Housing (Interim Management Orders) (Prescribed Circumstances) (England) Order 2006

I am very grateful to the noble Baronesses for the hard work that they put in through the passage of the legislation, which I was not involved in. As with many instances when dealing with housing legislation, I know that I am in the hands of a great deal of expertise on the other side. We have come to the point now where we are dealing with implementation, and that gives us some pleasure, even if some of the things that the noble Baronesses, Lady Maddock and Lady Hanham, would have liked to have seen were not successful. I welcome the support that they have given the statutory instruments in general. Both noble Baronesses know well the pressures on people living in houses in multiple occupation, how important they are as a source of accommodation and how they have always housed the most vulnerable. I take the experience of 20 years of seeing the sorts of states that people live in in those houses, in saying that it is a good thing that we have now moved to provide through regulation a national licensing scheme to include those controllers. It might be worth explaining why we have five statutory instruments here instead of bundling them up into one. We felt that it was important to keep the matters dealt with in the three orders separate, because they deal with issues arising in three separate parts of the Act; Parts 2, 3 and 4. We wanted to avoid any confusion arising between what was required in relation to mandatory licensing when prescribing which types of HMO would be subject to mandatory licensing on the one hand, and which properties could not be subject to selective licensing on the other. We also felt that the question of when to make a special interim management order had very little to do with the rest of the issues, so that was dealt with separately. We also decided that the management requirements should stand alone, because they deal with a specific set of requirements. They apply to all HMOs too, as opposed to just those that are required to be licensed. Therefore, they should not have been buried among the others. That is why we are bringing forward five provisions today. The common questions asked by both noble Baronesses essentially were about preparedness, and I will start with that in describing what we are doing. I take the point about the three months, but we are where we are. I will go into a bit of detail about what we have tried to do to get local authorities up to speed, including local authorities that have had registration schemes and those that have not, which are starting from a different base entirely. It is important that we get them up to speed as much as possible. It is a challenge; there is no doubt about that. We have given high priority to putting in place a comprehensive training programme for all local authorities. We funded the Improvement and Development Agency—the IDeA—to train all local housing authorities in the details of implementing the licensing provisions. They are seeing more than 900 delegates from 336 local authorities in training. In addition, 800 delegates have attended an extensive programme of events across England on their role in licensing. We have also been trying to deliver a cultural change in attitude towards the problems. It is not simply a technical process; it will be about looking strategically at what they are now able to do and sharing ideas for joint working. The Local Government Association has produced, in consultation with authorities and the landlord organisations, a licensing fees toolkit, which is suitable for use by all types of local authority. That has been endorsed by the IDeA, CIPFA and the Department for Communities and Local Government. For landlords and tenants, we have a paid publicity campaign in newspapers and on the radio, which is raising awareness. It began in early March and will run to the end of June. We had 200,000 hits on the dedicated website in the first two weeks, and lots of inquiries are coming in from local authorities, landlords and tenants’ organisations. We have set up a telephone helpline and an email address to respond to licensing inquiries. We are getting inquiries from the public and from the range of stakeholders. We had 750 email inquiries by the end of April, and they have been responded to. The feedback suggests that stakeholders are taking these opportunities on board. That is what we have tried to do. As the programme unfolds, the department and local authorities will be on the alert for anything else that we can do in the interim. Matching that is the question about monitoring, which is equally important. We know the scale of the changes and we are committed to ensuring that the measures that we are introducing should work in a very practical way. They are new, so we must monitor their effectiveness and practicability in helping to raise standards. We have commissioned the Building Research Establishment to monitor licensing and its impact upon the private rented sector, but we have also commissioned the Local Authorities Coordinating Office on Regulatory Services to provide advice to authorities on the practical application of licensing and other measures in the Act, including developing best practices. So we are trying not simply to share best practice but to aim at consistency between local authorities. All that will inform a review of all aspects of the new licensing regime within the next three years, and if we conclude on the basis of evidence that changes are needed, we shall look at what needs to be done. The process of review was made clear during debate on the Bill, and we are now engaged with that process—and I think that this is the right time to do that. The other question that links in with this debate is the scope of the definition of what should be mandatory. I do not really want to revisit what must have been hours of debate—and very well argued, I am sure; but I shall repeat briefly what must have been the argument and what remains the argument, which leads us to the question of amenities. It is essentially a question of how we protect the most vulnerable and make the best use of our resources. The choice is to spread thinly and widen the definition or to arrive at a definition of mandatory licensing that picks out the big houses with the most tenants and, therefore, the most vulnerable people.