Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 29 in my name and in that of the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, but before doing so I will thank the Minister, as so many other noble Lords have done, for the courteous way in which she has discussed this issue with me. My amendment seeks to provide for a pre-appeal assessment process to filter out appeals that have no prospect of success and thus avoid overburdening the tribunals. Its specific and highly practical suggestion is that the Government should take advantage of the technical expertise available to them through the Valuation Office Agency. Rent appeals should progress to the courts only if the Valuation Office Agency considers that they have a chance of success. It seems appropriate to be making this suggestion on the 100th anniversary of the Rating and Valuation Act 1925, which ensured consistency of property ratings across the country by the use of professional valuation officers. I commend this Act to noble Lords. Reading it is quite possible because it is a relatively brief piece of legislation written in language that a normal person can understand. But the main reason I am commending it is that it set up a decentralised but uniform system which gave people across the country consistent decisions on a regular and predictable timescale, with clarity on who was making those decisions and how they could be contacted. This sort of clarity and consistency is surely what we would like for all tenants and all landlords, but the current drafting of the Bill, which loads more work on to a tribunal system that we know is overloaded, is not in a position to deliver this. As I explained in Committee, my proposal was prompted by current Scottish practice. It does not in any way reduce the right of tenants to appeal against a rent increase, and I am not sure that it even reduces the incentive to appeal on the off-chance, but it does reduce the likelihood that the courts will be overwhelmed very soon by appeals, in particular by appeals which do not succeed and which swamp the courts, to the detriment of important and merit-worthy cases. Under the Government’s current proposals, tenants will enjoy a number of new and important rights. Rents cannot be increased as often as at present, for example. Most importantly in the context of this group of amendments, tenants who wish to challenge what they see as an excessive rent increase have access to an independent tribunal. The tribunal cannot propose an increase that is any higher than the one initially proposed by the landlord, as the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, has already pointed out. It can endorse the landlord’s proposal or rule that a lower rent should be charged. Obviously, these charges are of great assistance when landlords are proposing major increases that are out of line with inflation or the market, but, equally obviously, they will encourage a very large number of appeals which are lodged on the off-chance, and I do not think there is any doubt that this would be disastrous. In the other place during the Public Bill Committee, Minister Pennycook observed: “There is no dispute on the Government side of the Committee as to the fact that the court system is on its knees”.—[Official Report, Commons, Renters’ Rights Bill Committee, 22/10/24; col. 9.] He added “after the past 14 years” but the relevant point here is that the court system is on its knees. As first introduced, the Bill provided that the tenant who appealed against a rent increase where the tribunal found this was allowable would pay the increase only from the date of the tribunal decision, which could be many months on. This clearly hugely increased the incentive to appeal, and I think it would also have been seen as massively unfair by any tenant who accepted an increase without appealing and then saw a fellow tenant getting months at a lower rate. So, I was very pleased that the Government recognised this risk and I look forward to the Minister explaining how the government amendments will work in practice. However, I do not think this is enough to head off tribunal overload, which is why I have retabled my amendment. There will still, for many people, be a sense that they have nothing to lose by appealing. If I were an officer in a student union, for example, and I was asked my opinion, I would have to say that appealing remains something of a no-brainer. I would have to say the same if I was on a radio programme or an online forum. Why would you not? I therefore remain convinced that, in the absence of some sort of prior screening of the type that I have suggested, the courts will be overwhelmed. In Scotland, the first stage in any appeal goes to Rent Service Scotland. Apparently, on average, it takes just five days to respond and most things stop there; very few cases go further. Obviously, the Scottish situation is very different from ours, but it is also obvious that, when it comes to providing tenants and landlords with quick feedback rather than months in limbo, it is very effective. It is also obvious, given the volumes that Rent Service Scotland deals with, that without this prior system there would be a very large number of cases which were effectively a waste of time. It would be very easy for us to introduce a similar first-stage process in England. There is a large amount of expertise on rents outside the tribunals and the courts. The Valuation Office Agency already gives the Government valuations and property advice that they need to support taxation and benefits. Rents in social housing are tightly regulated. Registered providers must comply with the Regulator of Social Housing’s rent standard or rent settlement, which is effectively set by the Government, and its annual increases would be an obvious and simple yardstick to use when evaluating whether appeals should go on. Rent officers also still set rents for the remaining group of protected tenancies, so the basic infrastructure is there. To see what we are facing, I think, as I thought in Committee, that a bit of back-of-an-envelope arithmetic is in order. The Government do not think there will be a huge growth in open appeals. If appeals from private sector tenants tracked the levels going to Rent Service Scotland and they all proceeded to the tribunal, we would end up with another 40,000 cases a year. That compares with 909 cases heard by the tribunals under current legislation in England, so that would be a fortyfold increase. But suppose that it was only a quarter of that level; that would still be a tenfold increase, with 10,000 extra cases a year hitting First-tier Tribunals that are under enormous strain. We hear a lot in the press about pressures and backlogs in criminal courts, but the statistics for the tribunals are at least as grim. In the year 2024-25, the open case load total—excluding immigration and asylum—rose to 745,000, which is an increase of 14% in the course of a single year. The Minister was kind enough to discuss my amendment with me following Committee and to recognise that a provision for initial screening could be helpful if tribunals were indeed overwhelmed. In the absence of any government amendment to that effect, I look forward to hearing from her about the Government’s current thinking. I also highlight the enormous importance of reviewing the impact on the judicial system, which we will return to later on Report.