Jerome Mayhew MP: speeches

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Speeches

31 Oct 2024 · Renters' Rights Bill (Fifth sitting) · Hansard source
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The Minister made reference to the burden of proof under the clause being the civil burden, and compared that to the Equality Act. I just had a quick look at that Act—I stand to be corrected because it was a very brief look—and the burden under that Act appears to be a civil burden and also one where the maxim res ipsa loquitur can be applied. If that is the case, what is the difference between the burden of proof in this clause and that of the Equality Act?
31 Oct 2024 · Renters' Rights Bill (Fifth sitting) · Hansard source
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The Minister identified other legislation that already make discrimination illegal, and went on to make the point that proving discrimination is very difficult, so my question is twofold. First, if we have already outlawed that kind of behaviour, why do we need further legislation to do exactly the same thing? Secondly, if we do require further legislation, how is the evidential burden going to be passed more easily under this clause than has been the experience under previous provisions?
31 Oct 2024 · Renters' Rights Bill (Fifth sitting) · Hansard source
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The Minister will be aware that, although there is a civil burden of proof under English and Welsh law, the level to which the courts hold that burden of proof varies substantially, depending on the nature of the tariff or the consequence of that finding. Given that councillors will be seeking to impose what looks quite like a criminal fine under clause 39—a fine of many thousands of pounds—is it the Minister’s understanding that, although the burden of proof required is civil, it will be a high hurdle when applied by the courts?
31 Oct 2024 · Renters' Rights Bill (Fifth sitting) · Hansard source
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rose—
29 Oct 2024 · Renters' Rights Bill (Fourth sitting) · Hansard source
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I am grateful—I am not intervening for the sake of it; there is an important point here. The Minister says that it would be unfair on the tenant to have a significant increase in rent and a backlog after the determination of the tribunal, but that is rent that ought properly to have belonged to the landlord and has been unjustifiably denied them for the period of the process. Why is it fair for the landlord to be denied a just rent as a result of the delay in the process, yet it is for some reason not fair for the tenant?
29 Oct 2024 · Renters' Rights Bill (Fourth sitting) · Hansard source
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The Minister is quite right; I am a believer in the free market and I am sure the market will respond. Does he have an indication from his discussions with the insurance industry of the kind of price and the surcharge that will be required to fit the need?
29 Oct 2024 · Renters' Rights Bill (Fourth sitting) · Hansard source
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I understand that the Government’s intention is that tenants should not go to the tribunal unless they are clear that the asked-for rent is too high, but what prevents them from gaming the system, as we discussed?
29 Oct 2024 · Renters' Rights Bill (Fourth sitting) · Hansard source
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Will the Minister give way?
29 Oct 2024 · Renters' Rights Bill (Fourth sitting) · Hansard source
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We are talking about perverse incentives here. One way to tackle that would be through a costs regime associated with the tribunal. Is it my hon. Friend’s understanding that the current intention is that there would be no adverse costs orders awarded against a tenant, should they go through a tribunal process and not be successful in reducing the level of rent?
24 Oct 2024 · Fakenham Swimming Pool · Hansard source
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Fakenham needs a swimming pool. I rise to present this petition on the Fakenham swimming pool, with reference to a similar online petition that has gained more than 1,250 signatures. The petition states: The petition of residents of the constituency of Broadland and Fakenham, Declares that local people in the Broadland and Fakenham constituency require access to adequate facilities to conduct regular exercise; further declares that since the closure of the swimming pool in Fakenham there has been limited facilities in the area; and notes that the Treasury has been instructed to review the £9.9 million previously committed to fund a new swimming pool. The petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urges the Government to consider the resource needs of the new swimming pool and 3G sports pitch in Fakenham, Norfolk, whilst undertaking its funding review, and to retain the funding previously committed. And the petitioners remain, etc. [P003014]
23 Oct 2024 · Promoting Business and Growth · Hansard source
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11. What steps his Department is taking to help grow the Northern Ireland economy.
23 Oct 2024 · Promoting Business and Growth · Hansard source
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It is all very well talking about an industrial strategy, but economists agree that increasing national insurance contributions for employers reduces profits, reduces pay and leads to fewer jobs. Does the Minister agree that if the Government decide to raise taxes, perhaps to fund union pay rises, then employer national insurance contributions would be the last tax to choose if they want to support Northern Ireland’s economy?
22 Oct 2024 · Renters' Rights Bill (First sitting) · Hansard source
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Q Can I bring you back to your opening statement? You said that there were likely unintended consequences from the Bill in its current form, and that one of those unintended consequences would be an increase in homelessness. Could you expand on why you said that? Theresa Wallace: There are various reasons. We need the private landlord at the moment, no matter what his property is like—a lot of them are in very good condition. Private landlords are very scared about this Bill and a lot of them are exiting. I know some of you might think that there are other places those properties can go, but we need them in the PRS—the tenants need them. We want to keep those landlords. We have institutional investment, but that is a very small percentage—I think it is 2% or 3%—for build-to-rent. Unfortunately, the build-to-rent model does not work financially in the places we need those properties, because of the way their financial model works and margins.
22 Oct 2024 · Renters' Rights Bill (First sitting) · Hansard source
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Q Welcome, and thank you very much for attending today. To kick proceedings off, I am interested in hearing your first impressions of the Bill in respect of whether you think there should be a balance between landlords and tenants and whether the current drafting gets that balance right. I would be grateful if you could identify any differences in opinion between professional landlords and those who are sometimes described as accidental landlords—amateur landlords with one or two buy-to-let properties, perhaps for a pension. Theresa Wallace: I think the Bill has the best intentions, and we support a lot of its changes. However, I believe that as it is currently written there will be unintended consequences, one of which would be more homelessness. It needs some changes. We know that section 21 is going, but we have to accept that it will not solve the issues in the PRS. We have—the English housing survey has quoted this—more than one million tenants in the PRS in receipt of benefit for housing. The majority of those should really be in social housing. If we had those social homes, we would not have the current supply/demand pressures and rent pressures, and we would not have properties lower down in the market that are unfit for purpose and damp and that should not be there in the first place. One of our problems is that a lot of the Bill will help tenants—renters—once they are in a property, but we have to stop those properties that are not fit for purpose being rented in the first place. I heard a story last week about a lady who is renting further up the country. She is paying £500 a month for a two-bedroom cottage. On the market, it would be worth £750 a month, so she is saving £250. Her property has damp and mould, which she will not be reporting to anybody because that is all she can afford to pay and she has nowhere else to go.
22 Oct 2024 · Renters' Rights Bill (First sitting) · Hansard source
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Thank you both very much.
22 Oct 2024 · Renters' Rights Bill (First sitting) · Hansard source
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Q I am butting in again—I apologise. You say that private landlords are exiting the market already; what evidence do you have to support that statement? Theresa Wallace: There is evidence out there. With my agent’s hat on, I can say that we have evidence in the amount of landlords we have lost and the number of people looking at properties compared with before. I gather we have a 12% increase in properties on the market now, which is the highest since 2014, per agent.
22 Oct 2024 · Renters' Rights Bill (First sitting) · Hansard source
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Q What impact, if any, is that having on rental asks? If supply is being reduced, what is happening to demand? Theresa Wallace: Demand is up and supply is down, so that obviously does have an effect. It is not just an effect on rent: it is also an effect on the tenants who can secure the properties in the first place. The Bill is there help the people who are struggling, and in some places those are the people who will be penalised.
22 Oct 2024 · Renters' Rights Bill (First sitting) · Hansard source
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Q You have mentioned confidence twice. In anticipation of the Bill, and now that it has been published, are you able to say what has happened to confidence in the real market for both accidental and commercial landlords? Ben Beadle: If you consider yourself an accidental amateur landlord, that is arguably part of the problem —I do not think we can have amateur landlords. Having a lettings business is a business. Whether you have one or 10 properties, you need to do it properly, and we try to support all our members with that. We have been tracking sentiment in the sector for the last 12 years, across our membership, and it is at a record low. Only about 10% of our members are looking at actively investing in the sector, and about a third are looking at disposing of one of their properties or exiting the sector completely. I appreciate that that is sentiment rather than actuals, but we also have to point to the fact that we are seeing such a significant number of section 21s being used where a landlord is selling, and that still has not percolated through to some of the statistics. An average of 21 people applying for a rental property is not going to get better.
22 Oct 2024 · Renters' Rights Bill (First sitting) · Hansard source
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I declare an interest as a private landlord.
22 Oct 2024 · Renters' Rights Bill (First sitting) · Hansard source
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Q Ben, you have been patient. Perhaps you could do your best to answer the same question. Ben Beadle: With pleasure. We are largely supportive of many features in the Bill. There is a lot to be welcomed, and the Minister should take great credit for bringing in these reforms so quickly. One thing the industry has suffered with is the hokey-cokey politics of when we will see the abolition of section 21. Our position has been very clear: we do not oppose the abolition of section 21, providing the alternative is workable and fair, but there are two elements that do not quite strike the balance. The first element is court reform and the need for landlords to have confidence in it. I appreciate that others might have viewed this as a delaying tactic in the past, but the reality is that we are waiting seven months on average to get possession of our homes, and that is for a fast-track situation with almost no proof needed. When we move to a section 8 ground, that will require more resource and more scrutiny, quite rightly, but without investment in the court system we will not deliver what either renters or landlords need. In a survey of over 1,400 of our members, 60% of landlords said they were less confident or not at all confident that they will remain a landlord without suitable court reform. That declines to 37% if suitable court reforms are enacted. Our argument has always been that this is about confidence, striking the balance and giving support to responsible landlords, as well as delivering for renters. The other area we have seen is that landlords will be provided with robust grounds for repossession; I may have missed them, but I do not see the doubling of notice for serious rent arrears or increasing the rent arrears threshold from two to three months as sending the right message or as fair and proportionate. Those tenancies will largely fail, whether it is two months, three months or six months, quite frankly. What we want to do is avoid rent arrears building in the first place, so we are supportive of something like a pre-action protocol where responsible landlords can help to signpost tenants to manage their arrears. We did that during the pandemic. I worry that not addressing that point will send the wrong message. We have an average of 21 people chasing every home, so whatever nip and tuck we make around here, whether landlords are leaving or not, that is only going to worsen as confidence decreases.
22 Oct 2024 · Renters' Rights Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source
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Q I am straying into my memory now, but I think the financial exemption was set at £9,000 for the costs of an upgrade, above which you are exempted as a landlord. Judicaelle Hammond: It was proposed to be £10,000 in the last consultation. It is every five years.
22 Oct 2024 · Renters' Rights Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source
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Q You mentioned unintended consequences, a topic that I have come back to repeatedly today. We heard evidence earlier that rents in Scotland have outpaced those in the rest of the United Kingdom quite considerably in, I think, the last five years. You mentioned the 2022 rent control legislation and the impact that that has had on rents. If you can strip that out in your own mind and give us an assessment of what impact rent reform has had on rents over the past seven years, can you give the Committee a flavour of whether rents have gone up as a result, stayed the same, or reduced? Anna Evans: We show in the report that the rents increased at a similar rate to the rest of the UK until ’22. If you were trying to isolate why there was a more considerable increase since that time, you could probably fairly conclude that it was because of the 2022 legislation, but it is very difficult to isolate out. The range of legislation that has been implemented in Scotland is significant, but there was a tipping point in ’22 when rents in Scotland appear to have increased at a greater rate than in the UK. The key point was the 2022 legislation. I should also caveat all of that—as we have in our report—by saying that the Scottish rent data is not as good. It is based on advertised rents rather than any survey of in-tenancy rents. The published data on rent levels and the hike in Scotland will be for new tenancies, and therefore, that will naturally be inflated compared with most tenancies, because we know that landlords do not tend to increase rents in tenancy. They prefer to keep them at a level that keeps tenants content and therefore they have a longer rental period. That evidence has to be considered with caution, because it is based on advertised rents.
22 Oct 2024 · Renters' Rights Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source
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Q Just to follow up on that point, none of us knows what the increase in tribunal work will be, but there will be an active incentive not to agree a rent increase because you have your rent, it is going to go up, there is the delay of the process, and then at the end, the worst that can happen is that you get the rent increase that you were going to get anyway. Why would not tenants always, as a matter of course, put off the evil hour? They would get six, eight, 12 or 15 months free. Justin Bates KC: But what I am saying is that I do not know whether it will be that long. There is an assumption in the questions, which may or may not be correct, that all these cases will need a hearing. Most of the section 13 cases that the tribunal already deals with are done on the papers. It rattles through 10 of them a day because, unless there is something specific about the property—unless you need to see it to understand the condition of disrepair, or whatever—there is no reason why you cannot do rent-based determinations on the basis of written materials: the Rightmove print-offs, the price and so on.
22 Oct 2024 · Renters' Rights Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source
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Q Just on that, every landlord—or the vast majority of landlords—increases the rent annually to take account of inflation and other issues. Is that not right? Justin Bates KC: There is a famous housing benefit case, which the Commission on Social Security likes to remind us of, that says that Rachman is not the only model of landlord. It is entirely possible not to do that, or to agree sub-ones. Remember that the private rented sector is so difficult to pin down as a single, homogeneous beast. A landlord who lets to someone who is predominantly reliant on welfare benefits to pay their rent will not hike it beyond the inflation rate of the benefit, because all they would be doing is creating a situation in which the tenant cannot pay. I do not think you are wrong to raise that spectre; I just struggle with how we identify how likely that is to play out, and what the numbers will be in any given period. I do not think, for my part, that we can safely assume that every landlord will go as high as humanly possible, or that everyone will be defended, but on your broad point that there will be a delay, yes, that must be right.
22 Oct 2024 · Renters' Rights Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source
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Q Building on that, we heard from a few of the witnesses this morning that one of the key concerns of the private rented sector is the delay associated with the recovery of property through the Courts and Tribunals Service. A moment ago, you said that some of your members are waiting 12 to 18 months, during which time they do not get any rent and it is an asset that is not working for them. I would like to drill into that a little further to understand fully why it is that landowners are already leaving the market and why that might happen in the future, and what impact you assess that will have on future rents. On one side of the argument you could say, “Rents will go up as supply decreases.” Do you think that will be an unintended consequence of the proposed legislation? On the other side, which I invite you also to consider, is the question of whether, if you increase foregone earnings—that is, increase the losses associated with being a tenant—because the time required by court processes will be extended because of increased demand, that increased loss will filter into increased rents in the long run. Judicaelle Hammond: I think the answer to both of your questions is that there is a risk. If demand and supply work in the way they are intended to, unless you increase the supply there is a risk that the rent would go up—to do exactly the two things you suggested. What we see is broader than just renters’ rights reform, though: we are seeing, for example, the move towards minimum energy efficiency standards, and I totally understand why that is needed. At the same time, it is quite difficult for landlords to deal with some of the costs. Again, we are mostly talking about older properties in rural areas. The cost of maintenance and improvement, particularly since the Ukraine war and the surge in the cost of building materials, has not come down. It has stopped growing at the same rate, but the prices have not come down to where they were pre-pandemic, pre-Ukraine. As a result of that, you will first have to wait for a void in your properties, in all likelihood, in order to do the kinds of work that will be needed. Those voids do not happen very often. Secondly, you need to get your hands on tradespeople, who might actually prefer to stick to their local areas, because they are within 30 minutes’ driving time and not an hour and a half’s driving time. That is something else that we hear quite a bit about. All that is bringing pressure on to the private tenanted sector.

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