The government has insisted that a new private landlord redress scheme will only have a “negligible impact on the availability of rental property”.

During a House of Lords debate, housing minister Baroness Taylor also confirmed that the Housing Ombudsman, which delivers social landlord redress, would operate the private rented sector landlord ombudsman and that it wasn’t looking at any other options.

However, Conservative peer Lord Jamieson questioned whether the redress scheme would be proportionate and workable, and asked how the government would avoid duplication when a complaint related to actions involving both a landlord and an agent. “What safeguards exist to prevent multiple investigations into the same complaint and conflicting outcomes being reached by different bodies?”

Growing

Lord Jamieson said many landlords looked at the growing list of registration requirements, fees, compliance obligations and potentially significant fines – as well as court delays - and wondered whether it was worth carrying on renting out a property. He asked: “What steps have been taken to prevent landlords from being required to pay multiple fees for systems and fill out multiple forms that, from their perspective, may appear to serve similar or overlapping purposes?"

He said the scheme’s success should not be measured by the volume of complaints it processed or the number of enforcement actions it took.

“The work we have done [creating necessary legislation] shows that there would be only a negligible impact on the availability of rental property,” said Baroness Taylor, who added: “It is not right for a landlord to be able to get away from their responsibility because it is the agent that is part of a redress scheme.”

Logic

While there is a logic and benefit in levelling the playing field with the social sector, the private rented sector is a very different beast with diverse, complex and varied areas of potential conflict, according to Sean Hooker, head of redress at Property Redress Scheme (pictured right).

“A merged service, under the Housing Ombudsman, will need to work with the existing provisions and redress providers, develop new ways of working and adapt their processes and resource to deal with this, the largest tenure type,” he tells LandlordZONE. “There are millions of new tenants they will need to help: but also, they will need to deal with millions of landlords compared to a couple of hundred local authorities and less than one and half thousand social landlords, who currently they serve.”  

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