Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. I’d like to acknowledge the research support I’ve had from the National Assembly’s staff, including very clear legal advice. I’d also like to thank Catherine Iannucci, a final year student who did an effective day’s work gathering information about Cardiff Lettings agency, following up recent work done by Shelter on the state of play with letting agencies across Wales. In light of the Shelter report, I’m slightly surprised that no other Member has requested to speak, but I’m very happy that so many of you seem to be wishing to stay.

On my way here this morning, on my bike—today is Cycle to Work Day—I was delighted to see an advert on the back of a bus telling landlords that they need to register by the 23 November deadline. That’s one innovative way of getting the message across that will hopefully educate both landlords and tenants on this topical and important change in the law, but I fear it’s unlikely to be sufficient to capture all the people who need to know about this, and 23 November is not very far away.

How well is Rent Smart Wales, who’ve been tasked with covering the registration and licensing of landlords for the whole of Wales, or any other agency of Government, making clear the changes now required by the 2014 housing Act? By mid June, nearly 13,000 landlords had registered. By 1 September, 19,500 had registered—so far so good, but that’s out of a potential number of somewhere between 70,000 and 130,000 private landlords operating in Wales. So, we still have some considerable way to go. Are landlords not aware of the change in the law? Are they planning to ignore it in the hope that there’ll be no comeback, or are they just going to leave it to the last minute, which, of course, they are entitled to do, but it could delay the issuing of their licence? If thousands of landlords and letting agents leave it to the last minute, I hope we will not see any relaxation of the assessment by Rent Smart Wales that they are a fit-and-proper person to whom it is appropriate to grant a licence.

This is not a minor regulatory matter. After owner-occupancy, private renting is the second biggest type of housing tenure across the UK. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation estimates that nearly 40 per cent of all young people will be living in private rented accommodation by 2020, which is just round the corner. This, of course, reflects the failure of successive Governments over the last 30 to 40 years to build enough social housing and to assume, in the boom years of easy money, that anyone and everyone could aspire to own their own home. That mirage came crashing down in 2008, and we’re still paying the price in terms of the huge cost to the public purse of housing benefit. Let’s remember that most of the homes bought by tenants under the right to buy eventually end up in the hands of the private rented sector, not happy householders, making it ever more difficult in estates to identify who is responsible for noisy neighbours or disrepairs.

The cost in terms of the well-being of families living in private rented accommodation is often being forced to move every 12 months. Private landlords can evict without giving any reason, using what’s called the section 21 notice. The impact on children is particularly awful. The combination of a seller’s market and the cap on housing benefit makes it almost impossible to find suitable alternative private rented accommodation in the Cardiff area, if that’s where they come from; that is my experience as a Cardiff representative. Being forced to move every 12 months, even if you are model tenants, exacts a huge price in preventing families putting down roots, making and retaining friends and being able to complete your education at just one primary school and just one secondary school. Other families, I acknowledge, have rented for many years in the same property from a good landlord with whom they have a good relationship, but suddenly they find their home is being taken from them because the landlord’s got into financial difficulties and needs to sell. The tenant is the innocent victim. There is no security of tenure in private rented accommodation.

In theory, private renting is fine for young people who are on the move and yet to settle down, but the age when you turn to the local authority to be housed once you have children is crumbling under the weight of underprovision of supply over demand. Local authorities are being forced to use the private sector to discharge their duties to house homeless people as they simply don’t have enough social housing properties to discharge those duties. So, the housing Act is an important first step in regulating the private rented sector to ensure that there is a minimum of quality standards there when we are referring vulnerable people to be housed by them.

In the past, all sorts of amateur landlords have piled into the private rented sector, encouraged by the tax breaks that are on offer and the attractive returns compared with other ways of investing savings. If you bear in mind what you can get from putting your money into a savings account at the bank, you can see why people are investing in bricks and mortar, never mind into the manufacturing industry. Too many have had little regard to their obligations as landlords in exchange for the privilege of assuming rent. Registration will, hopefully, force these people to raise their game or get out.

I've dealt with landlords who’ve not thought it a priority to provide a front door that locks, or who ask contractors to fix the roof on four-storey buildings without any scaffolding, in terrifying contravention of health and safety regulations. Registration should at least allow us to find out who these people are in a timely fashion, as they have to provide the name and contact details, including their phone numbers. This should put a stop to landlords or letting agents who simply fail to provide meaningful contact details. An e-mail address is simply not sufficient if the water’s pouring down the walls as a result of a burst water pipe, or there’s no lock on the front door. Equally, letting agencies that publicise a phone number but never answer it are just as bad. From November, anyone who does not register will not be issued with a licence, and if you don't have a licence, then, obviously, there are very severe consequences.

Is this going to drive out the modern-day Rachmans from the landlord business? Hopefully. These amateur or absentee landlords who are not in a position to meet the licensing obligations can appoint a letting agent to act on their behalf; otherwise they simply will be refused a licence. And if you haven't got a licence, you can be fined—not a very large fine, £150 to £250—but more significantly, you will not be entitled to issue a no-fault eviction notice against your tenants—what I've previously referred to as the section 21 notice. In the most serious cases, you can also be subject to rent stopping or rent repayment orders. So, we have to assume that there will be a strong incentive to comply, as the landlord, or to appoint a letting agent to comply.

I want to spend the rest of my time just looking at the role of these letting agents, which are potentially going to get the lion's share of the business as a result of this Act. They need to comply with a code of practice as part of the licensing arrangement with one of four approved organisations, which include the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, which includes enabling you to get a discount. That's a quick way of ensuring that at least they've got a tenancy deposit guarantee scheme, so that that money doesn't disappear if they go bankrupt, and a complaints resolution process. But signing up and complying are two different things.

What role might these approved agencies play in raising standards amongst these letting agencies? For example, I spent the best part of a week trying to get hold of a letting agency called Pinnacle about trying to retrieve a former tenant's unpaid deposit, which has been outstanding since the end of June. Two people, perfectly polite on the phone, but neither is the right department for dealing with the matter. I've been informed, as a result of that phone contact, that they are a member of something called the National Approved Letting Scheme. The National Approved Letting Scheme website assures landlords and tenants that their members all have a complaints procedure that they adhere to, and that they respond to correspondence in a timely fashion. Has the National Approved Letting Scheme’s chief executive responded to my phone calls and correspondence? Sadly, not yet. The royal institute, RICS, does pick up the phone, but they readily admit that they are only going to be inspecting agencies that benefit from their badge of approval every three years, and only a limited selection of those agencies. So, I fear it will fall on Rent Smart Wales and local authorities to deal with the people who are either not complying or simply not adhering to the terms of the Act.

At the moment, the biggest concern I get is from widespread abuse of the issues around fees and charges. For example, landlords and letting agents must return the deposit within 10 days of both tenant and landlord agreeing how much they'll get back, but the loophole is that there’s no specified time in which they have to agree how much they'll get back. And, I think, in particular, students are particularly vulnerable to sharp practices. Remember that when they set out to sign these letting agreements, they are somewhere between 18 and 19 years old, this is the first time they'll ever have entered into a legal agreement, their first time away from home, and many of them absolutely not aware of their rights. Shelter, in their research on letting agencies across Wales, did find one letting agency in Rhondda Cynon Taf that they said was a model of exemplary practice, and that’s completely excellent, but none in Cardiff. My research of 30 letting agencies in Cardiff is that none of them, unfortunately, meet that standard.

There is an organisation called the Cardiff Student Letting Agency, which is owned by the Cardiff University Students’ Union, and they could be a model of exemplary practice in Cardiff, but one of the problems they possibly face is they don’t have enough properties to meet the demand from their student bodies, never mind anybody else, to ensure that their practice of not charging fees becomes the norm.

Looking at the Shelter report and the testimonies I get from constituents, few letting agencies are complying with their obligations under the Consumer Rights Act 2015, in which we asked the House of Commons to include something on this when it was going through. They’re not complying because they’re simply not displaying their fees, and students or anybody else only find out rather late in the day what eye-watering fees they turn out to be. So, one student told me they would charge £150 to each tenant in agency fees, and that was just to take the property off the market ‘while we sort out the contract’. So, in a six-member household, that is £900 for 10 minutes’ work. In another agency, in the small print of the contract it was revealed that they would take £65 from each of the tenants for professional cleaning at the end of the contract, regardless of the condition of the house. This individual was outraged because the house that they inherited was in such a poor state that clearly this professional cleaning had not been carried out after the previous tenants left. Frankly, such activities, if they are going on systematically, are fraud.

‘So, how is it possible to say there was professional cleaning done if the kitchen is leaking and rotting, and that the ceiling collapsed within a week due to an upstairs leak, and the bathrooms reeked of mould and piss?’

Many people argue that the fee is the worst aspect of the relationship that they have with the letting agencies, and the legal advice I’ve had from the head of the legal service here in the National Assembly is that we do indeed have the powers to follow Scotland’s lead and outlaw letting agency fees. It should be the landlord paying the letting agency, not the tenant. Now, I know that the Welsh Government in the past has argued that this comes under consumer protection, which is not devolved, but that’s not the legal advice I’ve had. They say there’s a very strong argument that letting agency fees are devolved, so that the Assembly could pass a Bill including banning them. Following on from the success of the Agricultural Sector (Wales) Bill, which was adjudicated on in the Supreme Court, it is clear in his view that

‘The relationship between a "Landlord" and a "Tenant" forms a long-established and well-understood branch of the law' as being a service rather than a consumer relationship’. So, I would urge the Minister, not least because you need to recall that those on housing benefit end up having to pay the letting agency fee from their income support, because the housing benefit is already being applied to the max to cover the rent. So, that is causing a huge amount of hardship, and, frankly, the letting agencies are getting away with simply not providing a service in exchange for the fee. I think it’s something that needs to be stopped as a matter of urgency.