My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Bates for tabling his government amendments. In my mind, it certainly makes the situation better, but maybe not perfect. I understand that the Government wish to tackle the rogue landlords who deliberately flout the law by knowingly taking in illegals as tenants. However, the Bill, as written, uses a sledgehammer to crack a nut by criminalising all landlords, even if they have done everything reasonably possible to confirm the status of a tenant and are actively seeking to evict a tenant they have been told does not have the right to rent.
I would like to explore how the government amendments would work in practice. I am happy to say that in my 30-odd years of being a landlord, I have never had to evict anybody, so this is new territory for me. Suppose one of my tenants in Norfolk was of Middle Eastern extraction with a Greek passport. As I do not know what a valid Greek passport looks like—other than like my British passport, but all in Greek—I send it off to one of those passport verification agencies. It gives me the all-clear and the tenant moves in. Subsequently, I receive a letter from the Immigration Enforcement office—in King’s Lynn, in my case—giving me notice that the tenant is an illegal with a fake passport. The government amendments say that I have a defence if I have,
“taken reasonable steps to terminate the residential tenancy agreement … within a reasonable period”,
beginning with the time when I first knew that he was illegal. Therefore I write to the tenant to evict him, with reasons, giving him so many days or weeks to vacate the premises. However, the tenant, realising that he has been rumbled, scarpers at once and disappears into another part of the country to become a tenant of some other unsuspecting landlord.
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This cannot be the right answer. I would have thought that the immigration enforcement officers would want to interview the tenant before I made him aware that his collar was being felt. Would not the enforcement officer want to confiscate the forged documents and maybe take the illegal to some holding camp? In which case, the job is done for me: the illegal has been removed from my property. If not, what is the point of it all—of allowing or giving the illegal the opportunity to escape into another area? Therefore there needs to be some joined-up thinking to ensure that the Government achieve their stated aims.
Government amendment 62 says that,
“the court must have regard to any guidance”,
but it says little about what the guidance will contain and what it will be directed to. Will it say what the steps to terminate a tenancy are? Will the enforcement officers ask the landlord not to send the eviction letter until after they have interviewed and maybe taken the tenant into custody? What is a reasonable timescale? I have to give two months’ notice to evict a legal tenant to give them sufficient time to find another home to rent. However, for an illegal, it should surely be a matter of days, not weeks. Will the guidance be clear about the circumstances in which financial or criminal sanctions would or would not be made against a landlord?
I thank my noble friend for bringing forward these government amendments. They are an improvement but some questions still remain unanswered.