Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 6:04 pm on 6 November 2018.
The market is broken at the moment, and therefore this Bill proposes to fix that. We need to get it right. We can't go on having tenants who are being forced to stay in damp or insecure properties just because they simply don't have the money to pay for the letting agent's fees. That is not the way in which markets operate and, at the moment, they are operating entirely to the advantage of the letting agent. The average tenancy fee is £337 and, in Cardiff, it's as much as £450, just for the pleasure of signing a contract. So, we have to rectify this. There's a particular problem in my constituency, Cardiff Central, which has the highest proportion of university students of any constituency around the UK. Young people who have never entered into a legal agreement on anything before are particularly vulnerable to being strong-armed into some pretty outrageous fees. Not only are they charged £60 or more for a credit check, which probably doesn't cost more than £5 to execute, but they're also being charged renewal fees as high as £300, which simply involves printing out the same contract with new dates on it. People have even been charged £150 per person to take a property off the market while they sort out the contract. This is what happens in a seller's market, and we need to change the balance so that it is fairer for the renter.