Domestic Lettings (Hansard, 5 February 1991)

§ Mrs. Teresa Gorman (Billericay)
I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to amend the law to relax certain requirements upon a private householder taking in not more than two lodgers, in respect of taxation, the unified business rate, and the provisions of the Rent Acts; and for connected purposes.
My Bill will concern itself with small domestic lettings and will tackle the pressing problem of homelessness, which is a blot on our society. Today in The Times a letter from Shelter claims that homelessness is the result of too little affordable rented accommodation.
The tragedy to my mind is that homelessness exists while there is a surfeit of accommodation. There is plenty of accommodation in private houses, but people will not rent it out. My proposal would unlock this housing so that homeless people could come in from the cold.
There are many reasons why people find themselves homeless. A common reason is that young people who have always wanted to leave home and set up on their own cannot find anywhere to live nowadays. Once upon a time one could look in any local newspaper, or in the local sweet shop, and see lots of advertisements for bedsits or furnished flats to let. People with rooms to spare were willing to let them for a modest sum. There was much competition, which kept prices down. Sometimes letting helped to pay the landlord's mortgage or rent. Sometimes the family had left home and people felt that they would like a little company. Many a lonely young person, coming to the city, found a surrogate mother in the company of a friendly landlady—someone to keep an eye on him, and someone to come home to in the evening and to tell about the events of the day.
The landlord or the landlady was rarely too worried about getting a lot of money in advance. Often they would take people in for a week's rent only and they rarely wanted references. They would judge people at face value and let them into their homes. If the arrangements did not work out they would give notice, but that was not a tragedy because there was always somewhere else just down the road where one could find alternative accommodation.
Tenants were not harmed by that liberal, liberated system. That is what happens when there is a free market in any service—there is always a supply to meet demand.
Even young couples, after they got married, frequently started married life in a bedsit or in a furnished flat. It enabled them to save money and build up the capital to buy a place of their own.
Something has happened which has destroyed people's willingness to let parts of their houses. The Rent Acts are still a spectre facing people who rent out homes, as is the prospect of the taxman breathing down their necks wanting part of the rent, or of complicated accounts to reduce the amount of liability, or of the local town hall and the prospect of being re-rated.
I pay tribute to the work of my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Chope) who, when he was Minister for housing, liberated furnished lettings, especially rooms to let, and went a long way towards making the landlord more comfortable. Nowadays, if a landlord has to give notice to a tenant in a private household, he does not have to go to the county court, but can simply serve notice and the tenant has to go. If a 173 landlord has fewer than six lodgers, he is not liable to be re-rated as a boarding house. Many liberal measures have been introduced, but the popular terror still exists in the public's mind about being a landlord.
Instead of tackling the causes, we tend to spend more money on providing hostel or bed-and-breakfast accommodation, at enormous expense to the taxpayer.
I talked to many homeless people in the Westminster area when I was a member of Westminster city council and deputy chairman of the housing committee. When I asked people what they wanted, they told me that they did not want a room in a hostel, however nice it might be. They wanted a room in a home—somewhere to leave their belongings, an address, somewhere where they could lock the door and could call home. That is what we should be aiming for, rather than providing more hostel accommodation. The Government are spending £5 million a week on many of those cold and friendless alternatives to homes in the private rented sector.
Although Ministers agree privately that what we are up to is a kind of madness, we are still afraid to tackle the cause of the blockage. I believe that the cause is the caricature of the private landlord as a Rachman—a caricature which the Labour party always drags out as a means of boosting public housing, public spending and public control. The other bogeyman for the would-be landlord is the Treasury, which regards letting rooms as a black economy activity, and wants every last farthing that it can get out of the rent.
The Department has already done a great deal to liberate the housing sector. I want it to go a step further and stand up for homeless people and against the bullyragging nonsense that we hear from the Labour party. I want it to reassure people that if they let their accommodation, they will receive a bonus. They could take in up to two lodgers and make £100 in rent—which is none the less much less than we pay for a hostel or bed-and-breakfast places. If the arrangement did not work out, landlords could part company with their tenants—as they can now—without having to go through the awful trauma of rent tribunals and county courts.
I am sure that that would liberate an enormous amount of housing, without adding a penny to the taxpayer's bill. Moreover, it would provide a surrogate, or alternative, for the young, the not-so-favourably disposed, the unemployed and the friendless, in a warm home where they would receive the support and company that they probably expected originally from their own families.

§ Mr. Michael Spicer (Worcestershire, South)
I oppose the Bill presented by my hon. Friend the Member for Billericay (Mrs. Gorman).
My hon. Friend's heart is, of course, in the right place; the problem is that her Bill has been so narrowly drafted that it does not, in my view, adequately address the problem that she has so properly brought to our notice. In my hon. Friend's immortal words, her aim is to bring lodgers back to the bosom of the landlady. That is a laudable aim. We know exactly what my hon. Friend means and exactly what she wants: she wants, as she said, to reduce the pressure on housing, especially for single 174 people. She wants to do that by giving a boost to private renting, which always used to be a major source of accommodation—especially for single people.
I fear—and I know that my hon. Friend shares my view—that the problems of private renting go much deeper and are much more profound than the difficulties faced by those wishing to find private shared accommodation, although their difficulties are, of course, an inextricable part of the wider problem. Private renting in this country—unlike private renting in any other country in the western world—has collapsed. In the 1950s it represented about 50 per cent. of all accommodation; today it represents about 7 per cent. At the same time, there are about 600,000 empty private sector houses, as my hon. Friend pointed out. Many are not rented out because their owners are literally terrified of the consequences of doing so.
Thirty years of socialist denigration of the landlord and landlady has taken its toll. As a result, the potential penalties of renting out their property, or one room of it, are considered by most people far to outweigh the meagre rewards. My hon. Friend stressed that, and the implications for the use of the national housing stock are extremely serious. If even one third of the empty private sector housing were put out for rent many of the present pressures on housing would be removed without a single new building.
I know that in the current mood, we are not really allowed to be confrontational and far be it from me to disturb the tranquillity of the House, but I should like to make one small, innocent, well-meaning observation about the socialist party's policy towards private renting. Its programme, now printed formally in its policy documents, of reintroducing total security of tenure to new as well as to old lodgings, and presumably thus to shared lodgings, would, if implemented, finally kill the private rented sector stone dead with or without the Bill which my hon. Friend the Member for Billericay has brought before the House today.
Labour's policy is already acting as a serious deterrent to new landlords coming forward and it is directly and detrimentally affecting the position of thousands of people looking for homes.
I should have liked to see in my hon. Friend's Bill, with all its excellent intentions for the provision of extra accommodation, some mention of something that she herself has championed in recent years—the future deregulation of tenancies. We should at least ensure that people who succeed to existing regulated tenancies should do so through contracts freely entered into by them and their landlords, as is the case now for assured tenancies and for shortholds. It is also necessary to treat the operations of landlords for tax purposes in the same way as any other business would be. Their capital expenditure should certainly benefit from roll-over rules. I believe that it would have been better if my hon. Friend's Bill had addressed that point.
My hon. Friend has done the House a great service by raising the matter of privately rented accommodation. I want her to reapply her genius to the wider context in which lodging must be seen, take this Bill away and bring back an amended version, perhaps more along the lines of the one that she presented to the House some months ago.

§ Mr. Speaker
The Question is that the hon. Lady be given leave to bring in the Bill. Those in favour say aye; to 175 the contrary no. The hon. Member who has spoken against the Bill must follow his objection by recording a no call. I think that the ayes have it.

§ Mr. Speaker
Who will prepare and bring in the Bill?

§ Mrs. Gorman
Mr. David Shaw, Sir Marcus Fox, Mrs. Maureen Hicks, Mr. Christopher Gill, Mr. James Pawsey, Mr. John Greenway, Mr. Michael Spicer, Mr. Barry Field, Mrs. Rosie Barnes and myself, Sir.

§ Mr. Speaker
Order. I do not think that it is possible for the hon. Member who has just opposed the Bill to be also listed as a sponsor of the Bill. Perhaps his name could be deleted.
Bill ordered to be brought in by Mrs. Teresa Gorman, Mr. David Shaw, Sir Marcus Fox, Mrs. Maureen Hicks, Mr. Christopher Gill, Mr. James Pawsey, Mr. John Greenway, Mr. Barry Field and Mrs. Rosie Barnes.