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Housing (Tenancy Deposit Schemes) Order 2007

This side is also happy to support the principle and the detail of the business in front of us today. I know that my noble friend Lady Maddock, who is our housing spokesman, campaigned hard for this here and in another place. It is good to see it come to fruition. Nowadays the general thrust is that we should avoid regulation at all costs, but this demonstrates that when industry is given an opportunity to reform and manage itself, it sometimes fails. When that happens, the state has a responsibility to step in and make life better for tenants. This has been some time in coming; it has taken almost three years to get these regulations. However, I shall not carp about that because the department has done a thorough job in consulting and in coming up with a scheme that appears to deal satisfactorily with all the concerns. From that point of view, this scheme is the opposite of one of the other great outcomes of the 2004 Act—home information packs. The proposals about them were rather rushed through and we are left with great uncertainty, with changes having to be made because the industry is not ready. This is the better of the two approaches and I wish HIPs had been dealt with in this way. I have a couple of points of detail. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, I lost track of what will happen in insurance-based schemes when landlords are uncontactable. Paragraph 7.10 of the Explanatory Memorandum states that, "““the department considers the landlord should be given the opportunity to give his consent””." I could not find anything else in the memorandum that would explain what would happen at the point when one really could not contact the person. It is not clear to what extent the scheme would have to try to find someone. It is very difficult to imagine a situation in which someone owning a property that they are letting out would actually disappear altogether—but then we do not know how hard the scheme would have to try to find someone. A lengthy delay in that regard would leave tenants in some difficulty, so like the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, I should like clarification on that. What arrangements will be made for monitoring how all this is working? From the point of view of the landlords and tenants, we clearly think that the scheme will work; but one can never be sure, so we need to keep an eye on how this is working from both points of view, particularly with regard to the relative merits of insurance versus custodial schemes. The law of unintended consequences is always alive and well, and some changes in behaviour may happen as a result of these provisions that none of us could have predicted. It is useful if trends are monitored before they become problematic. Apart from that, we are happy to support this.