30,000 and allowed local authorities to keep that money, and they brought in rent repayment orders—both were recommendations in the Committee’s previous report. Local authorities need further funding, though, and we hope the Government will work with them to try to achieve that. Concerns were expressed that local authorities could not always cover the full cost of prosecutions, which might deter them from prosecuting some cases. The Minister said that local authorities’ duty was to prosecute regardless, but, being cash-strapped, they will often take the cost into account when they make decisions. We believe that courts should require offenders to pay costs that reflect the actual costs to local authorities of enforcement actions.”
“However, powers can be meaningless if they are not actually used, and a freedom of information request showed that six out of 10 councils had not prosecuted a single landlord in 2016. One council, Newham, was responsible for 50% of all prosecutions across the country—why is that? Clearly, the level of protection being offered to vulnerable tenants in many councils is not adequate. The reasons we heard were: the legislation is over-complicated, as I have mentioned; local authorities have insufficient resources; and some local authorities simply lack the political will. On resources, the Local Government Association has identified a funding gap of £5.8 billion by 2019-20. The Chartered Institute of Housing showed that local authority spending on enforcement has reduced by a fifth over a six-year period.”
“We heard near unanimous support for the Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation and Liability for Housing Standards) Bill introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck). We, too, offer our support for the Bill, but we want to make sure vulnerable tenants at the lower end of the market are able to make use of these powers. We have therefore called for free and easily accessible technical and legal advice to support tenants. As it is likely tenants will seek this advice from local authorities, it is vital that they are suitably resourced to provide this additional service. Most local authorities told us they were satisfied generally with the powers they have.”
“Since then, we have had the Housing and Planning Act 2016, the Consumer Rights Act 2015, the Deregulation Act 2015 and many others, so the situation is even more complicated. Therefore, we recommend again that the Law Commission undertakes a review of the legislation and provides guidance as to whether a new approach would bring more clarity for tenants, landlords and local authorities. We focused on the housing health and safety rating system, and heard that there is a lack of understanding about how it works among landlords and tenants, and inconsistent application by local authorities. We called on the Government to immediately update the guidance on the rating system and eventually to introduce a more straightforward set of quality standards that everyone can understand.”
“We heard that 14% of tenants felt that they had been penalised for complaining, and more than 200,000 reported having been abused, threatened or harassed by a landlord. We found that there is a clear power imbalance, and we called on the Government to consider extending protections which they rightly introduced in the Deregulation Act 2015. We also agree with the Government that a specialist housing court would provide a more accessible route to redress for tenants and urge them to issue more detailed proposals as soon as possible. We looked at the overall legislative framework. The Residential Landlords Association told us there were 140 Acts of Parliament and more than 400 regulations affecting landlords in the sector. Our 2013 report called for that to be consolidated and made simpler.”
“In our online forum, we heard directly from tenants about the poor conditions they had suffered. One submission said: “We live in a house full of mould and damp with four young children…We have …faulty electrics and water comes through the living room window when it rains…the whole family keeps getting ill from it.” We wanted to know about the power relationship between landlords and tenants: are tenants, especially those at the lower end of the market, able to complain and get their problems attended to? Unfortunately, the answer is no. Citizens Advice told us that 44% of tenants said that a fear of eviction would stop them from negotiating with their landlord over disrepair. Shelter and Citizens Advice told us that they often reminded tenants about the risks of making complaints.”
“The private rented sector has doubled in size in the past 15 years. There are now 4.7 million households in the sector, including 1.8 million families with children, which represents 20% of all households. Statistics show that most housing in the sector is adequate, although Shelter told us that 53% of tenants had experienced at least one problem with conditions or repair in the past year. Although the overall proportion of inadequate properties in the sector has fallen, the absolute number has increased, and a significant minority of private rented accommodation continues to be shockingly inadequate. The English housing survey shows that approximately 800,000 private rented homes in England have at least one category 1 hazard, such as excess cold, mould or exposed wiring.”
“I am grateful to you, Mr Speaker, and to the Backbench Business Committee for allowing me time, on behalf of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, to speak to the House today about our fourth report of this Session, which is on the private rented sector. The report concentrated on: the quality of accommodation; the balance of power between tenants and landlords; the legislative framework; and enforcement This Committee last considered the private rented sector in a report in 2013, following which the Government carried forward many of our suggestions, including a reformed approach to selective licensing, the mandatory licensing of houses in multiple occupation and a new regulatory model for letting agents. We hope the Government will take forward many of our recommendations this time, too.”
“That is why we say that we should look again at that particular issue.”
“I absolutely agree. In our previous report—my friend, the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman), was also a member of the Committee at the time—we called for longer-term tenancies and greater certainty and security. We recognise what the Government have done under the Deregulation Act 2015 in terms of protection against retaliatory evictions, but the problem in the current market is that if a tenant does not formally complain in writing to the local authority, and the local authority then does not get enforcement action, there is actually no protection. We also recognise that the new legislation coming in, such as the private Member’s Bill of my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck), could leave the tenant open to retaliatory eviction, and in that legislation there is no protection from it.”
“I thank my hon. Friend for her best wishes. May I also thank her and the hon. Member for Harrow East for the work that they did on the Select Committee while I was off in March? Absolutely. We heard that many landlords do an excellent job. There are some who do not do it quite as well as others, and there are some who are basically criminals—the word “rogue” is used, but they are basically criminals. They are exploiting both the tenant and the taxpayer. In those extreme circumstances, the ultimate power of not merely banning them from operating as a landlord, but taking that property off them, is something we hope the Government will seriously consider.”
“We did not particularly consider that in this report. In our previous report, we said that Shelter had produced a good model, and that we encouraged the sector to look at it. We must make landlords more aware of what is on offer. Sometimes, there is a feeling that some letting agents encourage the delivery of shorter-term tenancies because—guess what?—they make money every time the tenancy is renewed. The Government are dealing with that element in terms of tenants paying those fees, but landlords should get a bit wise to this, because I think many would actually favour longer tenancies. Let us get the information out there and encourage it.”
“That is something we should welcome in terms of public resources—getting in more tax as a result of these schemes.”
“There are two issues there. We have talked about the power imbalance, and action can be taken particularly on retaliatory eviction and retaliatory rent increases to try to rebalance the power. We have also asked the Government to use social media to make more information available to tenants, rather than just using the written form. On licensing, what we are saying is that, essentially, this should be a local decision within the current criteria. I hear landlords say, “It costs us,” but what I say is that the landlords’ concern over selective licensing is not because of the fee that they pay, but because Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs might suddenly realise that they are raking in an income and they might suddenly have to start paying tax on it.”
“I will certainly do everything I can. That was the view of the Committee, and of the House on the Bill’s Second Reading, which I was here for. The Bill has unanimous support, so I hope there will be no obstacles to it. We did identify two issues, however, around making the Bill work. One was to ensure protection from retaliatory eviction when tenants complain—we thought that important—and the second was access to proper legal and technical advice, which many tenants will need to take on their landlord. We also said that a reformed housing court would make such legal approaches by tenants or anyone else much easier to deal with, and asked the Government to give urgent consideration to that as well.”
“Just to give the Secretary of State an example of unequal treatment, is it true that for the new east midlands rail franchise in 2020 the current HST—high-speed trains—carriages will be scrapped, because they are disability non-compliant, and the power cars will then be matched with second-hand, cast-off carriages from the east coast main line? Instead of the brand new, hybrid hydrogen trains that we were promised, we will be getting hybrid trains composed of 30-year-old power cars and 30-year-old discarded carriages from another line.”
“One of the horror stories we heard during evidence was that people were often sent away with a scrap of paper on which there were a few telephone numbers—often out of date—and told, “Go and ring them if you want any help.””
“It tries to put the emphasis on prevention so that there is not the ridiculous situation of people being told to go away and wait until the bailiffs come before they will be considered as homeless. In a case I had recently, people were told to wait until twins were born in a cramped one-bedroom flat before they would be considered homeless. The Act ought to force local authorities to take proper account of such things. People are entitled to a proper plan when they go to see an authority. Their expectations about what they need in respect of their jobs, their caring arrangements and the schooling of their children should be taken account of; in many cases, however, local authorities are simply not able to do that because of the shortage of housing. People who are not entitled to priority rehousing must get proper advice.”
“In 2016, the Communities and Local Government Committee conducted an inquiry into homelessness and addressed many of the issues, including the fact that we do not have a really good take on what homelessness is. It is about rough sleepers, sofa surfing, and people living in overcrowded accommodation and with in-laws. The statistics are not satisfactory. The Government have accepted that we need to do a lot of work in trying to improve them. The Select Committee also did pre-legislative scrutiny on the Homelessness Reduction Bill, as it was then—the first time a Select Committee had done pre-leg scrutiny on a private Member’s Bill. In the end, the Act that came through the House with all-party agreement and great support was significantly helped by that scrutiny. There are challenges. Everyone can see that the Act’s content is really good.”
“Let us at least look at 100% of the receipts being reinvested in social housing, rather than the percentage of the receipts at present, so that we can deliver back not simply one-for-one replacements—even that is not happening—but like-for-like replacements. A family home being sold off and replaced by an upper maisonette really is not good enough for a homeless family with children who need a home with a garden to live in.”
“At least we can have a degree of certainty in the long term if we plan for a major social house building programme, which will continue through recessions. The Government ought to give serious consideration to that. Finally, we have to think about the right to buy in areas of acute housing need. It cannot be right to give people a 70% discount to buy homes that are the only ones available for people in acute housing need and people who become homeless. Surely we need a review of the effectiveness of public spending, because that simply cannot be right. Let us have a look at the discount in areas of acute housing need or at the possibility of suspending the right to buy for a period, with local support.”
“That is the reality. I welcome the Government giving a £1 billion lift to local authorities by raising the housing cap, but as the Treasury Committee has argued, we need to abolish that cap altogether, and the Government need to sit down with the Local Government Association and look at how we can start delivering social housing that people can afford. What is needed in this country is a major programme. That is needed for the people who cannot afford to buy and cannot afford rents in the private sector, and it is needed to hit the 300,000 target. We will not hit it any other way. The other great advantage of social house building of that scale is that it is counter-cyclical. We all know that building by private developers will go up and down with the market.”
“It will not encourage the provision of supported housing or allow existing housing to be maintained. St Mungo’s, the Salvation Army, Home Group and the YMCA have all given evidence to the Government and to my Select Committee to say that that needs to be revisited if we are going to have a proper service and system. This should not be simply about trying to address the issues of people who become homeless. That is really important. Why have we got a problem? In the end, it is because we have a shortage of housing in this country. I know that the Government have an ambitious target, which I share, to get us to a point where we are building 300,000 new homes a year in this country. However, we are not going to build those new homes unless a very high percentage are built by local authorities and housing associations with Government support.”
“There needs to be an analysis of the effectiveness of constraining local housing allowance and what impact that has on extra spending down the line by local authorities on dealing with the consequences of increased homelessness. That analysis needs to be done if Government are going to justify that position. Something needs to be done urgently. Another problem is that many homeless people, including single people or people in temporary accommodation, are offered supported housing at some stage. All the evidence, from St Mungo’s and others, has been that the Government’s current proposal of grants being given to local authorities—albeit on a ring-fenced basis initially—to deal with supported housing of less than two years’ duration, which generally applies to people who are homeless, is not going to work.”
“As it stands, the Homelessness Reduction Act is likely to reduce not homelessness but its growth. As the NAO report on the estimates highlights, the big growth in homelessness and in the percentage of people presenting as homeless and being accepted is because of section 21 notices being served in the private rented sector and people not being able to afford the rent in that sector, as local housing allowance does not keep pace with rent increases. That is the situation, and it seems that the Department for Work and Pensions and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, as it is now called, simply have not got their act joined up.”
“It is single people in that situation—women as well as men. We had evidence from both at our Select Committee inquiry. They are not entitled to priority rehousing from the local authority, but they are entitled to advice, although they were not getting it in all too many cases. The Government have given an extra sum, between £60 million and £70 million, to help the implementation of the 2017 Act. I do not think that anyone in local government thinks that sufficient. I hope that the Government are open-minded about the issue: it was emphasised over and over again, on a cross-party basis, both by the Select Committee and the Bill Committee, that the money will have to be looked at again. The Act must not fail because of a lack of resources for local authorities to implement it.”
“Will the Secretary of State reflect on the issue of the transitional grant? It may be important to some authorities, but will he confirm the figures Sheffield City Council has given me showing that the authorities that have had the biggest cuts to their core spending—cuts of over 30%—have between them benefited in this financial year to the tune of £10,000? That is the total figure for the authorities that have had the biggest cuts in grant over the past few years.”
“The Local Government Association has calculated that there will be a £2.3 billion gap in social care funding by 2020, having taken account of the 2017 Budget increases, and there are similar figures from the King’s Fund. The National Audit Office did a report for the Communities and Local Government Committee looking at these figures and basically confirmed their accuracy. There is a real problem here that cannot be disguised and that will not go away without extra funding being delivered.”