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Keith Hill: If I may be allowed to make my argument and the hon. Gentleman still wants to intervene, I would welcome his remarks.
The findings illustrate, as I maintained in Committee, that the ordinary workaday route for tenants and residents to complain directly to their local authority works well in the vast majority of cases and there is no need to widen the official route.
Mr. Davey: The Minister is making an interesting speech, which would have enlightened our previous "thrashing" debate. However, perhaps the current formal route is not sufficiently wide and the findings that he has secured back the case that we made in Committee.
Keith Hill: In Committee, we were in a sort of competition to extend the category of those regarded as official complainants. However, the reality appears to be that the current system works well enough and we perceive the official route as a fall-back, default mechanism or recourse when other more obvious routes fail.
Andrew Bennett (Denton and Reddish) (Lab): Does my right hon. Friend accept that there has always been a tension between the public health and management sides of a council? Does he also accept that, especially when houses have been bought up because of, for example, road widening, the council tends, in its management of the road-widening scheme, to resist pressure from the public health side to make temporary improvements to those properties? There is now a danger that, if local authorities do not have the resources to put their council properties into a state of good repair, the housing authority could manage a house with, for example, poor electrical wiring and be embarrassed by the pressure from the public health side of the council. It is important that the Minister emphasises that the public health side should have priority.
Keith Hill:
On the whole, I am inclined to agree with my hon. Friend and to emphasise that, of course, public health must have considerable priority. He perhaps takes us wider than the immediate issue, but I have listened to him very carefully and, as ever, I will bear his observations in mind as I pursue these matters.
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I took the point made by hon. Members in Committee that not all areas are blessed with a parish or community council, and I recognise that those councils do not have the same independence as justices of the peace, but I am not about to deprive those who have access to such a council of that second string to their bow, even though one is enough.
Subsection (4), as amended by amendment No. 10, ensures that all inspections, whether by the authority in response to an ordinary complaint or by the proper officer in response to an official complaint, are carried out in accordance with regulations, including those under clause 2, which will prescribe the method of hazard assessment. That means that all inspections carried out in response to complaints, whether ordinary or "official", will be carried out with the same rigour.
Amendment No. 13 further strengthens the procedure for official complaints by ensuring that it is properly rounded off with a report by the proper officer, whether the hazard revealed by the officer's inspection has turned out to be category 1 or 2. Amendments Nos. 9, 11 and 12 are technical and consequential.
On amendment No. 134, let me begin by assuring the hon. Member for Poole (Mr. Syms) of the continuing even-handedness of the Government's approach in these matters. As I said in Committee, we anticipate the start-up costs of these arrangements to be about £4 million to £5 million.
Members will be aware that in January we had a thorough debate in Committee on an amendment with the same purpose as amendment No. 134. Indeed, the Committee even divided on that amendment, so I acknowledge that certain members of the Committee were not entirely persuaded by my arguments. That said, my arguments against this amendment remain unchanged.
Clause 8 enables the Secretary of State in relation to England, and the National Assembly for Wales in relation to Wales, to give guidance to local housing authorities on the exercise of their functions under part 1. That guidance will be about how properties are to be inspected and assessed using the housing health and safety rating system and how authorities, once they have assessed a hazard, should apply the enforcement duties and powers provided in part 1. Those relate to the use of improvement notices, prohibition orders, hazard awareness notices, demolition orders, and clearance, and also to the use of the emergency measures under the provisions added to the Bill by Government amendment in Committee.
Amendment No. 134 would add to the topics on which guidance may be given. I must declare to the House that I remain entirely unconvinced that those additions are necessary. The amendment appears to question the fact that environmental health officers employed by local housing authorities are already qualified to operate the rating system.
I recognise that the rating system requires a change of approach by local authorities—this is the first time that we have brought risk assessment and housing conditions together under a regime that has been around in some shape or form for the past 80 years—but the housing health and safety rating system is essentially a tool to assist professional judgment, as I have repeatedly said.
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Environmental health practitioners are already used to risk assessment methods in other areas of their work. I am comforted by the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, which in its response to our recent consultation on the enforcement guidance gave an account of the work that practitioners do. The CIEH response points to environmental health practitioners'
"experience in risk assessment procedures and ability to take an holistic view of the health, safety and welfare of occupiers alongside traditional building and means of escape defects."
It seems to me, therefore, that the hon. Member for Poole takes a dimmer view of the experience and abilities of environmental health professionals than does the CIEH.
The chartered institute is a key housing stakeholder and I do not underestimate the contribution that its members will make to the success of our reforms, but it is clear that we are not talking here about the need for new qualifications. Rather, I have said that we will do what we can to ensure that the rating system is implemented smoothly. There will be training in the system, and we are considering what training will be required, but in the meantime, there cannot be many EHOs or authorities who remain ignorant of the principles underlying the system, as version 1 entered the public domain in 2000 and a draft of version 2 has been available since last December.
Proposed new subsection (1)(f), which amendment No. 134 would insert in clause 8, appears once again to be an attempt to write a regulatory impact assessment into the guidance. That is not the function of guidance on either a technical assessment or the use of the enforcement options. I have said before that inspections are likely to vary considerably in the time that they take, both in the field and back at base. The computer programme that will be part of version 2 of the housing health and safety rating system should enable inspectors to save time by entering data as they carry out the inspection.
As to proposed new subsection (1)(g), which would be inserted by the amendment, it is not clear in what circumstances authorities may need to compensate landlords. Landlords will have a right to appeal on the improvement notices and prohibition orders for which the Bill provides before they take effect, or, in the case of the emergency measures, after the measures have been taken.
Compensation may well be an outcome of an appeal in some such cases. I suggest that compensation is a matter that should be dealt with on appeal. I cannot agree that compensation should be a matter for Government guidance under clause 8, nor, as I said before, can I see that compensation is a likely outcome for a landlord who has kept his tenants in conditions so hazardous that a local authority has felt compelled to take enforcement action.
I turn now to the question of fire, which of course is one of the 29 hazards dealt with by the rating system. There will indeed be guidance on hazards from fire, which will cover the causes and preventative measures. Fire is one of the most important hazards. Nevertheless, I do not think it necessary to single out fire safety in the
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Bill. All the hazards will be spelled out in the regulations, which prescribe the housing health and safety rating system method under clause 2.
Mr. John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con): I am trying to be helpful to the Minister, as he knows I generally am. As he is moving on to those matters, will he specifically deal with the report by the National Landlords Association, with which he will be intimately familiar? I see he is looking at it with knowledge and familiarity. The report makes this absolutely clear:
"Just over 5 per cent. of England's population live in HMOs, which, statistics suggest, suffer just over 5 per cent. of England's fire fatalities."
I do not necessarily make the argument for the association, but I know that he will want to deal with its argument in the fullest and most persuasive way.
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