Baroness Thornhill (LD)

My Lords, the three amendments here are interesting. The noble Baroness is well aware that we share the same concerns as the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, regarding shared owners. I was allowed to gatecrash their meeting. I admit that it was eye-opening for me. I was aware of the issues around shared ownership, but I was shocked at the costs incurred and the amounts of money lost, which the noble Lord has amplified superbly. I hope the noble Baroness can give us some way forward on this and other issues that seriously affect shared owners—accidental landlords who are trapped in the situations the noble Lord has accurately described and see no way out. The “What can I do?” was quite revealing. It is no surprise that we will support Amendment 59. We know that the not-able-to-sell situation applies to thousands of shared owners—far greater numbers than, I suspect, Amendment 58 from the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, applies to. This is yet another area in the Bill where we do not know the numbers. We do not know how many homes will be affected. I have to pay credit to the noble Lord because Amendment 58 has been patiently worked on and lobbied for by the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell. I completely understand where he is coming from but perhaps do not agree that the detriment to the relatively few landlords who find they cannot sell their property is worth the abuses that might occur if prohibition on re-letting is reduced to six months rather than 12 as in the Bill. Perhaps this is an area for some compromise. I have a simple question, and I am sure somebody will tell me I am wrong. If I genuinely wanted to sell my property and realise my capital for whatever reason, given the amount of time to evict, I would probably not serve notice to my tenant until I had sold my property. I can serve the notice; the process of selling, conveyancing and everything else carries on; the tenant leaves at the appropriate time; the buyers exchange contracts and we say, “You can’t move in until that time”. I do not see how that would be unachievable. I am sure somebody will tell me why that would not be the case. I certainly would not evict them before I put it on the market or had some sense of the market or of how things were. As I said in Committee, a letting agent said to me, “All houses will sell, Dorothy. It just depends on the price”. Amendment 41, moved by the noble Lord, Lord Hacking, is clearly designed to act as a disincentive to landlords trying to abuse this ground, but maybe if the landlord is genuine, it is just a little too draconian. We broadly agree that the Bill has got this right, as far as we can tell.