The only losers in this Bill are the outrageous letting agents who've been charging both the tenant and the landlords for carrying out work. They've been double-jobbing, these unscrupulous agents, and they need to be put out of business. We heard very good evidence from both the Residential Landlords Association and the Association of Residential Letting Agents that they want us to put these people out of business, and therefore we need to strengthen the Bill to ensure that that happens. There's no point in introducing an abolition of letting agency fees if we then allow spurious charges to be introduced for other matters. So, I think it's disappointing that we don't have a stronger response in terms of what constitutes an appropriate default fee. It needs to be really clear that that has to be fair and reasonable, otherwise we will have all manner of default fees for bringing in and out. 

There is a particular problem, obviously, with tenants who are unable to pay their rent on time because the universal credit has failed to make that payment. Clearly, landlords need to get their payments on time because they've got to pay their own costs, but, nevertheless, it's difficult to see how there's an appropriate arrangement for people being charged for things over which they have no control. It's absolutely appropriate that tenants should be charged for the bother of getting new keys if they were to lose them, or some other matter that requires the landlord to make special visits, but I think that one of the things we need to do is make sure that the range of fines is appropriate for the range of letting agency landlords that we have. The proverbial little old lady who simply hadn't read the legislation and wasn't aware of it who charges a fee is one thing, but a letting agent with 100 properties, it is hard to see how they could possibly not have known that they were not entitled to charge a fee.

Therefore, I'm disappointed that the Minister is still not planning to ensure that any penalty has not been discharged if they haven't returned the illegally charged fee to the tenant. We're not in the business here of creating more work for the citizens advice bureaux or other advice agencies. They've got plenty of work on their plate as it is, so I think that we simply need to ensure that the regulations are sufficiently robust that those who've done the wrong thing have rectified it before they're allowed to move on.

I think also that it's very disappointing that the Minister only wants to increase the range of fines to £1,000, when even the Association of Residential Letting Agents support financial penalties of between £5,000 and £30,000. They're encouraging us to be more radical, because they want the unscrupulous letting agents put out of business as well. I think that we have to be really careful that, with exit fees, it's entirely appropriate for a reasonable fee to be charged if a tenant is terminating the contract before the period they signed up for, but I don't think it's at all reasonable for exit fees to be charged when it's come to the end of the tenancy, the year or whatever it is. There should be no fee charged—simply both parties are moving on. So, we will discuss this matter further and I look forward to reading the detailed response from the Minister.