Lord Best (CB)

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, on the compromise he has achieved on this important amendment. I must declare a family interest: my wife owns rented property in Dorset. I shall speak in opposition to the amendment to Motion C in the name of my noble friend Lord Cromwell, well-intentioned though I believe it is. My noble friend’s amendment would mean that a landlord who had gained possession of a property using the grounds of an intention to sell would be able to relet that property after six months if it had not been sold, rather than having to wait up to a year, as specified in the Bill. In normal circumstances, one would expect a sale to be agreed within around six months, or, if not, the landlord would still want to go for a sale rather than relet the property, so the issue would not arise in most instances where this ground for possession could be used. However, the Government want to prevent an unscrupulous minority of landlords using these grounds for eviction as a way of bypassing the Bill’s fundamental intention of giving renters greater security. The fear is that the landlord will profess to want to sell but has no such intention; they simply want to evict the tenant. They may want to switch to more profitable Airbnb-style lettings, or they may want to replace a tenant who is complaining about the landlord’s neglect of essential repairs and find a more malleable or more desperate tenant. There is some evidence of such cheating behaviour from Scotland, where similar legislation has not had constraints on how quickly a vacated property can be relet, so the Government want to prevent abuses. The Bill needs to ban reletting for long enough to deter a landlord from misusing these grounds for possession. The question is how long a pause before re-letting is permitted would be long enough. Let us take a case where a renter is complaining about damp and mould. The property needs, say, £15,000 to be spent on rectifying various defects. If the tenant is paying £900 a month, it would be advantageous for the landlord to go without six months’ rent, that is £5,300, to be rid of that tenant and find someone who will tolerate the poor conditions. Having to forego 12 months’ rent before reletting, well over £10,000 in this case, would present a more robust deterrent against using this no-fault eviction route to removing the tenant. I can see that a compromise of a nine-month ban on reletting would probably be acceptable all round, but in the absence of that halfway house, it is safer and more foolproof to stay with the Bill’s 12-month term and reject this amendment.