The Earl of Kinnoull (CB)

My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendment 53A. Getting the balance right between landlords and tenants is something that was stressed by a number of speakers on the previous group of amendments, including the Minister. The Bill really amounts to a presumption that tenants can keep pets, on the one hand, and protection for landlords, on the other hand, in the shape of a deposit and insurance. Insurance is going to fall away because it was not available and would have entailed a high cost. Even if such insurance had been available, the loss ratio would not have represented good value for tenants. Good tenants would have lost all their money, whereas, as the noble Lord, Lord de Clifford, has pointed out, you can get your deposit back with interest at the end. I feel that a deposit is a very good way to go, and that is why I tabled Amendment 51. I was disappointed that the appearance of Amendment 49 was going to kill Amendment 51 by way of pre-emption. That is why Amendment 53A is a very good idea. Pets damage buildings. We heard a lot about this in Committee, and the noble Lord, Lord Trees, may say something to remind us of all the unseen things that pets bring into the home. I am afraid that I feel that the survey by the academics at the University of Huddersfield is a rogue thing; it does not accord with my experience at all—and the Blair Charitable Trust is a reasonably sized landlord all round. Pets do damage things, but a deposit is a very fair way of adjusting the balance between the two people. In Scotland, that deposit is set at two months. Here, if the correct level of deposit is five weeks and we add the risk of a pet on top of that, which was going to be taken out by the insurance as originally proposed in the Bill, it seems to me not to be a good balance that there should be no increase in the level of deposit protection. In the original Amendment 51, I had set the additional protection at three weeks because I considered eight weeks very similar to two months and I felt that having some symmetry between Scotland and England on this point was a good idea. I also felt, through experience, that Scotland, with two months of deposit, was okay, and that the balance between tenants and landlords was okay where pets were concerned. I feel that Amendment 53A has a tremendous amount of merit. One of the points made to me is that Amendment 53A would add a lot of expense to tenants in the amount of deposit they would have to put up. I was just totting up how much our own two dogs cost to look after in a year, and it is a lot. Even though they probably eat better than some dogs, the dog food, inevitable visits to the vets—we do not buy insurance but it would amount to roughly the same as insurance is a pooling scheme—and all the various other things one has to do, such as finding someone to look after them if you go away on holiday, cost many hundreds of pounds a year. There is also the initial cost. I am talking about dogs, but it would be same for other pets. The website Pets4Homes has 1,625 dogs on it today, which cost between £400 and £3,000. Many people who have pets are engaging in something that is reasonably costly anyway, so asking them to provide another three weeks of security is perfectly fair and proportionate—especially if, having looked after the property well, they get back not only the interest on it but the money itself at the end. I am very pro Amendment 53A.