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Alan Simpson (Nottingham, South) (Lab): I rise to support amendment No. 87, which I intend to press to a vote.
I begin by thanking the Opposition spokesman, the hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr. Hayes), for his kind and generous remarks about my work on fuel poverty. That is an issue to which we will return later in the debate. I also want to thank the members of the Standing Committee that considered the Bill—and especially my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Attercliffe (Mr. Betts)—for what they said in Committee about the problems encountered in university cities, and the proliferation of properties that are being acquired and turned into HMOs.
I also want to congratulate the Government on grasping the nettle that is a national licensing scheme. However, I want to press the amendment, as the holes in what we have done mean that people will criticise us rather than thank us.
Last night, I attended a public meeting in my constituency. The banner headline on yesterday's edition of the Nottingham Evening Post was "Students Drove Me to the Brink of Suicide". A two-page spread inside told how attractive areas of the city were doomed to become the slums of the future. Such was the scale of feeling in the city that the meeting was covered on BBC Radio Nottingham as an outside broadcast.
I did not come across anyone at the meeting who was close to suicide, but many appeared to be close to murder. People expressed a great deal of anger at the way in which their lives, in settled areas and communities, had been turned over because properties that were traditionally family houses had been sucked up and converted into HMOs.
Nottingham is the fastest growing university city in the country. In a couple of years, its student population will total about 55,000. In some of the areas that I represent, half the properties are occupied by students in HMOs. The police complain that those areas are becoming unpoliceable. Schools say that families no longer live there, and that as a result there are no children to make up school roll requirements. Many residents say that they do not have a clue where the landlords of these properties can be found.
Representatives of landlords' associations were on the panel at last night's meeting, but even they said that they had nothing to fear from an inclusive regulatory process that meant that everyone running an HMO
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should be subject to a licence. However, there are gaps in the way that the Bill defines HMOs, and the landlords at last night's meeting said that those gaps will be an invitation to cowboys.
Good landlords do not present a problem—many of the best have been involved in setting up voluntary agreements, and they stand by those agreements—but cowboys are a problem for everyone. The landlords told the meeting that the proposed definition of HMO will allow the most exploitative of landlords to move from three-storey properties into two-storey properties, and that that is exactly what they will do. They said that those landlords will seek to exploit the definition and make the greatest amount of money for the smallest outlay. Do they care about standards and conditions? Not one jot, we were told, and that is why I urge the House to support a definition that is as inclusive as it needs to be if we are to preclude the Bill becoming a cowboys' charter.
Many residents at the meeting asked exactly the same questions as the local authority was trying to ask. How do we deal with misbehaviour by tenants when there is no constraint on the people who own the property? The Government—rightly, properly and proudly—have introduced a series of measures to tackle the standards of tenants' behaviour, including antisocial behaviour orders. In addition, local authorities have been invited to take a much tougher and intrusive line when it comes to telling council tenants, "Look, if you can't control your kid's behaviour, your tenancy is in jeopardy and you can expect to be evicted."
Do any similar powers exist in respect of the private sector, and HMOs? No. Last night, everyone—including representatives of the police, the local authority, landlords and the universities, and even student bodies—was asking for a level playing field. They want standards of decency and community stability to be part of the framework for housing provision, in which safe neighbourhoods and sustainable communities are delivered, and are not just slogans used by the Government.
We can achieve that if we have the courage to use a definition that covers the majority of properties currently being acquired and converted into HMOs. My definition would accept the three-storey limit but would apply to properties in which four or more people live. Effectively, therefore, it would also cover properties in the two-storey category.
I hope that the House has the courage to vote for the amendment. If it does, landlords, local authorities, students and communities across the country will sing our praises. If we do not have that courage, we will get only brickbats from communities that are divided against each other.
Mr. Harold Best (Leeds, North-West) (Lab): The account just given by my good and hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, South (Alan Simpson) mirrors what is going on in my constituency. One difference is that the equivalent of what happened at his public meeting last night happened seven years ago in my area.
The Bill is to be welcomed. I want to place on the record my appreciation of the efforts of my right hon. Friend the Minister for Housing and Planning. Real
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work has been done that will help to ease the real problems that exist. I want to deal with how the peculiarities of tenancy agreements and property management have been exaggerated by the explosive growth in student numbers. That has happened in densely populated areas that once were homes for traditional families.
Mr. Andy Reed (Loughborough) (Lab/Co-op): Does my hon. Friend accept that in a place such as Loughborough, a market town with a population of between 55,000 to 60,000, the impact of student numbers—there are between 12,500 and 14,500, depending on how one counts them—is even greater than in large cities? I support amendment No. 87 because the vast majority of properties in towns such as Loughborough are much smaller, being terraced houses with two or three bedrooms. The problem highlighted by my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, South (Alan Simpson) is enormous in my area, and has also caused house prices in the town centre to rise way beyond the traditional entry level for first-time buyers.
Mr. Best: I have no difficulty in endorsing that point. The problem is not confined to large cities. Leeds has a population of 750,000 and it has two universities. In addition, people attending Huddersfield university live in what has become the student area. The effect on house prices is equivalent to what my hon. Friend described in his constituency.
I want the Bill to contain a clear definition of the term "storey". How many storeys does a particular house have? For example, a traditional family house with a ground floor, a first floor and an attic used to be considered to have two storeys. Such houses used to cover acres of land in my constituency. However, for practical purposes—and those are what we must be concerned about—those houses have four storeys. That is important: thousands of houses that used to be family homes have been opened up to exploitation, with a catastrophic effect on what we might normally call community structures. For example, it is difficult to get people to vote. We have polls in which the turnout is only 12 per cent., which is unbelievable given that 10 years ago, in the same area, turnout was between 40 and 50 per cent. in local government elections.
The other issue is crime. That area had the highest burglary rate in the UK last year and the year before. It will probably have the highest rate this year and next. The peculiarities that we are legislating for must be understood. I appreciate the Minister's efforts, but this legislative programme must be further advanced as rapidly as possible.
3 pm
Keith Hill: This has been a lively debate, in the course of which many separate issues have been raised. I shall respond first to the issues raised by the hon. Member for Ludlow (Matthew Green) on behalf of the Liberal Democrats, because what I have to say may be of interest to all those who have contributed to the debate.
The hon. Gentleman spoke in support of amendments Nos. 127 and 128, and I have to tell him that the Government have no plans to extend mandatory
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licensing. However, as I have said before, we intend to review the operation of the licensing system within three years and we will come back to the House if any proposal to amend it finds favour. I hope that that gives the hon. Gentleman some comfort. I also hope that other colleagues will have heard that reassurance.
The hon. Gentleman also discussed other amendments, including new clause 21, with which I shall deal if I have time. However, we will have the opportunity to debate the issues of warm homes and energy efficiency under a later group. I turn, therefore, to those issues on which an intention to divide the House was expressed. Amendment No. 124 was spoken to by the hon. Gentleman. It would remove the exemption from the definition of houses in multiple occupation for those properties managed by universities and occupied by their students, such as halls of residence, in schedule 11.
I genuinely believe that there has been a misunderstanding in some quarters about whether property owned by universities but leased to other bodies for them to manage is also exempt from the definition. That is not the case, and Government amendment No. 60 clarifies that position. We tabled that amendment to make the situation clearer. Properties owned by universities and managed by another company, but of which the university retains control—and continues to receive the rents from the tenants—will be exempt from the HMO definition and, therefore, licensing. Properties that are owned by universities but managed by another organisation, and of which the university does not retain control—for example, because it has granted a long lease—will not be exempt from the HMO definition and may therefore be subject to licensing. That clarifies the position and goes some way towards what the National Union of Students and others would like. However, it does not go far enough for them, as they would like all properties owned by universities but managed by another organisation to come within the HMO definition.
The Government are aware of the concerns expressed by the National Union of Students about the conditions in some halls of residence. We are not, however, convinced that licensing or management regulations would be a solution to those problems. For a start, we are not aware that the problems are on the scale alleged. I have seen examples and they appeared mainly to concern the physical condition of the property. As I said in Committee, those issues can be addressed through part 1 of the Bill, which covers the health and safety rating system—and could not in any case be dealt with through licensing. Of course, I appreciate that there will be cases of management failure, but the Government expect universities and other higher education establishments to regard the health, safety and welfare of their students as of paramount importance, equally in the lecture halls and in the residential accommodation they provide.
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