It is striking that the highest percentage of people in the private rented sector is in London. The reason it is in London is that, excluding Somerset, London is the most dynamic part of the UK economy. It attracts an enormous number of international visitors and makes it possible for them to come, but it also attracts an

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enormous number of our fellow countrymen, who find London an attractive place in which to live and work. The Dick Whittington view of London—that the streets are paved with gold—has historically drawn people to the metropolis, and that requires flexible private rented capacity.

Why is that better, more flexible, than social housing? The reason is that social housing is limited in its number. If people move around the country—if someone moves from Somerset to London and gives up their social housing in Somerset—they have permanently given up something that they may never again be able to get back into. Social housing is, therefore, an enormous encourager of the status quo. It encourages people to stay where they started, where they got on to the housing ladder.

The same is true of controlled rents. Once people are in a property with a controlled rent, or one that is heavily regulated, they know that if they give it up they will never be in so beneficial a situation again. They have, therefore, less incentive to move to find employment or to increase their prosperity, and, given the way in which the law is devised, that is also often the case for any dependent children—or certainly one child—because they may be able to take on a low-priced tenancy, which discourages economic activity.

The flexibility of the private rented sector allows people to move and it allows economic activity to go where it is best needed; it allows people to move where the jobs are. That has been essential to the way in which the economy has gone since the late 1980s, and the private rented sector has been transformed by the huge number of accidental or amateur landlords that have been discussed. That is a very good thing. The idea that people can buy a property, let it out, involve themselves in the capitalist system, and effectively develop a pension for themselves by contributing to the private rented sector, is good both for the landlords and for the tenants. I happen to think that those accidental landlords are likely to be particularly good ones because their properties are the main source of their potential future income, so they have a deeper interest in the properties that they are letting out than almost anyone else is likely to have.

If I were to rent a property, I can think of nothing finer than to rent it from my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley, who, I imagine, would be a first-class landlord, and attentive if ever there was a problem with the bath overflowing, a dripping tap or the gas going off. I would have a service that was second to none. That applies to thousands, tens, probably hundreds of thousands, of individual landlords throughout the country, to whom their one property is their real nest egg. We heard from my hon. Friends the large number, as a percentage of the total property available, of people in exactly that category.

That interest that such people have means that, by and large, they are likely to be good landlords. The shadow Minister referred to being a good landlord being both morally right and good business sense, and I agree entirely. It was a fine point to make. It was almost a high point of his speech, marginally beaten by the idea that Governments should regulate less but more effectively.

The reason that it is both morally right and good business sense, and that it should be left to the market, is that if a landlord, a group of landlords or a letting

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agency have a good reputation, that is something they can advertise. They can have kitemarks. We have already discussed the associations that exist that will be able to say that a landlord comes up to certain standards and is signed up to the property ombudsman, so tenants know that if they go to a certain letting agent or landlord they will be likely to live in a better quality of property. That helps the landlord, because they would probably be able to get a better price, which makes good business sense. It makes good moral sense, because we all want people to live in high-quality accommodation. It is also good for the prospective tenant, who will be assured that not only is a quality property available, but that it will be managed in a reasonable way and with a form of appeal to the property ombudsman.

That is the laissez-faire approach. I approve of laissez-faire; it is a good economic approach. The governmental approach is that everything should be centrally controlled; that it should be uniform, die-cast and stamped down upon landlords and tenants, so that they fit and can all be regulated in exactly the same way. Although that may remove a small number of extreme cases—though I happen to doubt that—it has every chance of lowering the standard of the good landlords, because they no longer have any competitive advantage in saying that they have independently decided that they will offer such a degree of excellence, that they will have that verified and that they will go to the ombudsman. They are now in a situation where there is no competitive advantage for them to raise their standards. It is, therefore, a classic socialist example of attempting to level down standards rather than allowing the market to provide the best standards.

Why do I doubt that that will have a great effect on the lowest-quality landlord? It is because I think that the lowest-quality landlord tends to be borderline criminal anyway, and one thing that introducing a level 3 fine will not do is make a hardened criminal quail and quake in his boots. A life sentence might make him quail and quake in his boots, but a level 3 fine is not sufficient punishment to really make a difference to his criminal activities.

There is a further point that we should be concerned about. In the days of the greatest rent control there was the greatest incentive for landlords to be rotten, and I will explain why. In the current situation, with assured shorthold tenancies, if landlords require their asset back for other purposes, they can remove their tenant and sell their property at the full market price, so they have no reason to allow the property to run down or to behave aggressively. Under rent controls, that was simply not true. Rent controls put a substantial discount on the capital value of a rental property, so if a landlord was of criminal intent, or even just aggressive, they had a clear incentive to make their tenant’s life so unpleasant that they would be forced to leave. That is exactly what Rachmanism was about: forcing tenants out because the increase in capital value was so great that the landlord made money from it. With assured shorthold tenancies, however, there is no incentive for landlords to be really wicked. There is a perverse effect, because when one bucks the market the situation deteriorates for those one is aiming to protect most of all.

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There is a further point. Many landlords who might have a property covered by a protected rent would not dream of behaving badly or aggressively towards their tenant and would want to continue running the property properly for as long as possible, but there might come a point when they have to sell. At that point the highest price in the market is likely to be from the rogue landlord, because they can make more money by rogue practices and by forcing out tenants in the protected rented sector.

Therefore, anyone calling for more regulation in the private rented sector will encourage low standards. They do it for the most noble reasons, and I do not attack their motives at all. Indeed, I apologise to the hon. Member for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter) for the crack I made earlier about lawyers, because I did not realise at the time that he is a lawyer. It was not intended in any sense as a personal attack. The danger is that they will create something worse for the people they are trying to protect. That is why the market is likely to work better than regulation.

I go further from that point. What are the Bills that my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley talked about, and the support from the Labour Front Bench and the early-day motions all about? They are about hammering landlords. There will be people thinking about going into the private rented sector who might be uncertain about the result of the general election. I, of course, am certain that the Conservatives will have a majority of about 200 as we sweep through great swathes of the nation as our popularity rises with the success of our marvellous and glorious policies, but some people—it is extraordinary—are less positive and optimistic. They are doomsayers. They fear that the red peril might get in and that landlords will be in the front row before the firing squad to be shot down by these bullets of socialism. That, 18 month before a general election, would put people off entering the private rented sector.

This Bill, the other Bills and early-day motions associated with it and the policy that the Opposition have developed are already threatening the private rented sector, because there is a developing fear that some type of regulation will be introduced and that it will be unduly onerous and, worst of all, it will end up seeking to limit rents. The Leader of the Opposition has already called for price controls in one area. How long will it be before we hear calls for price controls in other areas? We know the deleterious consequences that follow price controls and that would hit the private rented sector.

I also said at the beginning that the Bill is an attack on the rights of property. That is an important point. The House has always defended the rights of property—the rights of individuals to own and enjoy their property and use it in a sensible and lawful manner—rather than unreasonably restricting people’s lawful use of their property. It is an incredibly important part of our constitutional settlement that the state should not interfere with property unnecessarily and that people will be able to get full value for their property without facing onerous Government regulations depriving them of that benefit.

The Bill is an attempt to reduce, limit and regulate people’s lawful enjoyment of their own property. I deeply regret that. If people decide to rent out a property, they do so under a free contract; nobody is forcing the tenant to take a particular property. There is choice. As long as there is choice, the legal enjoyment of property ought to

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remain sacrosanct within our national political settlement. That ties in with the liberty that people enjoy in contracts. There is no harm in a Government’s setting certain minimum contractual standards; that has been practised for a long time. However, when two free people decide that they should make an arrangement, the state ought to intervene as a later rather than an earlier resort.

In the market as it exists, landlords and tenants are both in a position of strength. Obviously, the landlord has the property, but it is only one property of many; there is not a monopolistic supplier of private rented properties. The buyer—the tenant—has many properties to choose from. He may go to a variety of letting agents and use a variety of landlords. That is an extremely sensible competitive system. It allows landlords to set their prices at the market rate and tenants to negotiate and have the freedom to decide which property they should or should not take.

The same applies to letting agents. We have heard a lot about the variable charges that they apply, but that is the market. All sorts of industries apply different rates—plumbers, electricians and supermarkets apply different rates. It is up to the consumer to decide which rate he is going to pay. Thank heavens we do not live in a society in which the state directs everybody—“You can only go to that agent rather than that agent.”

We cannot always protect people from themselves, and nor should we try. If people do not ask the letting agent, “What are your charges?”—a perfectly basic question—how can we turn up and say, “Well, you didn’t ask so you’ve been overcharged.” Letting agents will set their prices competitively because there are many of them—so many of them that the Government cannot count them. Primary school children learn how to count, but Her Majesty’s Government, with their civil service and all the resources at their command, cannot count the number of letting agents, which indicates that there is a competitive market and the ability to go from one to another and check the prices.

I happen to have greater confidence in the electorate than the socialists tend to have. I believe that my electors and constituents in North East Somerset are intelligent enough to check out prices for themselves. I campaigned in Corby during the by-election; I apologise to the hon. Member for Corby. I found that the hon. Gentleman’s electors were also first-class, intelligent, capable people, easily able to see whether one price was higher than another. Although they elected him, they do not need his help to compare prices every time they go to Tesco’s or Sainsbury’s. It is remarkably simple for people to get a comparison, and that is also part of the competitive landscape.

If someone asks for the full gamut of charges, they may well see that the agent charges £10 for one part of the process but £200 later for the inventory check. Inevitably, there is some degree of competitive pricing—low at one stage and high at another—so that the charges overall balance out. However, in many cases, the bulk of the charges impact on the landlord rather than the tenant. The charges for letting are absorbed by the landlord because he has taken the agent on as his agent rather than the agent for the prospective tenant. It is important to remember that the agent is for the seller of the good, not for the purchaser of the good. We do not need to protect people from themselves quite so much.

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I want to respond to a point made by the hon. Member for Hammersmith about the legal agreements and the need for them to be written. He explained that if one of them ever got to court, it became enormously expensive. That is a perfectly valid point, but it assumes that there are not many thousands of other verbal agreements that never come to court and have an absolutely minimal cost. Again, it is about letting people decide freely for themselves.

May I say what a great pleasure it is to welcome my hon. Friend the Member for Epping Forest (Mrs Laing) to the Chair for the first time when I am speaking? It was an honour to be one of her nominators and a real pleasure to see her elected and now sitting there with such elegance and kindliness in allowing me to speak. It is rather gratifying not to have needed to catch your eye, Madam Deputy Speaker, because I was already in full flow. It is a pleasure to welcome you to the Chair.

To recapitulate, I was talking about the point made by the hon. Member for Hammersmith about legal arrangements needing to be written because otherwise it was more expensive, which I was countering by saying that there were thousands of verbal agreements that never went to court, even if the one that did proved somewhat complex. Let me turn to the detail of the Bill. “Detail” may be the wrong word, because it is vague; it leaves an enormous amount for Ministers to decide at a later date. I am very suspicious of this. In the 18th century, there was a great debate in this House—in a predecessor Chamber, of course, but this House none the less, in a spiritual sense—on the resolution that

“the influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and should be diminished”.

Bills like this give more power to the Crown because of what they allow Ministers to do by regulation. This Bill has only three pages—that includes all the paraphernalia that is necessary to a Bill, so only about two pages of actual law—but it opens up the opportunity for Ministers to take very widespread powers.

First, there is annual registration. I am not in favour of that when it is unnecessary. There used to be a dog licence, and it was not too onerous. It cost 37.5p, a price that was finally changed. It is one tax that was reduced before it was abolished, as it went down to 37p when the halfpenny was abolished. Registration is not, of itself, offensive. Nevertheless, the Bill says that landlords must

“provide all the information prescribed in regulations by the Secretary of State as required in the Register.”

Who knows what information that could be? Who knows how far the Secretary of State might go in his regulatory demands, how much power we might be giving not to this wise and good Government, as represented by my hon. Friend the Minister, but to a rapacious socialist Government who would put down regulation after regulation and impost upon impost?

Moreover, as my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley said, the fee that could be charged is not determined and so could be set at any level. We would find that law-abiding landlords who had their one property to let out went from profit to loss as they found that the impositions placed on them were so great that they could not afford to continue. What this does—it is fascinating how socialism often does this—is to corporatise the private rented sector, because those who would be able to cope with it would be the larger companies and

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letting organisations. That perhaps explains why some of the bureaucratic elements involved in letting properties are quite keen on this regulation—it plays into the hands of big players against the individual with one property to let.

I return to the example given by my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley of the person who inherits and becomes, completely inadvertently, the landlord of a property that was already let out by, say, his parents. Will these elderly parents not worry about the burden they may be leaving for their beneficiaries in dealing with this complex legal system, the charges that are being imposed, and a potentially unending list of regulations that could prescribe anything?

The Bill does not limit the information required, which could include prices. I learned when covering emerging markets that registering prices is only a very short step from price control. One country I used to look at made a great thing of freeing up the price of noodles—a deregulatory measure. However, the price of noodles still had to be registered with the Government, and if someone put the price up the Government refused to accept their registration. Therefore, although they had claimed to have deregulated and not to be regulating the price, by the power of registration they were able to regulate it.

I am deeply concerned that the Bill has within it a rather large Trojan horse, with the hon. Member for Mansfield leading as Odysseus in its innards, although there is perhaps more to fear from his honourable colleagues about what might ensue from it. It is a very unsatisfactory way of legislating. Legislation ought to be precise, limited and clear, and we ought not to give too much power to Governments.

Although I have doubts about a Labour Government in general, it is not particularly the Opposition Front Benchers I worry about, but the unforeseen circumstances of a really bad Government who might go way beyond the norms of our constitutional settlement and abuse powers such as those suggested by this Bill. That is why it is so important that this House should always circumscribe what it writes into law. Not all Governments will be good—we know that—but some will deliberately abuse the powers they have in their hands.

The Bill suggests penalties for not registering. I am against more penalties. There are far too many crimes already in this country that people can commit without really wishing to do any wrong. We have had a marvellous fall in crime, which is hugely to be welcomed. I am sure it is all down to the Government’s policies and that it has nothing to do with longer-term consequences, demographics or anything of that kind. It has all happened in the past three years and that is a great triumph. However, I do not want to see crime going back up purely because this House legislates to criminalise things. That would add cost to the operation of the state as a whole, increase burdens on the taxpayer and make the lives of British subjects more onerous. Surely this House should always be aiming to make the lives of the British people better, easier and happier, without constant intrusion and regulation spewing forth.

Similarly, I am nervous about the proposal to regulate private sector letting agents. As I have said, it seems to me that there are so many of them that there is genuine

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and deep competition, and competition is a much better curer of ills than state regulation. A lot of this is informal. Even in this House, every so often an e-mail comes around saying, “I have a property to let,” or “A friend of mine has a property to let. Are you interested? It’s in the Division bell area.” Do we really want to turn someone harmlessly working in a parliamentary office into a criminal because they have not registered as a letting agent for the purpose of sending one e-mail? Is that the degree of law that we wish to implement when there is already a perfectly workable system, with kitemarks, that is competitive and allows for up to 17,000 letting agents in the country at large?

I have already spoken about written tenancy agreements. I completely understand the desire of lawyers to have everything written down and buttoned up. If we look at what lawyers have done to us and at the legislation this House has passed, we will see that when we first started passing legislation it could be done on a few sheets of paper. It was clear, distinct and easily justiciable. We now pass so many volumes of legislation that practically all the legislation up to 1945 is in fewer volumes than each year of legislation since 1945. We have an incredible desire to write everything down in quintuplicate, in flowery language that is not understood by most people—half the time it is not understood by most lawyers—and that leads to endless litigation and complication. People in Somerset agreeing to let a property one to another over a pint of cider in the Crown—that fine establishment in West Harptree—are doing something that saves them cost and effort and that keeps things out of the hands of lawyers.

I am against the written requirement for tenancy agreements, I am against the need to register everybody who is at any point involved in letting a private sector property, and I am against the onerous and unending requirement of registration being put on landlords. I am for trusting the people to have the good sense to make arrangements for themselves that work, and for knowing what their best interests are and being able to operate in a competitive market. I am for the rights of property and I am for the liberty of people to decide what is best for them and their families. I am against the socialist view that it always has to be done by the state. The over-management and excessive intrusion of the state have done so much damage to this country in recent years. We need to reverse that. We need to roll back regulation and allow freedom once again to flourish. I shall therefore oppose the Bill.

12.55 pm

Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab): It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship for the first time, Madam Deputy Speaker. I hope to do so many more times and I congratulate you on your election.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield (Sir Alan Meale) on an excellent speech and an excellent Bill. I would like to extend the same courtesy to the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Corby (Andy Sawford). It is a pleasure to see him in his place. It is the first time I have heard him speak from the Front Bench and I hope to do so many more times, because he made a good speech that explained why this is a good Bill.

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I am a rare contributor on Friday mornings, so I have not had the pleasure of hearing the regulars, as it were. With all due respect, the phrase “Never mind the quality, feel the width” comes to mind. I was not greatly persuaded by the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies). I am sorry he has had to leave us and host his luncheon party, but I felt that he simply took the anti-regulation speech off the shelf without any consideration of the Bill. He confessed, either because of the late publication of the Bill or because he did not have the time, that he had not looked at it in detail. If he had done so he would have seen that it is not a great addition to regulatory burden or an impediment imposed on the private rented sector, but a necessary and modest proposal. It would be effective in an area where more effective regulation is needed.

With all due respect to the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg), I am not persuaded by his Hobbesian vision of a private sector market where, to avoid Rachmanism, private tenants should sign away their rights and the only way for them to have any sort of protection would be by allowing landlords to evict them on a whim, which is effectively what shorthold tenancies do, without giving any reason. If private tenants insisted on some form of protection or regulation, they would stand in fear of the type of behaviour that Rachman and his ilk got up to in the 1950s—which led to the major expansion of social housing to counter such behaviour.

I look forward to hearing what the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Bristol West (Stephen Williams) has to say. It is a great pleasure to see him on the Front Bench—it is long overdue. He has been given a brief to which he is well suited and I am interested to hear how he will deal with this matter. During a longueur in the speech of the hon. Member for Shipley, I could not help but do a quick Google of the Minister’s views. I came across a video—I advise other hon. Members to watch it—that he made for Shelter. I do not want to embarrass him, but I think it is entirely to his credit. He talks about his own experience of growing up in the private rented sector—his experience of eviction and poor living conditions. He made the video in the context of the “Bristol Rotten Homes” campaign, which was

“calling on the new Mayor of Bristol to take action on poor housing conditions in the private rented sector.”

Shelter stated that

“1 in 5 homes in Bristol are rented out by a private landlord yet over a quarter of these homes do not meet the Decent Homes Standard. That means many renters in Bristol are being forced to live in unsafe and indecent conditions.”

The Minister visited the Bristol Rotten Homes shop, which was a spoof letting agent that was promoting the campaign and providing housing and debt advice.

Going by that, I suspect that the Minister’s experiences and views are rather closer to mine and those of my hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield than to the brief that he has been given to read out today. This will be the first test of whether he can stand at the Dispatch Box and read out something with which he disagrees entirely, but I am sure that it will not be the last, as long as the coalition lasts.

If anybody wants to know why further regulation and scrutiny of the private lettings market are needed, they need only watch the BBC programme on racial

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discrimination in lettings policy that was aired last week. I am sure that some Members saw that programme, but I will describe what happened for those who did not. Having been tipped off, the BBC reporters obtained a flat and purported to let it out through 10 letting agencies in north-west London. They asked each letting agent not to let Afro-Caribbean people view the property or have access to it. Every single letting agent agreed to do that without demur and with enthusiasm. That is not only clearly unlawful, but disreputable.

I would have thought that that behaviour would surprise hon. Members on both sides of the House, given that it is almost 50 years since such discrimination was outlawed. Clause 2 would attack such disgraceful behaviour, but there are more punitive criminal sanctions for it, which I hope will be sought. The fact that such behaviour is, on the evidence of the programme, endemic across private letting agencies should at least give us pause for thought.

I know that the Conservative party—although not the Liberal Democrat party any longer—believes that qualifications in the teaching profession should not be required for a job in a state school. However, in most areas of life where people are at risk or where people seek to gain a benefit, regulation is appropriate. One would not expect lawyers to be unqualified. One would not expect to be able simply to set up and run a business in any professional walk of life without any regard to qualifications. That is not possible for estate agents. I really do not know why it should be possible for private letting agencies.

It is true that the private rented sector declined substantially for most of the last century. It is also true that it has increased massively over the past 10 years. Although I support and believe in a strong private rented sector, most of the reasons for that expansion are not good ones. One reason is the decline of the social housing sector, which is due to fewer properties being built and to properties being sold or demolished. That sector generally provides decent, affordable homes for people on low and middle incomes. Another reason is that owner-occupation, particularly in London but in other parts of the country as well, has become unaffordable in a way that it was not 20 or 30 years ago.

The average rent levels in my constituency are £245 a week for a studio flat, £467 a week for a two-bedroom flat and £770 a week for a three-bedroom house. Those rents are four to five times as much as one would pay in the social housing sector, and yet it is the private rented sector that is expanding and the social housing sector that is contracting. Those prices are unaffordable to most people, even those on several times the average income.

There are also far worse problems with housing conditions in the private rented sector than in any other housing sector, and we know that people are being forced into that sector because there is no alternative. I am afraid I did not recognise the rather rosy view that the hon. Member for North East Somerset took of a free market in which the purchaser has as much discretion and power as the vendor. That is not the private rented market that operates in London. By the Government’s own criteria, some 35% of properties in the private rented sector are described as non-decent.

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Conservative Members have made the point that we do not need regulation because there are other ways of obtaining redress. My hon. Friend the Member for Corby answered that point by saying that the cuts in Government spending have removed most of those avenues of redress. The most obvious one to me, although he did not mention it, is legal aid, which is no longer available for most areas of housing law. Many cases such as some that I have litigated—as often for the landlord as for the tenant, so I am not speaking with any vested interest—will not come to court now, simply because a tenant who is living in poor conditions, being discriminated against, not having their repairs done or subject to oppressive behaviour by their landlord can get no advice on their rights. If the state takes away the ability to self-help, it has a greater role to play in enforcing standards in the private rented sector.

Andy Sawford: My hon. Friend makes an important point about legal aid changes. Does he also find that his constituency is affected by cuts to citizens advice bureau services, welfare rights advice services and other such organisations that can help local people who are concerned about their rights? Mine certainly is.

Mr Slaughter: Of the four main advice agencies in my constituency, two have shut down in the past three years, one of which was a specialist housing advice agency. The others have had their work curtailed by budget cuts. They have either stopped taking new customers or, as in the case of the citizens advice bureau, become so overloaded that they can no longer provide the service that they would wish to provide. That is a real problem.

Conservative Members made the point that the Bill would have an impact on individual private landlords. I have great sympathy with small landlords, who provide opportunities for people and expand the market. Many of them, if not most, are very good, but that does not excuse them from providing proper services and decent conditions for their tenants. If the conditions that the Bill suggests imposing on them were onerous, Conservative Members might have a point, but they are not. One cannot excuse landlords on the basis that they are amateurs or have come into the property market by mistake or happenstance. That is not a reason for failing to ensure that they provide their tenants with decent living conditions. That responsibility must fall on them.

I am afraid that some of the worst landlords I have to deal with are private landlords who acquire a number of properties and deliberately run them to a poor standard. They usually get their referrals through local authorities. I have seen some utterly appalling housing conditions in the past two or three years, of a type that I had not seen for the previous 20 or 30 years. Often, the landlords benefit from a large amount of public money through housing benefit. The state has a legitimate interest in ensuring that it gets value for money.

I believe in a strong private rented sector, but a more professional one in which there is more investment by pension funds and larger organisations that have the capacity and management skills needed to provide longer-term tenancies and fairer rents. Such organisations could

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perhaps also manage with a lower turnover of people and with finance received over a longer period. As we have seen from the endorsements to proposals in the Bill by some of the more respectable landlord organisations, that would encourage a virtuous spiral in the private rented sector, rather than what we have at the moment, which is a free-for-all and downward spiral. It is a sellers’ market—particularly in London, but I am sure elsewhere too—and on that basis tenants have little choice and people are living in the sorts of conditions described by my hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield. It is appalling.

About one third of those in private rented accommodation are families with children. If one reads the Evening Standard or listens to the media, one would think we are talking simply about “generation rent” and young professionals who are waiting to get on the housing ladder and who are forced into private rented accommodation while they wait. That may be right—they are certainly an important group and more should be done to enable people to get into home ownership—but increasingly we are going back to those Rachmanesque days in which vulnerable people are forced to live in those conditions. Part of that involves the relationship between social housing and the private rented sector and it is now possible—this is an intended, rather than an unintended consequence of the Government’s attack on social rent—for a local authority permanently to discharge its obligation towards homeless families to the private rented sector. That means that vulnerable people are put into the hands of what are often very poor private landlords.

Even before one gets to that stage, because of the shortage of social housing many families are in temporary private rented accommodation for up to 10 years. I will give one example from my surgery from the past two weeks. A family of six who had been in overcrowded, private rented temporary accommodation for 10 years, were finally—very unusually in Hammersmith—made an offer of a permanent two-bedroom flat. That was clearly inadequate for six people, so they had to refuse it and therefore lose their right to housing. In the end—there is still an obligation—the family were told, “Yes, we will find you a property with four bedrooms in the private rented sector for £500 a week”. That four-bedroom property turned out to be a two-bedroom council flat that had been purchased and converted by the technique of putting a piece of plywood over the bath and making the bathroom into a bedroom, making the store cupboard into a bathroom, the kitchen into a bedroom, and putting the kitchen in the lounge. It was effectively a two-bedroom property for a family of six. That is anecdotal, but it is typical of the type of problems I see in my surgery every week. I have had hundreds, if not thousands, of such cases.

As local authorities have a shortage of social accommodation to let—in my local authority there is a deliberate policy of demolishing and selling off social housing—they are forced more and more to rely on substandard private rented accommodation. Owing to the benefit cap, the only type of accommodation likely to be available in London will be of very low quality; alternatively, it will be a long way outside London.

We have a responsibility to private tenants, particularly if they are vulnerable, such as the elderly or those with disabilities, and that responsibility is not being discharged.

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I will not go through the Bill clause by clause as other Members have done, but if the hon. Member for North East Somerset looks at it again, he will see that when the rhetoric is put aside, the measures proposed are straightforward and pragmatic. Greater regulation is undoubtedly needed in the sector.

Greater transparency is needed, too. I do not recognise this picture of the all-knowing tenant going into the letting agency and quizzing the agent carefully on the fee and charging issues. It is perfectly clear that many agencies—not just the rogue ones; I am afraid that this is almost the norm so far as letting agencies are concerned—are not transparent. I have heard complaints about some of the blue-chip letting agencies—I shall not name them here—that let out some of the most expensive properties in London and take every possible opportunity to extort money from their tenants.

That applies right through the tenancy from the time that the tenant first signs up to the time of leaving it. First asked for money as a deposit or for rent in advance, the tenant will then be asked to pay administration fees, holding fees, fees for renewal and finally fees on leaving. The tenant is over a barrel and not in a position to escape. If a tenant is in need of housing and there is only one agency that will accept him or offer something within his price range, there is little choice. In those circumstances, it is all very well saying “caveat emptor”; a wide choice does not apply. The landlord has the whip hand on every occasion. If measures can be brought in, not necessarily to regulate but to make the fees transparent, and if we can have greater scrutiny of the worst type of landlords such as those exposed by the BBC, that would be worth while.

Written tenancy agreements are standard agreements these days. It is possible to provide one’s own, but 99% of landlords will take out an assured shorthold tenancy agreement. Everybody will know what that is. Of course disputes can arise over written contracts—that can be taken as a given—but difficulties and confusion are far more likely if the terms of a tenancy are not clear. If it is an oral tenancy, we can bet our lives that the terms are not going to be clear.

We know that local authorities are under pressure, and nobody wants to put more pressure on them at this time. I think the scheme in the Bill is effectively the beginning of self-regulation. It asks good landlords to identify themselves and allows bad landlords and bad letting agents to be identified so that they can be dealt with in a way that prevents them from abusing their tenants any longer, as some of them have done for week after week.

I shall end my comments there. I do not want to delay the Bill’s Second Reading, but I suspect that other Members may well have that in mind. My hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield has done us a great service in bringing this Bill forward and in identifying what has often been a neglected area of public policy. Frankly, it has been neglected not just recently, but over 30 years or more. People are suffering silently. It is naive of the hon. Member for Shipley to say, “I do not get these people flooding into my surgery”, because people often do not know their rights. They may be transient tenants, migrant labourers or families who simply do not know what to do. They are prey all the time to poor landlord practices and are exploited by letting agencies on the way there. If we can do something, even through these modest proposals,

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to address that, it should be viewed as an obligation. I await the Minister’s speech to see whether my speech has persuaded him to throw his brief away and say what we know he probably feels.

1.18 pm

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Stephen Williams): What a pleasure it is to thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for calling me to speak. You and I served together for nearly three and a half years on the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee, so we know each other well. I feel somewhat sorry for the Committee Chairman, the hon. Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen). In the space of a week, he has lost the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt), who has become the shadow Secretary of State for Education; he has lost me, moving to my present position; and then the House took away you, Madam Deputy Speaker, to your position as well. I know that the hon. Member for Nottingham North wishes you well, as do I.

This is an extraordinary occasion. We began the debate this morning, and it has already lasted well into the afternoon. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter). Before—as he mentioned—my latitude was somewhat constrained, we worked closely together on foreign policy issues, and I like and respect him greatly as a Member of Parliament.

The hon. Gentleman mentioned a video in which I took part with members of Shelter. I had forgotten about that. I am sure that we all often forget things that we say: one thinks of Paul Simon’s lyric,

“all my words come back to me in shades of mediocrity”.

However, I do not resile from anything that I said when I took part in that video with Shelter in the pop-up shop on College Green in my constituency during the Bristol mayoral elections in November last year. The state of some parts of the private rented sector should indeed disturb us. I was talking then about my own experience of living in rooms in a terraced house which was in poor condition, and of being evicted. The one detail that the hon. Gentleman left out—perhaps he had not watched the full clip—was that I was 10 at the time. That was in 1977, and obviously things have moved on a bit since then.

We have heard several speeches so far, although perhaps not as many as we thought could be accommodated in the time available. I pay tribute to the verbal dexterity of the hon. Members for Shipley (Philip Davies) and for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg), although they have now left the Chamber. I believe that we may be hearing from more Government colleagues shortly.

Let me begin by responding to some of what has been said. I believe that the private rented sector plays an essential role in the English, and British, housing markets, and I would not want anyone who operates in that sector to think that the House is against it. A great deal of negativity has been expressed about it today, although some Members have issued the caveat that they recognise it to be an essential part of our housing market. I believe that it provides much-needed flexibility to that market.

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When I graduated from Bristol university a quarter of a century ago—I know that is hard to believe—I lived first in a one-room bedsit with plenty of strangers in the house. When I could afford it, I lived in a two-bedroom bedsit in the attic of a terraced property in Bristol, but still had to share a bathroom. Then, when I could afford it, I rented a one-bedroom flat, and when I could afford a bit more, I bought a two-bedroom flat. The private rented sector provides people with not just the first rung, but often the second and third rungs on the housing ladder, as well as providing liquidity and flexibility in the housing market. That is certainly true in my constituency, Bristol West, which contains the highest proportion of people living in the private rented sector in the country.

I am grateful to the House of Commons Library for providing me with figures from the 2011 census while I have been sitting on the Front Bench this morning and this afternoon. I think that I could have read the entire census during the four hours that have elapsed so far. In Bristol West, 21,538 households rent in the private sector, just over 40% of the total housing market in my constituency. That is topped only by the proportion in Cities of London and Westminster—where we are at the moment—which is 42%. The average in the country as a whole is about 15%. I have looked up the statistics relating to the constituency of every Member who has spoken today.

Let me at this point congratulate the hon. Member for Mansfield (Sir Alan Meale) on his success in the ballot, and on provoking and stimulating a very good discussion. I can inform him that the proportion of households in the private rented sector in Mansfield is 13.6%. In Hammersmith—as I am sure the hon. Member for Hammersmith is aware—it is just under a third. In Shipley and in Bury North—I believe we may be hearing from the latter shortly—it is about 14%, as it is in Corby. In north-east Somerset it is rather lower, at 10%.

The private rented sector has a great role to play in the future as well. Traditionally, private landlords have often been small providers who might only have one property that they let out; they might have acquired it to generate a stream of rental income to support them during their current life or, as is often the case, to provide for their retirement. This country has over a long period lacked large institutional investors in the private rental market, however, and the hon. Member for Hammersmith lamented that. In many other European countries it is the norm to rent accommodation and not to have this country’s obsession with buying, and they also have many large investors in their private rented sector. The Government want that market to develop here, too, so that there is more choice for tenants. Large providers are likely to invest heavily in quality and provide long-term leases.

That is why the Government have set up the Build to Rent fund, which hopes to generate £1 billion in investment. The Department has already agreed its first contract, in Southampton on Centenary Quay, where, as part of a wider scheme, 100 homes will be provided in the private rental market. The Government have helped to the tune of £3.5 million to get that development off the ground. We are, therefore, doing what we can to encourage larger investors and larger schemes to become more the

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norm in this country. Other first-round bids are being evaluated by the Department, and we have opened a second round of invitations to bid, which will end on 31 October. We would welcome more bids from new providers in this market.

We also have the private rented sector guarantee scheme. We are prepared to guarantee £3.5 billion for large potential investors who wish to enter the private rental market and provide new accommodation. Discussions are ongoing with several large institutional investors who may be interested in taking advantage of that scheme.

The growth of the private rental housing market—and, of course, of social housing as well—is key to the economy, so I should also mention the Government schemes Help to Buy, which enables more people to buy their own home, and the Growing Places fund, which has helped house builders, including in my own constituency in Bristol, to get schemes that were frozen after the crash of 2008 and 2009 off the ground.

The Government also want more affordable housing to be built. Our aim is to have 170,000 more affordable housing units built by the end of this Parliament, and we have already achieved 84,000, which will go some way towards addressing the shortfall that arose during the 13 years of Labour Government. For much of that period—certainly the first half of it when the economy was growing strongly and tax revenues were buoyant—they could, frankly, have done rather more to get affordable housing going.

As the housing market is important for the economy, it gives me great pleasure to be able to say that today’s GDP figures again show that the economy is returning to strong growth. We have had news that the economy has grown by 0.8%—again, that news came to us while we have been sitting in the Chamber today. Most pleasing of all, the construction sector, which is the sector that collapsed the most during the difficult period, grew in the most recent quarter by 2.5%. I think we can say that the economy is growing and Britain is getting building again.

Let me turn to points that the hon. Member for Mansfield made in introducing the Bill. He said that he found it amazing that 9 million people lived in the private rented sector. I found that amazing as well; I raised my eyebrows at that point. My understanding is that there are about 3.8 million households in the private rented sector, and as other speakers have said, there are children in about a third of those. I do not know whether we can extrapolate 9 million from that, but I suspect that the number is a little smaller. However, the number is significant, and the point is that the Government wish it to grow.

Sir Alan Meale: The figures are from the Minister’s Department, so I think that they are correct.

Stephen Williams: I thank the hon. Gentleman for that. We have heard that there are many estimates, and indeed ranges of estimates, available to Departments from various providers and people who survey the housing market, but the firm figure that is often quoted is that 3.8 million households are in the sector.

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The hon. Gentleman referred to selective licensing, a power that is already available to local authorities. When Bristol city council was controlled by Liberal Democrats, it initiated selective licensing in Easton in my constituency, so I know that authorities are making use of that power. He said that it was being strangled by red tape; I am not sure what the evidence base is for that, because he did not expand on that point, but back in the summer, when my predecessor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Bath (Mr Foster), was in office, he initiated a survey of all housing authorities. We are still gathering in the responses, but thus far we have had 194. Given that there are about 300 housing authorities, obviously quite a lot have not yet responded, or did not feel that there was an issue with selective licensing that merited a response. From the 194 that did respond, we know that 16 selective licensing schemes have been introduced in different parts of the country. Obviously, there are still data to be crunched, and I am sure that we will be able to say more about that in due course.

The hon. Gentleman also mentioned the issue of rogue landlords—as did other speakers, perhaps to counter what he said—as if there was nothing that local authorities could do about the minority of private sector landlords who can be described in that way. Of course, local authorities already have powers that they can use; certainly, as regards health and safety, there are powers to do with the safety and sanitary condition of houses, flats and bedsits in the private rented market. I think that somebody—possibly the hon. Member for Hammersmith or the shadow Minister—mentioned that local authorities face budgetary pressures. I certainly acknowledge that, but the Department has made available a £3 million fund for district, unitary or metropolitan authorities that feel that they have particular issues with tackling poor standards in private sector accommodation. They can bid for resources to deal with those issues.

Andy Sawford: That £3 million seems a very small amount, but we should welcome it. Will the Minister tell us how much of it has been allocated to date, when allocations will be made, and how Corby borough council might bid for some of it?

Stephen Williams: On the last point, I imagine that the Department has invited all housing authorities to bid for money from the fund, and has published the criteria. Hopefully Corby council knows what it needs to do. On take-up, if the hon. Gentleman puts his question in a written form, I am sure that I can give him a full answer, but I am afraid that I cannot give him an oral answer at this moment.

As I listened to the hon. Member for Mansfield and others, I thought: what problem is his Bill seeking to address? Obviously, there are problems in the sector. I looked at some tenant satisfaction statistics from the English housing survey, from which we get our most recent, comprehensive data. There are some interesting comparisons between the private rented and local authority sectors.

In the private sector, the English housing survey found that 83.6% of tenants were fairly or very satisfied with their landlord, compared to 76.6% who had the local authority as their landlord. Some 9.7% of private sector tenants were dissatisfied, compared with almost 17% of people in local authority housing. That might

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back up the point made by the hon. Member for Shipley that his constituency surgeries quite often see complaints about a sector that is already heavily regulated and has democratic accountability—that is, local authorities. Although there are clearly problems in the private rented sector, they are smaller than in the sector that is under the direct control of housing authorities.

Sir Alan Meale: Assuming that the Minister’s figures might be correct and about 15% of tenants in the local authority sector are dissatisfied, let us take the figure for the private rented sector, which is 3.7 million households. Fifteen per cent. of that is half a million—a not insignificant number—so we have to deal with the fact that huge numbers of people show dissatisfaction.

Stephen Williams: Those are not my figures. As I said, they are from English housing survey data, which are available for all of us to look at. I have acknowledged several times that there are problems in the sector. The hon. Member for Hammersmith mentioned the Shelter pop-up shop. When that was in Bristol, people cited extreme cases of exposed electrical wiring, poor plumbing and awful sanitation. Local authorities already have powers to deal with those transgressions. That is what we want to see them tackling, and the £3 million fund that the Department has opened should help them.

On the tenant satisfaction data, repairs are often an issue about which people come to see us as constituency MPs. The housing survey data show that 72% of tenants in the private sector are satisfied that their landlord deals with repairs in a satisfactory way, compared with 66% in local authorities. I am not in any way trying to diminish the fact that there may well be problems in the private rented sector; I am trying to put those into context. Even in a regulated environment, and even in an environment where each of the three main parties in the Chamber controls housing authorities and councillors have oversight of what they are doing, there is a certain amount of tenant dissatisfaction. No matter what the regulation, we can never make that dissatisfaction go away.

Andy Sawford: The Minister has clearly studied the English housing survey in some detail. It is interesting to hear his take on that survey, but it would be helpful and relevant to get his take on the trends that that survey shows. It clearly shows a rise in the number of people in private rented accommodation and a trend in dissatisfaction with private rented accommodation.

Stephen Williams: I will look at the survey in even more detail to deal with the points that the shadow Minister raises, but he is right. The private sector is growing, and that is something that we wish to encourage. That is why we have the policies in place to get people investing in the private sector in order to provide extra accommodation, which is needed in general, but is needed also to provide the flexibility that many of our constituents would want.

Let me turn to the Bill and its four clauses, the first of which establishes a mandatory national register of private landlords. When the shadow Minister was speaking, he allowed me to intervene once about the Rugg review. I tried to put it to him that that review was commissioned by the Labour Government. One issue that it considered

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was whether there should be a national register of landlords. It rejected that and the then Labour Government, as represented either by the present shadow Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), or by the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey), both of whom were Housing Ministers in the period of the Rugg review, accepted that recommendation. The hon. Member for Corby said to me, but would not allow me to intervene in response, that the general election got in the way of implementation. The Rugg review was in 2008. A lot of things happened between 2008 and May 2010, but clearly a decision was made by predecessors in my Department not to introduce a mandatory national register of private landlords.

The range of benefits that a register might provide was not clear, but one was that tenants would be able to find out who their landlord was. Under the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985, a tenant can ask the collector of the rent, which in many cases may well be a letting agent, to disclose the identity of the ultimate landlord. That information has to be provided within 21 days and failure to do so is an offence. If as constituency Members we find that people do not know who their landlord is, or the local authority does not know and may want to encourage the tenant to find out, perhaps we should publicise that provision, which has been on the statute book for quite a long time.

It is unclear what a national register would achieve. We certainly believe that it would create an unnecessary burden on all landlords, whereas what has been acknowledged in the debate is that there is a small minority of potentially rogue landlords whom we should be concerned about, rather than the vast majority who provide a good service to their tenants. None the less, many private landlords are already in industry accreditation schemes.

One concern is that the introduction of any new compulsory burden of regulation involves a cost. The hon. Member for Mansfield said that there would be no compliance costs, but I would be surprised if a national register of anything was introduced without some compliance costs. People in the private rented sector are looking to make a profit and like any private enterprise or individual in business they will pass costs visited on them on to their customers, who in this case are tenants.

Sir Alan Meale: Why is there a strange state of affairs that tenants have to list themselves on either the electoral or the community charge registers, but landlords do not have to register, unless they are in the social sector? Why are many of them trying to keep out of the limelight and not live up to their responsibilities?

Stephen Williams: With respect, the hon. Gentleman is conflating several obligations that are not the same. You and I, Madam Deputy Speaker, will have debated the requirement to register to vote many times on the Select Committee and during consideration of Government legislation on individual electoral registration, but that is totally different from someone in business having to disclose their business practices via a register. We have Companies House, where directors have to be registered, but I would be hard-pressed on the spur of the moment

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to think of another area of business where the owners of the business have to be on a national register. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman will give a real example from the world of business in which every provider in the country of a service to our constituents must be on a national register. I cannot think of one.

Sir Alan Meale: If nothing else, such a register will allow local authorities and Government to communicate with landlords and tell them what makes a good, safe and fair landlord. Surely that is the basic context.

Stephen Williams: In the event of a problem, the person most likely to need to know the identity of the landlord is the tenant, if they pay their rent via an intermediary, whether a letting agent or someone else, and under the 1985 Act the tenant has a statutory right to have the identity of that landlord disclosed to them within 21 days. That might be a long time to wait for the disclosure, but there is a statutory right to know a landlord’s identity if it is needed for dealing with a problem.

The Communities and Local Government Committee, which has been referred to several times, produced a report in the summer. Despite the evidence it heard, which the shadow Minister was keen to refer to, it rejected the idea of a mandatory national register of private landlords. Local authorities already have powers to introduce landlord licensing schemes to tackle problems such as antisocial behaviour where there are houses in multiple occupation that do not already fall within the statutory licensing regime to which the hon. Member for Shipley referred. A house that is three storeys high and has more than five unconnected people living in it already has to be licensed, but local authorities can license properties that fall below those criteria if they have identified particular problems. Therefore, with regard to the problems that a national register might solve, there are already laws in place, passed by this place, and opportunities for local authorities to introduce regulations in their areas.

Clause 2 deals with the regulation of private sector letting agents and managing agents. That area is already heavily regulated. There is a whole range of legislation governing the activities of letting agents—if the hon. Members for Shipley and for North East Somerset were still here they would probably need smelling salts by the time I finish reading this out—including the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008, the Consumer Protection Act 1987, the Consumer Credit Act 1974, the Price Marking Order 2004, the Housing Act 1988, the Housing Act 1996 and the Protection from Eviction Act 1977.

Perhaps my parents should have known about that Act in 1977, because that was when we were evicted. Incidentally, that was the first time I met a politician. I will use that anecdote now—why not? Abercynon in south Wales was represented by a communist councillor, Mrs Ann Williams, who came to talk to my mother. I listened to them talk and asked my mother afterwards, “Who was that woman?” My mother replied, “She’s the person we vote for on the council.” I was 10, and perhaps that was what sparked my interest in politics. Perhaps we could have done with knowing about the Protection from Eviction Act 1977.

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There is also legislation passed by this Government, the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013. It has a rather ugly name, but it does rather important things. The sector is therefore already quite heavily regulated. Some 60% of letting agents operating in the sector already belong to an ombudsman scheme that can deal with complaints, but it is important to recognise—the Government certainly do—that a minority of agents do not belong to the scheme and probably do not provide a good enough service. That is why we introduced the 2013 Act.

Sir Alan Meale: The figures are important. There are around 9,000 agents across the country, and the number who are unregulated are indeed a minority, but there are 4,000 of them. Those are the ones we are trying to get to, not the ones who are very good, fair and just. I say that those 4,000 operate in a manner that does not meet the needs of my constituents.

Stephen Williams: I thank the hon. Gentleman for that point. We have already acknowledged that there is uncertainty about the number of letting agents, although I hear what the hon. Gentleman says about the 4,000.

Perhaps when the hon. Gentleman was successful in the ballot and chose this cause for his Bill, he was not aware of the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013. I do not blame him; I am not sure I was aware of it until I was told about it, although no doubt I voted for it earlier this year. That Act allows us to introduce more regulation in this area.

Sir Alan Meale: If the Minister looks at Hansard tomorrow, he will see that I mentioned the 2013 Act in my speech.

Stephen Williams: Under the 2013 Act, various new powers are available to the Department to do with how we could regulate this area. The hon. Gentleman will have noticed last Wednesday’s announcement from the Secretary of State dealing with the whole private rented sector. Specifically, the Secretary of State said that we would lay the first order under the 2013 Act. I am pleased to say that we laid the order today. It is an affirmative order, which means that we will have an opportunity to debate it in the normal way. Early in the new year, subject to the order’s being approved, we will ask people from around the country to bring forward schemes for approval. We will then make it mandatory for all letting and property management agents in England—this is a devolved matter, of course—to become members of an approved redress scheme later next year.

Sir Alan Meale: I acknowledged that a major move had been made by the Government in the 2013 Act. Here and now I put it on the record that I am grateful for that movement. However, I want something much larger and more comprehensive than has been offered. The Government’s move is a great step forward, but it is only one move.

Stephen Williams: I suppose all politicians are guilty of saying, “You’ve done that, but I want you to go further.” That is the nature of the business that we are in. We do it to each other. Campaign groups will always

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say to those in Government, “Thank you for that—we’ve banked and bagged that one, but can you take the next step?”

All I am saying is that the next step has yet to be taken. The first step was the 2013 Act and the second was taken with the laying of the order today. The next step will no doubt be a Statutory Instrument Committee, which will consider the matter. Let us hope that those important steps are successful.

Requiring letting agents to belong to an ombudsman’s scheme will also empower tenants and consumers to make complaints and should be an effective way of driving up standards with the minimum regulatory burden. Our emphasis now is on making the measures that we have already introduced, and will shortly introduce, work, rather than, as the hon. Gentleman might like us to, anticipating the need to go even further.

As I mentioned, letting agents are already subject to a whole range of consumer protection legislation. If they are in breach of aspects of the legislation about charging unfair fees, for example, action can already be taken against them by local authority trading standards, which have both criminal and civil enforcement powers. My Department is keen to hear from trading standards authorities from county and unitary councils up and down the country to see how they use those powers so that we can have a full understanding of whether any action is necessary.

I can deal quickly with the third part of the Bill, which is about establishing a body to administer the national register monitoring compliance with regulations applying to letting and managing agents. Unless I missed it, the hon. Gentleman did not say what body would maintain that national register. It is not clear who would hold the data, who would have access to them, or whether there would be a charging mechanism. I can think of various people who might see some merit in having access to such data; I am sure that our friends in the Treasury might be interested. There is quite a lot of unfilled-in detail. Our basic position is that we do not accept the need for a national register because remedies are already available, so obviously we do not accept the proposal to set up a new quango to administer it.

Sir Alan Meale: The Minister is now approaching the Bill rather well. On the question of what the body would be and who would serve on it, it would be the Minister and his colleagues in Government. It would not be me or Parliament or anyone else; it would be the Secretary of State. That is what I am asking for; I am not asking for somebody out there to do it. When I was a Minister at the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, I abolished quite a lot of quangos. I took the number down from 116, which was unnecessarily large, to fewer than 100. I am not a great fan of quangos. The Secretary of State will decide on this. The Minister, as a Minister, will help to decide on how the body is set up and functions.

Stephen Williams: I hear that, but our basic position is that we do not accept the premise of clause 1 that a national register needs to be set up. I speak as a liberal. It is a shame that the hon. Member for Shipley is not here, because he rather doubted my liberal credentials compared with his libertarian credentials. At least the hon. Member for North East Somerset was a little

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kinder, saying that I was a good liberal. As such, despite what may have been prepared for me, I am in any case suspicious of national registers for any purpose. One can see a social need for them in some circumstances, as with a register of organ donors, but it is pretty difficult to see what merit there would be in having a national register of people who are in business to provide housing services.

Where would it end? Once the precedent had been set that one sector of the private sector economy had to register every single provider of a service in that sector, no doubt other hon. Members who were successful in the ballot in future years would introduce private Members’ Bills, or table early-day motions or introduce ten-minute rule Bills, saying that it should apply to plumbers, electricians, painters or decorators. I could go through a whole list, but I am not trying to filibuster, unlike some people today. There would be calls on many other sectors of the economy to set up a national register, and we do not want to run our economy in that way.

Clause 4 would require all tenancy agreements entered into with private landlords to take the form of written agreements. The general rule at the moment is that tenants can already make a written request under section 20A of the Housing Act 1988 for certain terms of their tenancy to be provided in writing, including the amount of rent payable, the date on which the rent falls due; whether there are any terms that the landlord wishes to impose for providing for a review of the rent, and, if there is a fixed term of tenancy, how long it is. The tenant can already request that those extremely important items be put beyond reasonable doubt by having them in writing. In the case of a tenancy of more than three years, the information must be in writing, created by deed and signed by both sides. It is not a matter of it being an option that the tenant can ask for.

There is a need for greater understanding of the rights and obligations that already exist in the law of England and Wales. The Department is in discussions with representatives of the sector to produce a model tenancy agreement that landlords and tenants will be able to draw on to eliminate areas of uncertainty where a landlord is possibly trying to put one over on the tenant.

Sir Alan Meale: Whatever happens to this Bill, will the Minister give an assurance that he will consider how he could improve on those standards for the future? I would be very grateful if he would do that.

Stephen Williams: Yes. The tenant’s charter is now available among the range of documents published by the Secretary of State last week. The model tenancy agreement is not yet available, because we are working with the sector on how it should look.

Last Wednesday, the Secretary of State announced that there would be a Government-endorsed model tenancy agreement, which we will develop with the sector. His announcement included a timetable for when we will introduce the agreement. We think it will provide extra security and stability for families entering into an agreement with a landlord.

We have also published a draft tenants charter, but that is not the end of the matter, because it is out for consultation and we would very much welcome people’s

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comments on it. The purpose of the charter, as opposed to the legal agreement of the tenancy, is to help tenants—and, indeed, landlords—to understand what they should reasonably expect from their rental deal and how they can take action if they are the victims of hidden fees, which many Members have mentioned, or poor standards of accommodation.

The Select Committee has looked at some of the issues and its findings no doubt enabled the Government to make their proposals. The Committee said that longer tenancies and rental control should be sought within the existing legal framework.

The Government also announced last week that there would be a mortgage lenders summit—summits are a very good thing—to consider how lenders can make it easier for landlords to offer longer tenancies. The Government will review the process by which tenants can raise concerns about the standard of their private rented property and the response they should expect from the council if they do not get anywhere with their landlord, particularly in enforcing standards of safety and hygiene. As I mentioned earlier, powers already exist for local authorities to uphold that. We will also consider as part of this review whether we should require landlords to repay rent, which would be the ultimate sanction for most of them, if their property is found to have the sorts of serious hazards highlighted to me by Shelter in Bristol.

In conclusion, the private rental sector is an increasingly important part of the housing market. This Government want to see that private rental market remain. We want it to grow and to serve even more of our constituents. That is why we are concerned about whether regulation is appropriate. We certainly should not stifle the growth of the market through poorly targeted and disproportionate new regulation. The hon. Gentleman made many good points and the interesting points and perorations made by others are also relevant, but the Government are taking action. New provisions are just starting to come in, so we feel the time is not right for this Bill to proceed further.

2.4 pm

Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con): I draw the attention of Members to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I own a residential property that I let out, and I am a tenant in the flat I reside in when I am in London, so I have an interest on both sides.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Mansfield (Sir Alan Meale) on his success in the private Members’ Bills ballot—I think he said that he came sixth. Having been an MP for more than a quarter of a century, he will be well aware of the difficulties faced by a private Member’s Bill, particularly one as interesting as this one, which raises concern and dispute across the Chamber.

I have listened and waited patiently for more than four and a half hours and I am grateful to have caught your eye, Madam Deputy Speaker. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Mary Macleod) for kindly agreeing to speak after me, because I have to leave in a few minutes. I apologise to the House for not being able to stay to the end. In the interests of saving taxpayers’ money, I am taking an earlier train. I am sure that all hon. Members would agree with that.

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I have time only to read the headings of the speech I would have delivered if I had been called earlier, but we have had a thorough debate and covered all the issues. My hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) filleted the Bill, covering many points I would have raised, and I agree with almost everything he said.

If just one thing has come to light this morning, it is that there is no doubt, despite the sector being referred to on a number occasions as unregulated, that there is a plethora of Acts, delegated legislation, rules and regulations that in one way or another have an impact on the private rented sector. Reference has been made to the first report on the private rented sector from the Select Committee on Communities and Local Government. Professor Martin Partington, a former Law Commissioner, said in giving evidence to the Committee that housing law was

“but one example of many policies being developed over decades, being implemented through myriad legislative enactments, leaving a mass of often unnecessary, certainly over complex legislation that does not work efficiently.”

If I may repeat my plea, there is one thing that the Government should do in response to that substantial report: reconsider the decision not to follow the recommendation to carry out a consolidation of legislation in this field. A consolidation and simplification of all rules and regulations covering landlords and tenants, so that they were together in one place and more easily understandable, would be a reform that benefited both landlords and tenants. That would be a great service to the nation, particularly to landlords and tenants, who would be able to look in one place rather than hundreds of places, as is currently the case.

As time restricts what I can say, I will consider just one element of the well-named Private Landlords and Letting and Managing Agents (Regulation) Bill. I note that there is wide cross-party representation among the sponsors of the Bill. They include four Government Members, including one Liberal Democrat Member, three Members from the same party as the hon. Member for Mansfield, and Members from the DUP, the Green party, the SDLP and the Alliance party. It is worth noting that one third of the sponsors represent constituencies that would not be affected by the Bill, because it relates only to England.

Problems would be caused by setting up the body that is referred to in clause 1(4), which states:

“There shall be established a body to administer the Register as prescribed in regulations by the Secretary of State”.

A new quango would be born. We know from experience what happens when a quango is born. It starts off as a fairly modest affair with just a few members and a small staff, but before long it grows like Topsy. There are plenty of examples of that.

As has been mentioned, there are 1 million landlords in the private rented sector. That seems like an extraordinarily high number. I understand, having looked into it, that it includes landlords who rent out just a room. To be fair, such landlords would be excluded from the scheme. Nevertheless, even if one excludes the estimated three quarters of landlords who are in that category, that leaves a quarter of a million landlords who would be included on the register.

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I do not know what the quango would be called. It could be called the office for the regulation of the private rented sector, Often, Ofland or even Oftenland. Whatever it was called, it would no doubt be a new retirement berth for politicians. We have no idea what the members of the quango would be paid. However, given that there are hundreds of thousands of landlords to manage, one can only begin to imagine the size of the bureaucratic monster that the Bill would spawn.

Before long, the quango would no doubt need a separate department to collect the fees that were payable and an enforcement department to deal with the small minority who were falling foul of the rules. It would no doubt need a huge advertising budget so that all tenants and landlords were aware of its existence. Public affairs consultants would have to be employed. It would, of course, need its own human resources department to deal with all its staff, and its own administration department. Before long, it would need regional offices. Before we knew it, there would be a staff of thousands. The cost of that would not disappear into the ether; it would be borne, ultimately, by the tenants. This is a tax on tenants—Members should have no doubt about it. I submit that we have enough rules and regulations for this sector.

We have already heard from the Minister that the Government are doing a lot to try to improve the operation of the growing private rented sector, and there is already a plethora of rules and regulations that need to be simplified. The imposition of a new quango and more regulations would simply add to the burden on landlords and inevitably lead to higher rents. For those reasons, I oppose the Bill and urge the House to vote against its Second Reading.

2.15 pm

Mary Macleod (Brentford and Isleworth) (Con): It is an immense pleasure to see you in the Chair, Madam Deputy Speaker. I know that you will do the Chair and the House proud with fairness, dignity and grace.

It is a great pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall), who made some important points about the Bill. The private rental market is a vital asset to this country, especially London. For a Member who represents a London constituency, it is important to discuss and debate it. For millions who cannot afford to buy, who are saving for a deposit or who just want some flexibility, the private rental market is critical.

I have been a landlord in the past, and I have also been a tenant, as I am sure many Members have. As you probably know, Madam Deputy Speaker, I was born across the river in St Thomas’s hospital in London and spent my first years in Battersea, but then had all my education in Scotland. The first place I rented was at Glasgow university. After graduating I came straight back to London, where I feel I belong, and I have rented properties in Shepherd’s Bush, Acton, Westminster and Chiswick. I have been a tenant nine times, and I hope I have been a good tenant. I cannot remember any disorderly behaviour on my part, so I hope I have been seen as a good tenant and a good landlord.

In the London borough of Hounslow, 42% of households rent in the social and private sectors, which is 10% higher than the national average. We want to build more

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housing in London and encourage more private landowners to rent out property. What worries me about the Bill is that it might prevent people from doing so.

It is interesting to see how important issues in the private rented sector are to people. In my constituency there are 93,844 residents in 48,500 households. I have received a total of 14,742 cases on housing, but only 35 of those have involved private landlords. Social housing has made up a lot more of them—nearer 500 cases. That shows that for my residents, the important issues are to do not with private landlords but with social housing, whether waiting lists, the state of houses, the state of temporary or sheltered accommodation, repairs or housing associations.

I believe that the hon. Member for Mansfield (Sir Alan Meale) has good intentions to drive up standards. That is what we want, but I do not believe that the Bill is the right way to go about it. There are good landlords. When he talked about the percentage of tenants who are unsatisfied, I wondered how many of our constituents would be satisfied with us if we did a survey.

Margot James (Stourbridge) (Con): My hon. Friend is talking about the effect of rogue landlords on tenants. Does she agree with my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) that the further regulation suggested in the Bill would be far more likely to trap decent, smaller landlords who are trying to do a good job by tenants, and that rogue landlords who are responsible for the problems that she is talking about would probably evade it? The Bill would therefore be ineffective where it really counts.

Mary Macleod: My hon. Friend makes an excellent point, and she is right to say that we want to encourage more private sector landlords. We need more landlords, and I do not want them to be put off by additional costs, regulation and red tape. In any case, as my hon. Friend said, rogue landlords would no doubt find their way around that anyway. I do not want to impose cost, red tape and more regulation. The Conservative party is about rolling back the state and having less regulation, and some of the extra charges would lead to landlords having to impose higher rents at a time when the cost of living is critical and we want more housing.

We have heard from many hon. Members and the Minister about the work that the Government have done. As the hon. Member for Corby (Andy Sawford) said, substantial legislation is already in place, and we certainly do not need or want any more. We heard about the Communities and Local Government Committee, and my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) said that we should simplify legislation. That is the right thing to do. My hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) mentioned making the provisions consumer-led, and as someone who came from the business world prior to entering this place, I firmly believe in that. We do not want to live in a nanny state; we want to create a competitive market and—as my hon. Friend put to the House so well—people are intelligent enough to make those comparisons.

If we consider the recommendations in the Bill, even the national register of private landlords can and will be a financial burden on landlords—a cost that would no

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doubt be passed on to tenants, which we do not want. Regulation of private sector letting agents and managing agents is again about imposing more and more burdens on local authorities, increasing costs and reducing the choice and availability of accommodation offered to tenants. I certainly would not want that across London and the rest of the country.

The Minister mentioned the things that the Government have done, which are important. They recently announced a tenants package, which means that we do not need to introduce new regulation for that. The package includes the tenants charter, which will help to promote awareness among tenants about what to expect, such as transparency of letting agents fees. We heard about the Government-endorsed model tenancy agreement that written tenancy agreements can be based on.

I had hoped that the hon. Member for Mansfield would mention another issue that has been brought to my attention in my constituency many times. Landlords have had to take tenants to court to evict them because of advice that the tenants received from local councils. If tenants want to be seen as homeless and get housing support—even though under their tenancy agreement they know they should leave the property with a month’s notice, or whatever—they have been told to overstay so that they have to be taken to court and evicted. Then they will not be seen as having made themselves intentionally homeless. I had hoped that the issue would be addressed by the Bill, but it was not.

I will conclude my remarks because I want to give my hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge (Margot James) the last few moments to say a few words. My hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset said that we should be making life better, easier and happier for citizens of this country, and that in North East Somerset they would do that over a pint of cider. In Brentford and Isleworth it would be over a cup of Teapigs tea, which is made in Brentford, or a pint of London Pride or Chiswick Bitter. I hope that we in this House can do everything possible to make life better, easier and happier for our constituents. I therefore cannot support the Bill.

2.24 pm

Margot James (Stourbridge) (Con): May I add my voice to those of others who have expressed their delight in seeing you in the Chair today, Madam Deputy Speaker, and may I congratulate you on your election?

I would like to draw the attention of Members to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, in which I have declared a property that I rent out. It is not really applicable to this debate, because it works on the basis of short-term holiday lets. Although this is not officially an interest, my partner owns two small properties in London, which she rents out and has done for some considerable time. I must say that she is a model landlord, who has not put her rent up at all in the last three years. I have observed at first hand some of the difficulties that a landlord experiences on the controversial issue of the balance of rights as between landlords and tenants. None the less, my constituency brings it home to me that the balance is a fine one, and that some tenants are victimised by landlords. That is why I sympathise with the intent behind the Bill and why I congratulate the hon. Member for Mansfield (Sir Alan Meale) on bringing it forward.

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Overall, however, I feel that the balance is about right at the moment. My partner would certainly not agree, but that is my view. I believe that further burdening landlords and their letting agents with a registration scheme over and above the voluntary schemes that already exist and that are already quite effective would have the effect of disincentivising people who own small properties from renting them out up and down the country.

We all know that we face a critical housing shortage at this time. I need hardly remind Members that between 1997 and 2010, there was a woeful lack of new house building. We inherited that situation, but despite the huge improvements of the last 12 months, which have seen a record increase in house building, we still have a long way to go in providing decent homes for the many people who are on housing waiting lists and cannot find private rented accommodation. For us to pass further legislation that would, in the opinion of many, act as a disincentive to the private rented sector at a time of such housing need would, I think, be a retrograde step. Along with my Conservative colleagues, I shall therefore oppose the Bill.

In the short time available, let me cover some aspects of regulation and legislation that already give protection to tenants in the private housing sector. Private sector letting agents are subject to consumer protection law, while councils have powers to tackle rogue landlords and their agents. I am sure many hon. Members would agree that we would like to see local authorities using these powers more assertively than they sometimes do. None the less, the powers are there, and I am not a believer in bringing in new regulation and new laws just because existing provisions, regulations and laws are not being used effectively. The first port of call should surely be to use existing legislation and regulation before we start burdening the whole system with yet more regulation. A registration provision of the sort in the Bill only adds to that burden of regulation.

At least half the private landlords in this country already belong to a professional organisation, of which the Association of Residential Letting Agents and the National Association of Estate Agents are but two examples. Such bodies have provisions for codes of best practice, to which letting agents and landlords must subscribe if they are to join them. I think it much better for us to try to increase the number of letting agents who subscribe to those schemes and organisations than to attempt—

2.30 pm

The debate stood adjourned (Standing Order No. 11(2)).

Ordered, That the debate be resumed on Friday 1 November.

Business without Debate

Young Offenders (Parental Responsibility) Bill

Motion made, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

25 Oct 2013 : Column 626

Hon. Members: Object.

Bill to be read a Second time on Friday 28 February 2014.

Foreign National Offenders (Exclusion from the United Kingdom) Bill

Motion made, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

Hon. Members: Object.

Bill to be read a Second time on Friday 28 February 2014.

Asylum Seekers (Return to Nearest Safe Country) Bill

Motion made, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

Hon. Members: Object.

Bill to be read a Second time on Friday 28 February 2014.

Prisons (Drug Testing) Bill

Motion made, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

Hon. Members: Object.

Bill to be read a Second time on Friday 28 February 2014.

Drug Driving (Assessment of Drug Misuse) Bill

Resumption of adjourned debate on Question (18 October), That the Bill be now read a Second time.

Hon. Members: Object.

Debate to be resumed on Friday 28 February 2014.

Property Blight Compensation Bill

Margot James (Stourbridge) (Con): I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

Hon. Members: Object.

Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing): Has the hon. Lady the permission of the Member in charge of the Bill?

Margot James: I will move the motion on her behalf to Friday 28 February 2014, Madam Deputy Speaker.

Madam Deputy Speaker: If the hon. Lady does not have the permission of the Member in charge of the Bill—

Margot James: I apologise to the House, Madam Deputy Speaker. I do not have the express permission of the right hon. Member for Meriden (Mrs Spelman).

Madam Deputy Speaker: The Bill is not moved.

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Police Recruitment

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—(Stephen Crabb.)

2.32 pm

Siobhain McDonagh (Mitcham and Morden) (Lab): In 1881, the Cardwell reforms abolished the practice of selling commissions in the Army. In 2013, we are adopting similar measures in relation to the British police force.

Earlier this year, one of the country’s top police officers complained that there was a growing diversity problem in the police service, and that he was “embarrassed” by the lack of progress in addressing it. This debate has been prompted by similar concerns.

We have just experienced a period in which our police service, especially in my part of south London, has increasingly begun to resemble the community that it patrols, but I fear that measures being introduced by the Government and by the Mayor of London will take us back in time. In particular, I fear that the way in which the police have been told to recruit will make it less likely that people from disadvantaged backgrounds, including ethnic minorities, will join the police forces.

Sir Peter Fahy, who is the spokesman on workforce development for the Association of Chief Police Officers and the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, said that police forces should recruit more black and ethnic minority officers in order to reflect British society, because there was an operational need for forces to have staff who understood and worked within Britain’s diverse communities. Figures from The Guardian suggest that in England and Wales there are just 48 black or ethnic-minority superintendents and chief superintendents, and just six black or ethnic minority chief officers —3% of the total. Sir Peter said he feared the diversity problem would get even worse because of budget cuts and the removal of senior posts, as that would make it harder for ethnic minority officers to get promotion to senior roles. He therefore wanted to see a

“wider interpretation of employment law and the issues which can be taken into consideration when making selection decisions”.

Earlier this week, my hon. Friend the Member for Ashfield (Gloria De Piero) launched a sweeping review of race relations that suggests, among other measures, changing the law to allow more targeted recruitment of black and ethnic minority police officers. Anyone can respond to the review, not just Labour members, and replies will feed into the party’s policy commission. The review says:

“It is time to look at whether the legal framework needs to be changed to allow police forces to pursue BAME recruitment programmes to meet their operational needs.”

I have a lot of sympathy with that position. When my local police service was expanding in the previous decade, it was notable how many recruits were young and from ethnic minorities. They could relate to the communities in which they operated, especially to the young people who were most at risk of getting into trouble.

More than a decade ago, I persuaded my right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears), who was then the police Minister, to meet local people on Steers Mead who wanted a team of police to tackle the low-level crime and antisocial behaviour that affected their part of Mitcham. Thanks to her, we fortunately

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got one of the country’s safer neighbourhood teams. The model of one sergeant, two police constables and three police community support officers in every ward has been a great success and has directly led to more police officers, especially PCSOs, patrolling the streets. One reason for that success is that those officers and PCSOs looked like the people whose streets they walked down. The police had drifted away from community policing for decades, but safer neighbourhood teams meant that we had six people working local beats whom we knew and who could not be moved away from us.

It is a great tragedy that those teams are now being broken up. No longer are they required to work in one ward, and one ward alone, in which they can build up relationships and local knowledge. Instead, most safer neighbourhood officers are being asked to patrol anywhere.

Even worse, the overall number of police officers has been falling. In March 2010, when police numbers in my borough of Merton were at their height, we had 60 police sergeants, 246 PCs and 85 PCSOs. According to Merton’s borough commander, by September 2013 the number of sergeants had dropped by a third, to 39.5, the number of PCSOs had dropped by around 40%, and there were 15 fewer PCs. Inevitably, that results in fewer people in our police service who reflect the social composition of the wider community. That is why it is important that when the police recruit they do so in a way that does not discriminate against under-represented parts of the community.

As the Minister acknowledged in his reply to a question of mine last Thursday, police recruitment is currently low. It is therefore even more important that recruiters ensure that what little recruitment there is does not make it harder for people from disadvantaged backgrounds or ethnic minorities to get a job.

We are certainly not going to tackle the diversity crisis in our police service by charging potential recruits nearly £1,000 just for the privilege of going on a course that might—just might—enable them to apply. We must make no bones about it: that is what is happening with the roll-out of the new certificate in knowledge of policing.

In my view, the introduction of the CKP will seriously damage police attempts to recruit people from disadvantaged backgrounds. The CKP will make the police’s ethnic profile even less like that of the community it serves than it is now. It was already hard enough to apply to the police, but the introduction of this certificate will make it even harder.

Already there are concerns that the composition of the police is being adversely affected by the move to recruiting ever more police officers from volunteer specials. In September 2010 the Metropolitan Police Authority announced that two thirds of its recruits would need to have volunteered as police officers for more than 18 months even to be considered. That was driven by a desire to

“deliver savings of between £12,000 and £20,000 per officer in salary costs during their training period.”

Kit Malthouse, the chairman of the Metropolitan Police Authority, claimed that the charges were needed because of a “financial jam”. However, even the Liberal Democrats recognised that the charges would make it harder for police recruits to reflect the communities that they serve. MPA member Dee Doocey said that the

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recruitment process would favour middle-class people who had spare time. The reliance on specials is hard enough, but if serving as a police officer is possible only for people who are able to cough up nearly £1,000 many months before they can even apply to become an officer, who will sign up? Will that interest the black and Asian young people from areas such as Mitcham and Morden, where £1,000 remains a very large sum to come by? I do not think so, and in fact that is what we are experiencing.

Although total staff levels of police officers, police community support officers and sergeants are down, we are one of the few places in the country that are recruiting to even a handful of positions. The new posts do not compensate for the positions that we have lost, but at least they are something. The experience in Merton is that, thanks to the certificate in knowledge of policing, for black and Asian members of my community, applying to be a police officer has become even more difficult.

It is already rightly difficult to join the police. Applicants have to complete a pre-application questionnaire, which takes about 45 minutes. If they pass that stage, the police service will send them an application pack to fill in. If applicants meet the required standard and get through that stage, they are invited to an assessment centre for a two-day assessment. That includes a 20-minute structured interview, followed by a numerical reasoning test. That is followed by a 30-minute verbal logical reasoning test, and two further written exercises, including one in which the applicant writes a proposal document. That is followed by four interactive role-play scenarios. Day two concentrates on assessing whether the applicant can meet the physical and mental challenges of policing. Even that is not the end of the matter: the applicant still has to go through security and reference checks. It is notoriously difficult to conduct assessments in such an environment in a way that does not favour certain socio-economic or cultural groups.

The point is that it is quite feasible to spend £1,000, and months gaining the certificate in knowledge of policing, and still not get through the recruitment process. Unless they had time and money, and confidence that they would pass the rest of the recruitment process, why would anyone get the CKP? For someone from a cultural background that is already under-represented in the police force, the only rational conclusion is that it would not be a good idea for them to part with their money. That is exactly what we are finding in Merton.

We in Merton are extraordinarily grateful for the fact that, that under the guidance of Darren Williams, our borough commander, we are recruiting 17 PCs, who, if they live in the borough, can remain in it. Mr Williams organised a recruitment day a few weeks ago in our local Odeon cinema. I was desperate for young people from my half of the borough—Mitcham and Morden—to be as well represented as those from Wimbledon. I was delighted to see that two thirds of the young—and not so young—men and women who arrived were from my constituency. Everyone was excited, but many were put off when they learned that the £1,000 for the CKP was the starting point of their application. For those of us with credit cards, £1,000 may not seem like a lot, but for families who have very little, it is like £10,000 to us.

In a parliamentary answer to me last Thursday, the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice said:

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“The Certificate in Knowledge of Policing is not a requirement for entry in to any force.”—[Official Report, 17 October 2013; Vol. 568, c. 824W.]

I can categorically tell him that as far as my local police force is concerned, that is not the case. Those attending the recruitment fair were told in no uncertain terms that the CKP was mandatory. They would need either to have one, or to have enrolled to get one before February, or they would not even be able to apply to work as a police officer. The outcome was entirely predictable: disappointment and frustration from those who felt that they could make a police officer. My borough commander was so worried by the response that he approached me to ask if there was some way that we could run a pilot looking at how we could meet the costs.

As the Minister for Policing admitted to me in his answer last Thursday, no forces have established bursary schemes for students undertaking the pre-joining arrangements. However, in Merton we have attempted to start. We started by approaching the local Ahmadiyya Muslim community to ask whether they might be prepared to put up the money to allow the best of those 17 recruits to be chosen and not to be put off by the cost of joining. I am grateful that the community has agreed to put the money forward not just for people from their community, but in favour of all young people in the area, irrespective of whether they have a religion, what colour they are or whether they are a man or a woman. I am incredibly grateful to the community, as there are many other things that they could, and do, spend their charitable money on. Should they have to do this? No. To weed out people who are poor, who do not have access to such funds, but who would make police officers, is entirely wrong.

The police themselves regard the introduction of the fee as a crude way of saving money. The CKP saves the police service the cost of training, accommodation, uniform and so on. Put simply, it removes the cost of the first half of the 18-week course that used to take place at Hendon. Responsibility for paying for that will transfer from the police to the applicant, and responsibility for administering the scheme transfers from the police to the new College of Policing. But the outcome will be simple and far-reaching.

Instead of reflecting the communities they serve, the police will become like the Army was in Jane Austen’s day, when it was only those who could afford to buy a commission who became officers. Merit did not come into it. The best never got to serve. In battle after battle, brave British lion-like troops were sent to their slaughter under the leadership of well-to-do donkeys. The certificate in knowledge of policing will do the same thing for the police. In a few short years, the police have been transformed. As we have seen this week, the force is not without its problems, but it is more modern and more representative of the people that it serves than it was even as recently as at Hillsborough.

We should not be turning back the clock. The last thing we should be doing is using cost as a barrier to exclude the very best potential officers from serving their community. The cost of these certificates is far too high. It will turn the police back into a job done for those with money, by those with money. Do we want the most able people, or only those with money, to get the best jobs? What would it say about our society if those

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who are most likely to be affected by crime—those from poor backgrounds and from ethnic minorities—are the least likely to be able to afford to get into the police? Is it the plan that people without money should be kept out? No matter how much we improve their schools, and no matter how hard young people work, as we can see from the recent qualifications being achieved in London, are their jobs to be only zero-hours low-wage contracts?

I feel very sorry for my borough commander, Darren Williams, who has been in place for 16 years and is certainly the most outstanding chief officer I have had during that time. He has a thankless task. How is he to find like-minded new officers who are prepared to make a difference in their communities, when the only people he will have under his command will be those with a spare grand? The cuts to our police service in the past few years have been very depressing. The 1-2-3 model of safer neighbourhood policing is no longer sacrosanct; police offices and police stations are closing. The number of police and police community support officers in our communities has fallen.

Constituents like mine are more likely to be affected by crime than residents in more affluent areas. They are starting to feel the difference. Even the police themselves recognise that they have a problem because they do not reflect the wider community. I therefore ask the Minister to review urgently the costs and roll-out of these certificates before they have a disastrous effect on our communities.

2.49 pm

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (James Brokenshire): I congratulate the hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) on securing this afternoon’s debate on the important subject of police recruitment, but also on the important issue of greater diversity within the police service, which I strongly endorse and on which a number of important actions have been and continue to be taken by senior police officers. She referenced Peter Fahy and some of his comments on the rightful need for a more diverse police force serving our communities throughout the country.

I pay tribute to the work of police officers in the hon. Lady’s constituency and across the Metropolitan Police Service. They do an incredible amount of work for us, day in, day out, week in, week out, to keep our communities safe and to bring to justice those who would do us harm. I pay tribute to the work of her borough commander, Darren Williams, whom I had the pleasure of working alongside when he was working in my London borough of Bexley a few years ago. I know how hard working and focused he is.

Let me be clear at the outset that we have an excellent police force, one that has delivered a 10% fall in crime under this Government, despite the difficult but essential funding decisions that we have had to make. Chief constables and senior police officers are rising to the challenge of making efficiency savings and providing greater value for money while protecting services to the public. It is important to put it on the record that we inherited the toughest fiscal challenge in living memory, and had no option but to reduce public spending. At the start of the current spending review period, the

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police spent some £14 billion a year, so it is right that they should make their fair share of the savings that are needed. The police, like other parts of the public sector, cannot be exempt from the requirement to save money.

What matters is how officers are deployed, not how many of them there are. All forces need to look at the way front-line services are delivered to ensure that the quality of service provided is maintained or improved. As Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary has previously made clear, and its latest report reinforces, there is no simple link between officer numbers and crime levels, between numbers and the visibility of police in the community, or between numbers and the quality of service provided.

There is no question but that the police still have the resources to do their important work. The Metropolitan Police Service has announced plans to recruit 5,000 officers during the next three years. Recruitment is under way, and 1,500 are expected to be in place by the end of March 2014. The Mayor of London has said that he will meet the demand of Londoners to keep police numbers high at 32,000 to deliver a safer London and to help reconnect the police with the public. That will mean that the police in London will be more visible and available, with more cops out on the street where the public want to see them.

Under the Metropolitan Police Service’s local policing model, Merton will see an additional 49 officers going into safer neighbourhood teams, almost doubling their numbers to 107. We know that, based on published data to June 2013, overall police recorded crime in Merton was down by 7% in the year to June 2013 compared with the previous year. I pay tribute to the officers in Merton for their work in achieving that result. That is why the most important factor is that forces prioritise their front-line delivery, that crime continues to fall and that victim satisfaction is up.

I want to address a number of the points that the hon. Lady raised in relation to the recruitment exercise. As I have already highlighted, the Metropolitan Police Service’s plan is to recruit 5,000 new constables by 2015, with an aspiration that 2,000 of them will be from black and minority ethnic backgrounds. It is notable that that objective has been set within the overall recruitment focus. In relation to the Mayor’s objective to achieve a more diverse police force in London, I understand that the Mayor’s office for policing and crime has established a task force to support the Metropolitan Police Service as it recruits new police officers. The task force is progressing with initiatives to introduce community ambassadors aimed at promoting and encouraging police officer recruits and careers across London and communities, to help to identify opportunities for community engagement.

The task force also suggests media improvements to increase the appeal for women and black and minority ethnic applicants. Most notably, adverts must encourage the positive impact that BME applicants could have in keeping their communities safe and improving policing. There is also a suggestion about introducing a London factor to the recruitment process, including elements of intercultural competency, London residency, subject to certain legal issues that the Mayor is examining, and language skills. Therefore, although I note the hon. Lady’s concerns, I think that the Mayor’s office for policing and crime—it is at the sharp end of the recruitment

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process, rather than the Home Office—from the information I have received from it, is ambitious and is seeking to drive its work forward in ensuring that the Metropolitan police work force better reflect and represent the diverse communities of our capital city.

I want to address some of the hon. Lady’s other points, for example on changes to equality legislation. We believe that the Equality Act 2010 included positive action provisions to enable employers to address identified under-representation of protected groups in the workplace. We are working with forces and colleagues at the Government Equalities Office and the College of Policing to identify ways of tackling under-representation under existing equalities legislation.

Siobhain McDonagh: In the four minutes remaining, will the Minister address the certificate in knowledge of policing and the requirement to pay approximately £1,000 to apply to become a police officer?

James Brokenshire: That was the next point I was coming to, so unfortunately I have now lost a few seconds of my time, but the hon. Lady was not to know that.

The certificate in knowledge of policing is one of a number of routes into the police. It is designed to increase access and inclusion and to build the professionalism of policing. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner has chosen, as part of his plans to recruit the 5,000 officers I referred to, to make it a requirement that candidates applying must have completed a certificate in knowledge of policing before starting as a constable. Chief officers—in this case the commissioner—are best placed to determine the skills and capabilities most needed locally, based on their understanding of the local labour market and what is needed in their forces. That is a decision best taken by the chief officer, rather than the Home Office.

The certificate can be taught and assessed by approved external providers. It is not intended that the certificate should be a prerequisite for all new recruits; the intention is to reduce training time and salary costs for cohorts of entrants who have achieved the award prior to recruitment.

I will move on to the cost of the certificate, which the hon. Lady focused on in particular. It is for each provider to set a fee—so far, 37 providers have registered for the certificate and 12 have been approved—but it is estimated that the cost of the certificate will be between £800 and £1,000, as she suggested. Many other professions, particularly law and medicine, require people to pay for the costs of their initial training. Further and higher education providers, as well as independent providers, will obtain a licence from the College of Policing to deliver the certificate course and may offer grants or loans to individual students.

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The College of Policing is monitoring take-up of the new qualification, including demographic data on candidates. As my right hon. Friend the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice stated in answer to the hon. Lady, it is too early to give an informed response on the certificate’s effect, because it is still in its infancy. It would be a matter for the force to decide whether it wished to reimburse the costs of obtaining the qualification for those who were successfully recruited. However, some further and higher education bodies that run the course may offer grants or loans to individual students.

Siobhain McDonagh: I want absolute clarity. Is the Minister saying that whether the certificate in knowledge of policing is required is a decision for the chief officer of the Metropolitan police?

James Brokenshire: Yes, that is my point. It is a local decision. It is right that chief officers should determine the skill sets that they require and therefore the appropriate process in the context of recruitment. I understand that the Metropolitan Police Service is considering providing loans for students undertaking the pre-join programmes. There are also some examples of community and local business consortia developing their own schemes to provide funding and support to those interested in taking the certificate and applying to the Metropolitan Police Service. The hon. Lady’s points are recognised and being examined further, from the information that I have been provided with by the Metropolitan Police Service and the Mayor’s office for policing and crime.

People across all communities want the police to fight crime while having confidence that their individual needs will be understood and respected. That is fair and effective policing. Police forces that reflect the communities they serve are crucial to cutting crime in a modern, diverse society. The police need to understand communities if they are to tackle crimes that affect them. Diversity is more than ever an important part of operational effectiveness.

Equality and diversity have always been a fundamental part of the British model of policing by consent, and I am clear that we must retain that model. That is why representative work forces are such a serious issue and why I am grateful to the hon. Lady for securing this debate.

There are important issues to do with the size and composition of a police force that are a matter for individual chief officers. Recruiting the right people to the police is vital in the fight against crime and will ensure that we continue to see a fall in crime and an increase in victim satisfaction long into the future.

Question put and agreed to.

3.2 pm

House adjourned.