On the 25th April 2018 an MPs select committee report was published on private rented sector enforcement, you can read it here.
It has four main headings:-
- Quality of accommodation and the balance of power
- Legislative powers
- Enforcement
- Innovative approaches in the private rented sector.
The research is compelling
The extensive research informing the report’s findings reveal that 800,000 PRS homes have at least one HHSRS Cat 1 hazard. 44% of tenants said that fear of eviction prevented them making complaints to their landlord, whilst 200,000 had reported being abused or harassed by their landlord.
Housing minister Heather Wheeler predictably told the committee that PRS homes failing the decent homes standard had fallen from 47% to 27% over the past ten years, but this view jars with information, equally predictably provided by Shelter that whilst percentage wise figures were reducing, the fact that PRS had grown so big in that time meant that in real number terms there were actually more of these properties.
Monty Pythonesque arguments
These are the kinds of arguments I hate getting involved in and remind me of the old Monty Python sketch on whether contradiction is an argument or not. “Yes it is – no it isn’t” but the MPs do seem to side with Shelter’s figures.
The ever-incisive David Smith said:-
“There are a number of properties that are good, and that is an increasing number, but the properties that are bad are very bad, and increasingly worse”.
As someone who goes into those properties every day, that’s my experience of it too, regardless of whose statistics are bigger than whose dad.
Legislation and Enforcement
Obviously given my job, I was particularly interested in the section of the report on legislation and enforcement.
Everyone seems to agree with something I’ve been banging on about for years, that we have enough enforcement tools to tackle rogue landlords but the marked shortage of success stories in terms of numbers, is down to the unwieldy and absurdly complex nature of the various bits of legislation coupled with the lack of resources to employ them, against the size of the problem.
Paragraphs 86 – 94 address the resources, highlights of which are:-
- Birmingham City Council only had five EHOs to cover a city of 1.1 million people.
- The LGA emphasised the financial challenges which they say will mean “a funding gap of at least £5.8 billion by 2019–20”
- Crisis told us that 1,272 jobs were lost in environmental health offices between 2010 and 2012
- the Chartered Institute of Housing highlighted that local authorities had reduced spending on enforcement activity by a fifth between 2009–10 and 2015–16, an average annual reduction of £8.75 per privately rented home in England.
It all too complex
On the issues with the complexity of enforcement legislation, Dr Julie Rugg of York University hit the nail on the head when she said:-
“One of the big issues that relate to some of the legislation is that it tends to split issues between condition-related issues, management-related issues, and issues that relate to letting agents [ … ] All of these things have been added on to other bits of legislation, and now we are in a situation where it is hard for a local authority that thinks, “Which bit of legislation do I use to deal with this particular problem?” and then finds that none of the bits of the regulation that they have got to work with will deal with that particular problem, because none of it fastens up”.
David Cox of the RLA concurred, adding:-
“There were over 140 Acts of Parliament and more than 400 regulations affecting landlords in the private rented sector”.
He may well be right. Life’s too short to count.
A wide-ranging review of the law?
The report recommends that government conducts a wide-ranging review aimed at consolidating legislation in the PRS.
Back in 1999, whilst reforming the justice system as a whole Lord Wolfe said:-
“Procedural reform can have only a limited impact on housing law. The main source of difficulty is the complexity of the substantive law itself. . . . The Department of the Environment should look at this as a matter of urgency. The Law Commission should be invited to carry out a review of housing law with a view to consolidating the various statutory and other provisions in a clear and straightforward form.”
It never happened. It just got even more complicated. [Correction – The Law Commission did a review – it was just never taken up by Government – Ed]
Dr Julie Rugg herself had a go a few years back but her recommendations weren’t taken up.
Joined up thinking
The matter of political will also crops up in the report.
Tamara Sandoul of the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health gets a big kiss on the cheek from me when she states:-
“In many local authorities, there was a lack of alignment between different departments, including building control and planning, housing enforcement and trading standards”.
I don’t think I have delivered a single conference talk in the past 5 years where this hasn’t been my main theme.
Yes resourcing is crucial and yes the law is too unwieldy but so often the council’s themselves are their own worst enemies, allowing these factors to destroy their motivation or belief that things can still be achieved through joined-up working.
The report recommends:-
“We call on local authorities to reflect on whether their Environmental Health, Trading Standards and other relevant departments are suitably aligned to promote enforcement activity, and whether effective mechanisms exist to work collaboratively with neighbouring authorities.
Local authorities should also make full use of their existing powers to obtain information about the tenure of a property on Council Tax returns, which should then be used by enforcement teams to identify private rented properties in their areas.”
The disappearance of the TRO
I am, as you would guess, understandably miffed that the role of Tenancy Relations Officers whose job it is to deal with complaints of harassment and illegal eviction, prosecuting offenders where negotiations fail have been left out of the report entirely.
All EHOs of my ken tell me that as they get more efficient at tracking down overcrowded HMOs this pushes up the rate of illegal evictions, as rogue landlords try to get rid of witnesses who might provide a statement.
Perhaps the absence of reference to the work of TROs is not surprising, given there are so few of us left. Most councils cut those roles altogether, meaning there is nobody to help reinstate illegally evicted families in many boroughs these days.
At long last someone is listening, but …
It is heartening for me to read that MPs are now at least aware of what I and my enforcement colleagues have been talking about for years.
It’s also heartening that they understand that joined up working is the only way to tackle rogue landlords and slum properties. Hopefully, this view will trickle down to more local authorities.
Whether the government will review the complexity of housing enforcement legislation is another matter but for now, I’m just happy that canteen talk and discussions of enforcement officer when we meet up at conferences, or just in the front garden of a property we are visiting, is finally getting wider acknowledgement.
Not condoning the 800,000 PRS homes with Cat one hazards but it needs to be put in proportion.
There are 400,000 social rental homes having at least one Category One hazard, (despite the social housing stock being much newer).
There are 3.5 million owner occupier homes with at least one Category One hazard.
If the evidence is so compelling why argue with it? The figures for the reduction in the number of properties failing to meet the decent housing standards may have been given to the committee by a minister, but if you had checked the source in the report you would have seen that they came from the “English Housing Survey 2016–17: Headline Report, January 2018, para 2.13”. That is a source I would tend to trust, especially as such improvement is to be expected given that the Decent Homes Standard includes a thermal efficiency factor which the minimum EPC legislation was bound to help with.
Whilst the figure are not available for 2016-17 looking at previous years you could see that non-only has the percentage of non-decent homes in the PRS fallen so has the number. See https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data It is not much of a fall (1.4 million in 2008 to 1.3 million in 2016) but shows that Shelter were not telling the truth.
I would like to point the honourable member Mr Jackson at the following quote from my piece above:-
“These are the kinds of arguments I hate getting involved in and remind me of the old Monty Python sketch on whether contradiction is an argument or not. “Yes it is – no it isn’t.”
Whether the figures come from the landlord side or the tenant/enforcement side I have no interest either way because there is always someone to say you’ve misread it or you’re measuring the wrong thing.
For every stat there is a counter stat and life is too short to get embroiled in, what i also refer to above “whose statistics are bigger than whose dad”.
I’m not saying that this is the correct or scientific approach, its just my approach. I go into these properties all day long and I see what I see. I dont care what official figures say. I’m not wired that way. I dont believe in objective empiricism Peter
You can’t have it both ways. Is the evidence compelling or should statistics be ignored?
If you have no interest in the figures why do they feature so much in your article? Are you only interested in them when they support your prejudices? (A very natural attitude.)
Statistics can be a very useful tool (as science proves) but they should be treated with care, especially if they seem to come from a source with an obvious bias. But the English Housing Survey does not represent landlords or tenants. It has been around goverments of various types and its methodology is subject to scrutiny. It’s headline reports tend to reflect the concerns of the day but the numbers are published.
Your personal experience is biased towards bad properties as that is what you look for in your job. I have little experience of such properties, though where I stayed as a student in the lates 70s would not have met the modern decent home statndard. Nor would a couple of properties I have bought, prior to refurbishment,. Nor would my parent’s house, where they lived for 49 years. My current home would be doubtful, but should pass once the bathroom is replaced I have been doing it up a bit at a time. None of them would I consider really bad.
So your argument is that one stat is biased and the other isnt because you say so? Dreadful reasoning skills. The only way to know for certain is learn statistical modelling and then go through for it otherwise youre just as guilty of being biased as everyone else
I’m saying the exact opposite John, that any statistics will have their bias so I take them all with a pinch of salt. Shelter will highlight figures reflecting their world view and government will do exactly the same thing.
This is why reasoned debate on programmes like Question Time or Andrew Marr are usually nothing more than each party refusing to believe the other party’s statistics.
“Yes it it is, no it isnt”, Which as I have said above quite clearly, I find a tedious life sapping process.
Every three months in a homelessness unit, for as long as I have been in the game, there is a flurry of activity to produce a form called a P1E, through which government publish their homelessness stats, which informs them on policy and strategy. The media then compile numerous articles based on the same stats.
In 2015 the UK Statistics Authority produced a report declared that the recording of statistics on homelessness were so poor that the methodology did not even qualify to be considered as statistics. The methodology of the rough sleeping count changed as a result but not the way statutory homelessness and prevention is conducted.
For reasons such as these I take all stats with a pinch of salt
I dont have an issue with anything you wrote infact i really enjoy reading your posts you offer some great advice and insights.
I explained why one statistic is much less likely to be biased. I didn’t just say so. Dreadful reading skills.
PS I did study statistics though that was a long time ago.
I read and understand precisely what you meant.
Your argument is an appeal to authority, “i trust this one and therefore so should you”. You haven’t discussed the methodology and limitations of each study which anyone with a basic understanding of stats should be aware of.
Oh but I can have it both ways Peter. Evidence can be both compelling and ignored.
The mistake is in believing that any evidence or statistics are pure maths and beyond corruption or bias.
I said above that Heather Wheeler had predictably, as a government rep, trumpeted information that made her government look good and I also commented that Shelter, had equally predictably, produced figures supporting their world view, proving that government were wrong.
I also said I have no interest in agreeing or disagreeing with either argument, precisely because I have no faith in the objective truth of stats of any kind, preferring to leave these tedious arguments to politicians and campaign groups.
I go into properties every day and see slums and intimidated tenants. I dont give a toss if those tenants represent 60% of the rental population or their scumbag landlords constitute 40% of the rental market. I have no idea and this is why i shy away from supporting data from either side.
Everyone has their biases and these can come through stats or opinions. I at least know my biases and I’m not a policy maker thank Christ.
Blogs are by their very nature opinion pieces, they arent reports and my opinions are based on simply dealing with people living in appalling circumstances, being exploited by bullies and reporting back on that angle of the problem.
I am also personal friends with many landlords who I think are fine human beings being ripped off by sometimes awful tenants. I am neither a campaign group nor a politician and I just write about my experiences, which necessarily is tainted on occasion with anger and bias. I’m a human being.
I dont do what I do or write what I write because I am anti-landlord or pro tenant. I just write about what I see. I leave others to make policies. As you will have observed by the above piece. Whilst holding a personal zero tolerance to rogue landlords I am mainly critical of my local authority colleagues for letting lack of resources defeat them and not being imaginative enough in their responses.
Something, as I said again above, has been the main thrust of most conference presentation I have made in the past few years, even when addressing my peers.
Why is everyone just banging on about Ben’s skills in analysing statistics? That’s not really what the post is about. Ben was reviewing the report.
And anyway if there is even one property in a disgusting state which people have to live in – that is one property too many.
Why is everyone just banging on about Ben’s skills in analysing statistics?
Because he has plucked out ‘debateable’ statistics.
Because Government policy should be decided on genuine facts.
Because misled, badly informed policy leads to even more properties in a disgusting state which people have to live in.
The report is important as it shows that the message is starting to trickle through to MPs. The message is
– That talking about things in percentages is misleading as you can say that the percentage of A has gone down and be correct, but if A has increased dramatically then a ‘lower percentage’ will actually mean a bigger number overall.
– That the legislation, although it does actually cover the problems, is overcomplex and this hinders enforcement, and
– That enforcement is also hampered by the lack of resources at Local Authorities which means less staff (in particular less properly trained staff) to take action against rogue landlords.
However, it does look as if the problem of Courts giving ridiculously small fines is being resolved.
Ben denied any interest in statistics which is clearly not true as he chose to include some in his article and commented about them.
Statistics are of course applied mathematics not pure and they can often be corrupted or misused. But they can also be used correctly. The whole of science is based on doing that.
The statistic quoted by the minister comes from a source that is well checked and is an interesting one. It might be misleading taken out of context, but Shelter went beyond giving context to telling a lie. The percentage of non-decent rentals has declined a lot, and most of that is due to the increase in the size of the sector, but the actual number of non-decent homes has also declined.a little contrary to what Shelter said. The statistic had to be collected because Tony Blair set a target for reducing the proportion of non-decent social housing, but the real question to me is what is a non-decent home.
Ben presumably thinks in terms of the sort of properties he visits, but the standard used is much higher than that. It has 4 parts:
Meet the minimum HHSRS standard
Be in a reasonable state of repair
Have reasonably modern facilities and services
Provide a reasonable degree of thermal comfort
My current home would have failed all of those when I moved in. Replacing the boiler was urgent – the old one worked some of the time but sometimes did not. Other things I have been fixing bit by bit. There was nothing I couldn’t live with. At no stage was it disgusting.
As for MPs realizing that local authorities need help/encouragement to enforce the exisiting laws surely they should that they (or some of them) understood that when they allowed LAs to keep some fines and allowed to tenants to sue on their own behalf last year.