Comments from David Smith on House of Commons debate - Renters' Rights Bill
Author - David Smith
September 8, 2025
I did not watch the House of Commons debate on the Lords' amendments to the Renters' Rights Bill live but I was reviewing the transcript in the Commons' Hansard.
Leaving aside how awesome it is that the Hansard is available with a detailed transcript so soon after the debate, I think the Housing Minister, Matthew Pennycook, said a number of important things.
First was on rent increases. The Minister re-iterated the possibility of changing the rules to allow some backdating of rent increases to the date of a s13 notice. However, he was very clear that this is not something the government is intending to do as a matter of course and it will not be used "unless and until it is considered necessary to avoid lengthy delays for genuine cases to be heard" where the tribunal is "overwhelmed". Given that the government thinks the civil courts are going to be fine, I wonder what will count as overwhelm.
On the same topic the Minister also stated that the Government has "concluded that there is a compelling case for the use of an alternative body or mechanism to make initial rent determinations" and it will "establish such an alternative body or mechanism as soon as possible".
Secondly, on the issue of pet insurance, the Minister said the Government had listened "to concerns expressed by several peers that the insurance industry appears unlikely to provide suitable financial products at the speed and scale required, and that the reasonable request of tenants to keep pets might be hampered as a result" it had removed "the provisions in the Bill which made landlord consent to a request to keep a pet conditional on the tenant taking out, or paying for, pet damage insurance." I wrote about this amendment at the time and questioned where the government was getting its information from as there were already multiple pet insurance products being brought to market (four at my count). But I suspect the real truth here is found in the word "suitable" by which the Government means products at a low enough price point.
But I think the real issue was when the Minister said that "most of the amendments in question serve to undermine the core principles of the Bill and for that reason we cannot accept them".
This is the real point. The Government has developed a relatively fixed idea of what the PRS needs to become and sees most comments on that not as healthy debate but as evidence of people who do not understand the "core principles". There was a near total rejection of amendments put forward in the Lords. This reached such a level that Lord David Hacking, himself a Labour Hereditary Peer, said at Lord's Report Stage that "the Government were not prepared, during the passage of the Bill, to listen to the expertise of the House. To put it bluntly, the rejection of over 300 amendments shows that they are not listening to this House." He also said that the Government appeared to have the view that they "were always right in Committee on all these amendments and that the rest of us were always wrong." It seems to me that the Housing Minister made clear that this is precisely the view that the Government holds.
I fear that we have now reached the nadir of the debate about the PRS. Because there is no longer any debate at all, just different groups talking past each other as they each claim to know more about the sector than anyone else. The long-term failure to deal properly with housing has brought us to this, where we cannot even properly discuss a Bill that will likely cause as many problems as it could ever hope to solve. The Government is entitled to reject amendments and it should be cautious to avoid efforts to undermine its objectives but it should also listen to expertise and engage in sensible discussions to achieve a better PRS. That time now seems to be gone