My Lords, perhaps I can deal with the noble Baroness’s comment on what happens in the event that the landlord dies. This is an amendment moved by my colleagues on the Front Bench, and if there is a difficulty with it there is no reason at all why the Government cannot come back with an amendment to deal with the thrust of the case laid in the amendments by my Front Bench but which
includes a provision for those circumstances. That is what we are here to do: to legislate. These amendments have been proposed but Ministers could take them away and say, “Yes, there is a point here but if we build in a system of exemptions then these particular problems will not arise”.
I can also deal with the question of tenants in arrears, which the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, referred to. As I understand it, under Clause 55—in Part 3, which is headed “Recovering abandoned premises”—the Government’s position is actually to simplify the whole process of dealing with what happens where,
“the unpaid rent condition is met”.
That would cover where people are in arrears and where mortgages are being paid, as I presume that under that provision the landlord would then be entitled to secure possession of his property. That deals with one of the main objections in the contribution of the noble Earl, to which I listened carefully.
Finally, the noble Earl referred to people working at Gatwick Airport who did not necessarily need longer-term tenancies. The amendment says that,
“it is an implied term of such a tenancy that the tenant may terminate the tenancy by giving two months’ written notice to the landlord”.
The tenant is not locked into the agreement at all. The tenant can pull out of the agreement at a moment’s notice simply by saying, “I gave two months’ notice to the landlord”. What we are doing here is protecting tenants by not locking them in, in the sense that they can pull out. We are protecting landlords—or the Government are protecting them—under the provisions of Clause 55 in terms of arrears. In terms of landlords dying, as I said, that could be dealt with by further consideration by the Government.
However, what we are doing more than anything else is giving people who take on tenancies a sense of security as to where they live. From what I hear from tales brought to me by my sons’ friends, who have had different tenancies in London over a period of years, many tenants in London do not know where they are going to be. They do not know whether the landlord will want the property back at the end of 12 months. People are entitled to know that the weight is moving at least a little more in favour of the tenants to give them more rights. We are not granting people long-term security of tenure and indefinite tenancies. We are simply extending it from one to three years to give more balance to the way that tenancies operate in the United Kingdom.