Deregulation Bill — House of Lords, 2015-02-11
Topic: Housing
Joan Hanham (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, with my noble friend Lord Tope, I have three amendments down on this matter. To start with, I point out to the House that this is a very small clause with a very large impact. It consists of six subsections, four of which require regulations. As my noble friend said, not only have we not seen any sight of these regulations but, apart from the Written Ministerial Statement that appeared on Monday, we have no clue what direction the Government take on this, other than that it is a complete liberalisation of the situation as it stands My noble friend Lady Gardner laid out in her usual elegant way some of problems with the legislation before us. We have a slightly different view on the emphasis to be placed on this, but we are all agreed—my noble friend Lord Tope, myself, my noble friend Lady Gardner and the local authorities—that this cannot just be allowed to rip. Local authorities have not paid any attention to people letting out their homes for short times. It has been illegal ever since the Greater London Council (General Powers) Act came in in the 1970s but, by and large, there has been a very sensible attitude taken about this—that if it is your home and you can get money in for a fortnight or so, it will not be a matter that a local authority will bother itself with. However, once it is acknowledged or admitted that the situation has been happening but that it is against the law and always has been, somebody does something about it London is different from everywhere else. Although the Written Ministerial Statement says in a rather patronising way that these measures, whatever they are going to be, will draw London into the 21st century, we should all recognise that London has actually been living in the 21st century since the 20th century—or halfway through it. We live with a great deal of problems, not only those which my noble friend described about people who come to live in a property for a short time and cause trouble. Another problem is that a lot of the housing now being built is investment property for rent and, unless there are some controls on who can let out accommodation on a holiday let, all hell will be let loose and there will be rentals all over London taking place in an entirely illegal way. The laws have up to now been broken and there are now companies, some of which my noble friend mentioned, which, unwittingly or not, have enabled people to do that. But a business is building around all this, and there can no longer be any suggestion that this is just people having a one-off whim to go on holiday for a fortnight in New York or whatever and to earn a bit of money on the way. That is not the reality. The reality is that agencies are already set up to deal with people who want to let their houses short term. Some of them will be very good and some will already have measures in place to let houses in a way that means that they are properly managed, they are cleaned up afterwards, they are looked after and their tenants do not cause problems—and there is some security aspect about who those tenants are. However, let us not delude ourselves that that is what will happen. As the business builds, more and more businesses will be built around it. Unless there is some regulation as to what is and is not allowed, we can say goodbye to quite a lot of accommodation that we are pleased to describe as permanent accommodation at the moment My amendments do three things. One says that there must be at the very least a fine-touch registration system with the local authority. It can be done quite easily and uniformly across London, with a website—and I have spoken about the royal borough, to which my noble friend has already referred. It can be done securely on a website. What can be discussed subsequently is whether people have to register before they go away or whether they have to register annually and say that they may be going away and letting their property under those circumstances. It requires some indication as to how many days they will be able to do that for, and the Written Ministerial Statement suggests that it should be 90. I do not know about you, but I am jolly lucky to get 90 days’ holiday a year. It seems to be quite a lot—and I think that most families would find 90 days quite a lot to go away. There will have to be a balance between 30 days, which I think has been promoted, although it is very hard to know as we do not have any regulations before us, and the 90 days being proposed by the Government There must be some way in which the local authority knows that the property may be let by the permanent owner, and it must have some idea of how long they will be entitled to do that—and for a very good reason. If the local authority gets complaints about that property, it is very helpful for it to know, for enforcement action to be taken, that it is being let by the owner. There are plenty of examples. My noble friend could give spiels of examples of where a property has been abused and people’s lives have been made a misery by lettings such as this and longer term. That would bring the planning authority back into the situation. At the moment, it has been completely chucked out. The provision in the Greater London Council (General Powers) Act goes and is amended with a few regulations that we do not know about and have not seen There is what I hope is an unwitting tendency at the moment to keep downgrading London. A later clause in the Bill on waste amends the London Local Authorities Act and this clause amends the Greater London Council (General Powers) Act. London is always going to be different and will always have different pressures and requirements. If every time local authority legislation goes through some of the measures get thrown out, that is not at all helpful or supportive. I think we would all hope that this clause would go away—at least until we have had an opportunity to sort out what the regulations are going to be, and how much regulation, even if it is light-touch regulation, we can put back in. My amendments try to achieve that. It is essential that the Government take note of the concern on this subject and do not try to pretend that London is some doolally maiden of two centuries ago with no idea of how anything works. They must recognise that London is an exceptional place, with great pressure on it from all sorts of sources, such as development, investment and the general movement of people in and out of the city I believe that our amendments are proportionate. I apologise to my noble friend the Minister for the fact that it is me—as well as my noble friend Lady Gardner—who is leading the attack from behind him, but I beg the Government to go back and take note of the concerns of London Councils. I should have declared my position as a co-vice-president of London Councils. It represents every local authority in London and it is absolutely against all these provisions.