My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, for raising this. I wondered slightly about the procedure of deletion and adding in, but I will leave that to others. I will touch on one or two things.
We must start from the standpoint that under the terms of a lease, a tenant is provided with exclusive possession of and control over the property of their landlord within the terms of the lease. It is perfectly possible for tenants to do a lot of damage in a short period of time. Mercifully, very few of them do, but the occasional one does, because they are ignorant, because they have strange lifestyles, or for whatever reason. I thought, when I looked at this part of Schedule 1, that the default, defined as performing an obligation or discharge of a liability, was probably too wide. It did not surprise me that the noble Baroness has picked up on that. To that extent, she has a point. First, the landlord absolutely must substantiate the amount in question. The noble Baroness would introduce the concept of fair condition, then limit fair condition to two items. She has explained that, but I can think of eight or 10 others that I could add to the mix, all of which could objectively be seen as fair conditions of properly occupying and generally looking after the premises by a tenant.
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She did referred to arbitrating over differences. I will share a concern about arbitration. Arbitration has been seized by professional arbitrators and made much more of, and much more costly, than it should be. The principle of alternative dispute resolution by other means—perhaps a single, jointly appointed adjudicator—might have been better, and much more cost-effective, than arbitration in accordance with the Arbitration Act. The apparent smallness of the cost—the noble Baroness refers to a lost key—is not necessarily an indicator of the process involved. I came across a situation where a fob for a security system was lost, could be obtained through only the company that operated the security system and cost quite a lot of money—a bit like the difference between getting an old-fashioned car key recut and getting a modern, electronic, keyless entry car fob reconfigured. Gaining possession is not an alternative to the cost of making good wanton damage through carelessness or whatever.
The noble Baroness referred to condensation. Such was the frequency with which I was asked about condensation professionally that, at one stage, I had a complete piece on my website about the causes of, and how to deal with, condensation. About two years ago, an architect asked me to look inside a property because she needed to speak to the tenant about a condensation issue. I was able to have some input, because the tenant had not been informed that the windows were fitted with trickle vents, which were all closed. The tenant had decided that the extractor fans for both the kitchen and bathroom were noisy, and had turned them off at the isolator switch. Because the tenant did
not like the cost of operating the dryer part of the washer-dryer, clothing was dried on a concertina rack in the living room of this flat. Noble Lords will not be surprised when I say that this produced some extremely unhealthy conditions, of which some, but not all, might have been expected to be in the landlord’s initial briefing. I think that limiting fair condition to only two items does not go far enough, just as I think that the Bill, as drafted, is probably a little too wide. How would you define whether the obligation was reasonable and whether the discharging of a liability was a proper one to be included in the lease? There is a happy medium somewhere. I commend that thought to the Minister.