My hon. Friend brings to the attention of the House the extraordinary situation with rents, particularly, although not exclusively, in London. There was a report in today’s papers about the scale of rent rises in the private rented sector affecting the whole country. Given the extraordinary rents that many private tenants are paying it is even more the case that the conditions to which they are entitled should be of a decent standard. Unfortunately, a significant minority of renters are not well served.
The Chartered Institute of Housing’s 2014 housing review calculated that 33% of all private rented housing in England—one third—would fail the Government’s decent homes standard for social housing compared with 15% of the social rented sector. According to the Government’s English housing survey, just under three quarters of a million homes, or 16.5% of private rented sector homes, failed to meet the minimum standard of the housing safety rating system. A quarter of a million properties in the private rented sector are estimated to have a category 1 hazard and, according to a major report by Shelter backed up by a YouGov survey, 61% of tenants were found to have experienced mould, damp, leaking roofs or windows, electrical hazards, animal infestations or a gas leak in the past 12 months.
Only this morning in City A.M. Hannah Williams wrote:
“As someone who runs a website that enables tenants to review properties they’ve rented, I see reports every single day of mould, damp and infestations that sound so Dickensian I can hardly believe they come out of 21st Century Britain.”
Some 10% of tenants report that their health has been affected adversely in the past year because their landlord has not dealt with repairs and poor conditions in their property, and 9% of private renting parents said that their children’s health had been affected.
The key issue addressed by the Bill is that, because of the rent limits, tenants are currently denied the same redress in respect of substandard conditions as they enjoy in respect of disrepair. The most obvious example relates to condensation and consequential mould. There is no obligation on the landlord as this issue is not one of repair. Causes can be lack of ventilation or extractor fans, inadequate though not necessarily defective windows, and so on. The structure in some cases may be sound, but design defects mean that the property is not fit for habitation. Suppose a property was built with no damp proof course and now suffers with damp. The existing disrepair laws do not help in such a case. Disrepair requires a change of state, but in this example there is no change. The Bill fixes that problem by shifting the focus on to the condition of the property, not simply the causes.
I have one of the largest private rented sectors anywhere in the country and I rely heavily on my local environmental health department to provide assistance in seeking redress for tenants who live in substandard accommodation. I shall return to the role of environmental health officers. Despite having a good and responsive environmental health department, I shall give some examples from my own caseload of the kind of conditions that I hope the Bill will redress.
A mother writes to me:
“For years my daughter has had damp in her home to the point where the walls were black. Many times surveyors come out but the situation is not resolved. This year workmen were sent out to deal with the damp and thought the problem was solved, but two months ago another surveyor had to come out to look at the property, inspected it and found that there was damp again.
My daughter has to live with the damp, ruining her health, numerous times reporting it and nothing done because she’s vulnerable, and although I as a mother try and look after her affairs I cannot be with her 24/7 as I work. My daughter suffers with poor health. She suffers from depression, self-harm, high blood pressure and alcohol problems. She has counselling and suffered from abuse. I know that is part of her problem. I know that if my daughter was to get out of the flat it would help her situation immensely, but her landlord is not doing what they should be doing, and that is addressing the situation with the damp.”
Another parent writes:
“My main concern is with the damp, mould and condensation as my son keeps on getting ill every 1 or 2 weeks. He has chronic asthma. I’ve had to throw away furniture that was only a year old as mould was growing on the back of it. Mould has grown in the microwave, the cooker, affecting my plates and cups, and under the sink where I have to store my pots and pans. Mould has grown on my shoes in the cupboard and on my son’s clothes and my clothes. It grew on his buggy seat and I cannot remove it.”
A third constituent writes:
“I have tried everything I can to stop and prevent the mould and damp from returning to my property, from covering the walls, constantly airing the property by opening the windows and doors in all weather, having the heating on and off at different times as advised, to constantly moving the furniture around so all the walls get enough air. Whatever I am asked to do I have done. The walls have had several treatments and redecorating simply covers over the problem. It’s not fair that I’ve had to live like this for so long. It’s 15 months I have lived in these awful conditions.”
There are many other cases, and that is in only one local authority.
Last year, the Building Research Establishment, working with the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, published two important pieces of work looking at the costs to health of substandard housing. In respect of health, it found that remedial action to tackle category 1 hazards would save the NHS £1.4 billion. In addition to the consequences for physical and mental health that so many of my constituents and renters across the country report, problems relating to damp and condensation cause financial distress to tenants, who often have to spend excessive amounts of their income on trying to heat their homes when damp and condensation make it difficult for them to do so and plague their property with excess cold.
The Bill would effectively enable tenants to enforce the kind of improvements that previously only local authorities could take steps to deal with via the Housing Act 2004 and the housing health and safety rating system. It would ensure that they have potential redress in respect of substandard conditions, as currently exist in respect of repairs. It would allow a tenant to secure an injunction to ensure that remedial works are carried out. The Law Commission’s 1996 report, which I referred to earlier, supported that change in principle, backed by the Court of Appeal, which remarked on the case of Issa v. Hackney London Borough Council in 1997 that the unsatisfactory state of the law currently means that tenants are
“wholly without remedy in the civil courts against their landlords, however grievously their health may have suffered because they are living in damp, unfit conditions.”
Why can environmental health officers not deal with these problems? In my view, environmental health officers are the unsung heroes of the modern welfare state. I draw very heavily upon Westminster’s environmental health officers, and I am proud to say that they do an excellent job—I spend a lot of time fighting Westminster City Council on almost every front, and quite rightly so, but when its officers do a good job I am delighted to say so—but across the country performance in highly variable.
The housing health and safety rating system, which was introduced by the 2004 Act and has been in force since 2006, allows local authorities’ environmental health departments to inspect and identify hazards. Where they identify a category 1 hazard—the most serious type— they are required to take action, but they can also choose to take action with regard to less serious hazards, and there is a risk assessment approach to property standards. However, the remedy available depends entirely on the choice that local authorities make on their enforcement strategy and, of course, the resources available to them. Overall, local authorities have not used their powers as often, or met their duties as well, as they might, too often acting only after receiving complaints from tenants, rather than proactively.
Despite the duty set out in section 3 of the 2004 Act, the removal of the Department for Communities and Local Government’s capital for private sector renewal and lack of funds for gathering the necessary information mean that few local authorities have a coherent strategy for the private rented sector and can take proactive action. Indeed, the most common way of dealing with hazards that are found when environmental health officers go into a property is informally. It is not clear what that is, but it is extremely hard to monitor and get a national
picture for how effective it is. In the case of category 1 hazards, that would also be a breach of their statutory duty.
A piece of research I carried out with Stephen Battersby, from the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, found enormous variations in practice and a high reliance on informal action. In 2010, just 3,744 improvement notices were issued, or an average of just 18 in each local authority, and that was up by just two per authority since 2007.