Lord Young of Cookham (Con)

My Lords, I have added my name to the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Best. I will add a brief footnote to what he has just said. As we heard in the last debate, there has been considerable concern about the capacity of the courts to handle the volume of appeals that will go to the tribunals when the Bill becomes an Act. The backlog has been going up: in the first quarter of 2025, the average time between a landlord submitting a claim and getting possession was over seven months—32.5 weeks, up from 29.8 weeks a year ago. The Minister uses a different figure—eight weeks—but that covers only getting a possession order, not actually getting the property back. In an earlier debate, the Minister implied that it was actually quite difficult for a tenant to challenge an increase in rent. I respectfully disagree with that. There is a whole range of organisations that will give tenants advice on how to challenge an increase from the landlord. This Government have made it clear that, unlike the previous Administration, they are not prepared to wait until the necessary reforms to the court processes are in place before they activate the Bill. That is a decision they are perfectly entitled to take, and it will be welcomed by tenants. However, a necessary corollary of that decision should be a process to minimise the chance of the courts being overwhelmed, which would be in the interest of neither tenant nor landlord. That is what Amendment 25 does. The likelihood of the rent—a market rent when it was fixed—diverging significantly from CPI or RPI over four years is quite small. The certainty that goes with that guarantee will be welcomed, I think, by both tenant and landlord. If, after four years, there is a divergence, as the noble Lord, Lord Best, has explained, the rent can then catch up. As someone who voted for the Housing Act 1988, which abolished rent control, I see no problem with this measure to simply smooth increases over a four-year period. Again, speaking personally, if at the end of the four or five years the courts have shown themselves to be up to speed, with no backlog, I would be happy to see this provision lapse, but in the meantime, I hope the Government will smile on it.