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Categories: government and politics | renters reform bill
Housing secretary Angela Rayner is facing criticism after reports emerged that Labour are pushing the Renters’ Rights Bill through the House of Lords as quickly as possible.
Labour peers have been summoned to complete the committee stage of policy amendments on Wednesday 14th May.
This drive to rush through the parliamentary process comes amid allegations of Conservative House of Lords members making coordinated efforts to delay and undermine the Renters’ Rights Bill.
Recap of the Bill’s progress
The road to getting the Renters’ Rights Bill into law has been longer and rockier than Labour apparently anticipated. During their election campaign, they boldly promised that they would ban Section 21 ‘no-fault’ evictions within days of being elected.
Over a year later, the bill has weathered several readings in Parliament, and is currently at the committee stage in the House of Lords. This stage allows peers to scrutinise the legislation in granular detail and propose more specific amendments.
The committee stage can take time, because a lot of line-by-line reading and debating is involved, often across party lines. For the Renters’ Rights Bill in particular, opinions remain sharply divided among Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat politicians.
The Conservatives had previously tried to introduce a similarly-named piece of legislation called the Renters Reform Bill, but they have been highly critical of Labour’s attempt at reforming the private rental sector (PRS).
This sentiment extends into the House of Lords. Several high-profile Tory peers are landlords themselves and understand the difficulties that may be introduced by the Renters’ Rights Bill.
Chief among them is Baroness Jane Scott of Bybrook, who spearheaded a think-tank of private landlords and housing industry experts gathered to brainstorm ways to delay the Renters’ Rights Bill until autumn, by any means necessary.
Baroness Scott has no expectations of preventing the bill from passing into law, but she was determined to prolong debate in the House of Lords for as long as possible. One of her proposed tactics was to flag potential human rights law violations.
This obstructive tactic is known as filibustering, informally referred to as “talking a bill to death”. It is nothing extraordinary in political and legal spheres.
‘Peer pressure’ to work into the night
In response, Ms Rayner has demanded that peers work until late into Wednesday night to get the bill fully reviewed, so that it may go through to the report stage for further scrutiny.
The Labour whip’s call to action was left on a printer in the House of Lords, summoning colleagues to “ensure [the] committee stage finishes”.
Politicians have been critical of the pressure to hurry their processes. Shadow minister Paul Holmes said:
Labour clearly can’t handle the heat of proper scrutiny and are resorting to bully-boy tactics to ram their bills through Parliament.
The Renters’ Rights Bill is a half-baked plan that will reduce the supply of rental homes, push up the cost of renting and make things worse for tenants.
It’s deeply flawed and, judging by Labour trying to rush it past Parliament, even they know it is ripe to unravel.
Similarly, Baroness Eaton, a Conservative backbencher, argued that peers on all sides need to effectively scrutinise the bill at sensible hours, rather than late at night.
We have serious concerns about the impact the Renters’ Rights Bill will have on the supply of residential homes in our rental market.
It would be unacceptable to debate crucial issues such as EPC ratings in the private rented sector and local housing authorities’ investigatory powers cursorily, late at night, simply to fulfil the Prime Minister’s desire to go ‘faster and further’. It is our duty to scrutinise this Bill thoroughly.
Labour have caught onto the Tories’ filibustering plans. A source within the party stating that the whip was in place “because of the procedural shenanigans and games from a handful of Conservative peers over the past few months”.
There have been many predictions for how long the Renters’ Rights Bill will take to complete, but this new initiative may mean that it will come into law sooner than some expected. Therefore, it is important that private landlords prepare for the rapidly approaching changes.
We will keep you updated on how the bill progresses through the House of Lords.
