Birmingham: The Canary in the Coalmine when it comes to HMO's and exempt accommodation

Speech delivered by Roger Harmer on 28 January 2025:

This is far from the first time the issue of exempt accommodation has come up on the floor of this chamber and I make no apology for bringing it up again. For all the talk, far too little has actually been done, and as a result:

• Many of the communities we represent continue to suffer quite appallingly.
• Residents of exempt accommodations are let down badly, effectively denied the support they need
• And millions of pounds of public money is wasted, or more accurately transferred to the bank accounts of unscrupulous landlords and providers. 

This is nothing short of a scandalous failure of governance by central Government and its one we need to keep shouting about until it is put right. Today, I’m going to focus more on that failure of governance and what needs to happen now.

But before I do let’s just reflect a little on the impact of this failure. 

I spoke with someone who has many years' experience of supporting women who experience homelessness, custodial sentences and domestic violence in our city. She told me shocking stories of women who beg to go back to prison when faced with the exempt accommodation they are expected to stay in. Similarly of a young woman sleeping outside Lidl in the wind and rain of December, offered a place who felt safer outside. And you can understand why when you hear the stories of sexual abuse taking place in these homes with some being run by criminal gangs and their links with the drugs trade.  And just as you wouldn’t want to live in such a place, you also wouldn’t want to live next door. And you would certainly expect that if you did it would be properly regulated. 

The failure to do this is even more egregious because there is very little disagreement about what needs to be done – there is a remarkable cross-party consensus in this chamber on that. What’s more, the normal barrier against reform in government, the Treasury, will actually gain by this being sorted out. 

I don’t doubt that the exempt accommodation policy was well meaning at its inception, but the way it has been exploited has been a disaster for Birmingham and several northern cities. So, how should a well governed country respond? Sure, take some time to understand the problem, and the failure points, work out how to fix the system, then generate proposals and legislate.

It would be understandable if that process took a couple of years. What has actually happened?

Well, it started to become clear that there was a major problem towards the end of the 2010s. A scrutiny enquiry into exempt accommodation reported in December 2021 and there was then a Parliamentary Select Committee enquiry held in 2022 which called for action. There is then what you might think is a stroke of luck with the Chair of the Select Committee enquiry winning the private members ballot and using it to bring in legislation to regulate the sector. This passed and received the Royal Assent in August 2023. It states that the Government must set up a panel and bring in regulation within a year. So, a year to recruit the panel and consult on the nature of the regulation; rather slow you might say but this is central government. 

But here we are nearly 18 months later, and the Government hasn’t even started the consultation on the regulation and the panel is still being recruited. Now for sure there has been a General Election during that time which would have delayed things a month or two, but no more than that, as this isn’t a party-political issue.

The real horror, for those desperate for action is to see how this plays out. So, at some point hopefully soon the consultation starts. That will take months and then the Government has to consider the results of it and draft the regulation itself. Those regulations then need to be implemented – and if that needs further legislation how long will that take. Say it recommends a licensing system. Will we have to apply for it to come here, how long will that take, If approved, past experience suggests there may be a 12 month notice period and then when it starts the Council will have to recruit staff to run it. Add all that up and you are looking at years and years into the future before a working system is actually running on the ground. By this time the horses haven’t just bolted, they’ve bred a whole herd causing yet more chaos in our communities. We need to shorten this process to bring in regulation that we can use this year. 

And it's even worse when it comes to planning – we are now looking at a 3-year consideration as to whether planning law should change. That’s madness. Our residents are right when they refer to exempt properties as HMOs and planning law is wrong when it classifies them as family homes. They are HMOs. And they should be classified as HMOs in planning law here and now, allowing us to use the tools we have in limiting the concentration of HMOs to apply to exempt properties. 

One small step in the right direction was Government SHIP funding – this is the supported housing improvement programme that funds the exempt accommodation team to inspect properties. Its telling of course that this runs out this spring. That is when proper regulation should have been in place to take over from the pilot scheme. Given that we are miles away from that happening, we clearly need for this to continue, until it does and our motion calls for this. 

The final part of our motion calls reflects the increasing complexity of the housing field and the problems this causes in working out what type of property is causing a problem and the delay this results in tackling the issues themselves. By bringing in a register of property types we can get onto the right teams straight away rather than first having to find out who they are. We also need to do more to ensure a single council approach to the sector by improving co-ordination between the various regulatory teams, housing and planning enforcement. 

In conclusion I return to the point about this being a failure of Government. We can speculate why but it's hard to escape one key point and that is that how Birmingham regulates its housing, should be a decision for Birmingham and not Westminster. If it were, I have no doubt we would have dealt with it by now. We are an overcentralised country, and this issue is a classic illustration of how it costs us. 

Lord Mayor, it's time for action, indeed its well past time for action.  I move the motion.