Housing and Planning Bill — House of Lords, 2016-03-01
Topic: Housing
Natalie Evans (Conservative, Centre-right): I will go through the process, which contains checks and balances which will ensure that a tenant has genuinely abandoned the property. The landlord can recover a property only where warning notices have been served on the tenant, with a copy of the first and second warning notice sent care of any guarantor. The first warning notice could not in practice be served unless there were at least four consecutive weeks’ rent unpaid. The second warning notice can be served only when at least eight consecutive weeks’ rent is unpaid. It must be given at least two weeks and no more than four weeks after the first warning notice. Each warning notice must state that the landlord believes the premises to have been abandoned, that the tenant or named occupier must respond in writing—which could be by email—before a specified date, which must be at least eight weeks after the first warning notice is given, if the premises have not been abandoned, and that the landlord proposes to bring the tenancy to an end if neither the tenant nor a named occupier responds in writing before that date Following service of the second warning notice, where the tenant has failed to respond, the landlord must then put a third and final notice on the door of the property at least five days before the end of the warning period. That notice must state that unless the tenant or the named occupier responds in writing within five days—as I said, that could include email—the landlord will bring the tenancy to an end and repossess the property. The Secretary of State will prescribe the content of the final warning notice. This requirement was added in Committee in the other place to add a further safeguard to the process. Finally, if a tenancy has been brought to an end using the abandonment procedure, where a tenant had a good reason for failing to respond to the warning notices, they may apply to the county court for an order reinstating the tenancy I hope from this explanation that it is clear that landlords will continue to have to go through a lengthy and detailed process before they can regard a property as being abandoned. In addition to a requirement that at least eight consecutive weeks’ rent remains unpaid, they must serve a series of warning notices on a tenant and, when applicable, any other named occupiers. We believe that it would be an unnecessary burden on local authorities to impose an additional requirement that a local housing authority must also confirm that a property has in its view been abandoned. It may be difficult to determine whether this is the case or not, and requiring it to do so could place it in a difficult position. It would also be likely to introduce further substantial delay into the process of recovering an abandoned property, depriving the landlord of income and a family of the chance to occupy a property sitting empty It is already effectively the case that in the Bill the minimum period before a landlord can recover an abandoned property would be 12 weeks, as I have outlined. The clauses are carefully drafted but complex and, subject to Royal Assent, the department will issue guidance to landlords to help them to understand the new process. Amendments 35 and 36 would also replace the current provision in Clause 57, which specifies that a second warning notice must be served at least two weeks and no more than four weeks after service of the first warning notice. We have sought to strike the right balance between ensuring that tenants are given adequate notice, that the landlord believes that the property may have been abandoned, and to respond if they have not, in fact, abandoned the property, while also ensuring that landlords do not have to wait an unreasonable amount of time before being able to recover the property. Requiring that the second warning notice is served at least four weeks and no more than eight weeks after service of the first warning notice would add further delay and deprive the landlord of an income and another family of the chance to occupy the property when it is sitting empty.