It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Graham. I start by welcoming the Under-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for South Derbyshire (Mrs Wheeler), back to her place.
This is the first time that we have had the opportunity to face each other in recent months, and I am very pleased to see her back in her place.
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) for securing this debate, and for her truly exceptional work to help those who struggle to get a long-term decent home in the private rented sector. She has been absolutely tireless in ensuring that the quality of people’s accommodation is sufficient and suitable for people to live in in the 21st century, and she is so persuasive that the Government supported her private Member’s Bill earlier in the year. I congratulate her on that.
For many of the 4.7 million private rental households in England, the risk of being evicted by a section 21 notice casts a looming shadow of insecurity over their time in the private rental market. In as little as two months after being served a notice, a tenant’s life can be turned around. For the one in four families with kids who live in rented accommodation, that can mean moving their children out of the settled environment of their school, where they have friends and connections. As my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown) eloquently said, that reduces their potential, limits their life chances and impacts on their healthcare and education. She helpfully set out some of the financial ramifications of failing in housing in the first instance, making those families move into new and strange environments. For many, their ability to raise the money for new accommodation, including deposits that can now stretch into thousands of pounds, is simply a pipe dream.
It is no coincidence that the rise of the loss of a private rental tenancy as a reason for statutory homelessness since 2010 has come in parallel with a rise in the use of section 21 eviction processes, and Generation Rent research suggests that more than 200 households a week are being made homeless through section 21 evictions. The use of section 21 has severe impacts on those who face it, yet there is no oversight of its use to ensure that it is justified, fair or proportional.
Nothing sums up better how deeply unjust the application of section 21 can be than the experience of a number of my constituents who were moved on to universal credit this time last year. During the transition to universal credit in my area as part of the pilot roll-out, a property company that housed the vast majority of universal credit tenants—generally at the lower end of the market and in cheaper properties that are not always in the best condition—sent blanket section 21 notices to people in its properties. While the landlord said that it had absolutely no intention to evict tenants who did not fall into arrears, the form 6A that was handed to tenants clearly stated that they were required to leave their property on 15 January. That action by the property company left people and their families facing homelessness just three weeks after Christmas. Those tenants need not have been in significant debt arrears to end up losing their home. Only the Leader of the Opposition’s raising this matter at Prime Minister’s questions brought home to the agents just how unfair and unnecessary their actions were. On first reading, the letter indicated that the
information on the form was final, and the full wording of that letter can easily be interpreted as saying that late payment by even one day would result in eviction.
My hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter) mentioned how those possession orders and the letters can literally terrify tenants, which is something that I experienced on a large scale only a year ago. He also commented on tenants being issued with a possession notice and being terrified. If they are deemed to have left the property too early, the local authority considers them to be intentionally homeless. How does that now work with the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017 and the local authority’s duty to prevent homelessness? The two seem to be in conflict, and I shall be grateful if the Minister will touch on that in her closing remarks. I am sure that she will absolutely agree that causing families that much stress over Christmas and putting people at risk of homelessness due to Government system changes rather than to individual fault, and when they have no previous rent arrears or a track record of being a bad tenant, is not how we want the eviction process to work in this country in the 21st century, but that is completely legal under section 21.
It is not just the eviction process where section 21 has a devastating effect on tenants in England. Giving landlords the power to play fast and loose with security of tenure creates a power imbalance, which unscrupulous landlords use to intimidate or exploit tenants and to get away with improper and often illegal practices. Some of the most extreme cases of this were made clear in Westminster Hall last week during the debate on sex for rent, which was secured by my hon. Friend the Member for Hove (Peter Kyle). Shelter estimates that this issue affects 100,000 women each year.
When landlords can evict tenants indiscriminately, they can hang the threat of eviction over tenants at any time they see fit. Tenants, who are often unaware of the help that is available to them, and often unaware of their rights and where they can get advice, feel that they have very little right, even if they could afford—particularly in terms of legal support—to challenge whether they have been correctly served with a notice.