SUCCESSION ON DEATH OF TENANT: HOUSING ACT 1985 (Hansard, 30 April 1996)

§ Mr. Betts
I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

Mr. Deputy Speaker
With this, it will be convenient to discuss also amendment No. 160, in clause 113, page 72, line 20, at end insert— '(4) Nothing in this section shall be taken as preventing any person from qualifying to succeed a tenant in accordance with section 112 above where the tenant concerned has died and had himself succeeded from his spouse or from a joint tenancy with his spouse.'.

§ Mr. Betts
May I put on the record something that I forgot to say in my last contribution? I declare a potential interest in leasehold reform, in that I am a leaseholder. I declared that in Committee, and although my interest does not affect the new clause and amendment that we are discussing, I thought that it would be helpful to put the fact on the record.
New clause 24 and amendment No. 160 involve the issue of succession, which I raised in Committee. I did not get a satisfactory response from the Minister, but he promised the Committee that he would go away and consider how joint tenancies affected succession. The fact that he has not tabled an amendment on the subject implies that, although he could not find a reason for not tabling one, he failed to do so simply because the Government do not support the principle for which we are arguing.
That is a pity, because my new clause and amendment are an attempt to deal with the position of children who live for much of their lives with their parents, often so as to care for them, and with what happens to them when, when they are in their 40s or 50s and have lived in the family home all their lives, their parents die.
The perverse aspect is that if there are two parents and the father is the tenant but the mother dies first, the law as it stands allows the child to succeed to the tenancy, because there has not been a previous succession. But if the father dies, the mother succeeds to the tenancy and then the mother dies, the child cannot succeed automatically, because there has already been one succession. The child is potentially homeless, and can be evicted.
I do not say that that happens every time, but children in that position have no surety or guarantee that the succession will be theirs. That causes real concern both for the parents, who can often feel an element of guilt for having put the 978 children in that position, and for the children, for whom there is a great element of uncertainty because when they lose their parents, they may also lose their home.
That difficulty has been compounded by the fact that joint tenancies are now much more usual in local authority properties. As the law stands, if there is a joint tenancy and one of the parents dies, the other parent succeeds as a sole tenant. Again, because of the way in which the law is written, the child cannot then have an automatic right to succeed to the tenancy. It cannot be right that, ultimately, accidents of history—such as which parent dies first, and whether there is a joint tenancy or a sole tenancy—decide whether the child has the right to succeed. That is not equitable.
No one argued in Committee that what I said was wrong, so this time I have tried to phrase the new clause and the amendment more narrowly, so that exclusions from the right of succession do not apply when, although there has been a previous succession, the tenancy has been passed only from one spouse to another, or to a spouse from a previous joint tenancy of both spouses. That seems to avoid the danger of drawing the provision too widely.
I hope that the Minister will rethink, and will accept the amendment, even at this late stage, not because I would get any personal credit thereby, but simply because there are so many people, especially elderly people, who are frightened and worried about what will happen to their children's home when they die, and so many children who do not have a guarantee that they can succeed to their parents' tenancy. In the interests of compassion and of fairness to those people, I hope that the Minister will reconsider.

§ The Minister for Local Government, Housing and Urban Regeneration (Mr. David Curry)
The hon. Gentleman is talking about what should happen when there are exceptional circumstances; I presume that he does not envisage a sort of perpetual succession in normal circumstances. None the less, because of local authorities' need to make effective use of their stock, I do not believe that the one-succession rule should be abolished.
There has been considerable debate both inside and outside the Committee about whether succession rights should be extended to cover couples of the same sex who share a home, and we shall discuss that matter on a later amendment. I shall then suggest that the best approach to the difficult situation in which a person may lose his or her home because a tenant has died is for the local authority to grant a tenancy to the remaining person.
We propose to issue unequivocal guidance to local authorities recommending that course of action, which will be equally applicable to the position in which someone faces the loss of his or her home because the one-succession rule bites. I hope that, in the light of that assurance, which I shall be able to amplify on the later amendment, the hon. Gentleman will not feel the need to persist with his new clause and amendment.

§ Mr. Betts
I shall not push the new clause, but I am not totally satisfied with the Minister's answer. I realise that he will issue guidance, but I hope that, when he does, he will make it clear to authorities that they should include that right in their tenancy policies, up front. The right should not be given to people after their parents die; it should be available to them as a right, if local authorities put it in their policies, so that, before the unhappy event 979 of their parents' death, people will have the certain knowledge that they will be secure in their tenancy. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the motion.