5 DECEMBER 1987, Page 6

POLITICS

A Bill to appeal to anyone with a spare adjective

NOEL MALCOLM

Every young opera-singer dreams of the day when the star whose role he is understudying falls ill or fails to turn up. Many careers have been launched in this way, through the benign intervention of flu, salmonella or fog at Heathrow. On Monday it was a cracked rib which pre- vented the shadow Secretary of State for the Environment from replying to Mr Ridley in the second reading of the Hous- ing Bill; his place was taken at very short notice by Clive Soley, member for Ham- mersmith, who turned out to be a veritable Heldentenor of Parliamentary invective. If only the theatre had been full at the time, one might be tempted to claim that a star had been born that evening. But the Labour benches were almost empty. Although the Housing Bill is one of the three great reforming measures of this Parliament, it seems to have been pushed into the scullery already by those overbear- ing ugly sisters, Health and Education.

Debating with Mr Ridley is always an unrewarding task, not because the En- vironment Secretary is a virtuoso perfor- mer himself, but because it is so hard to tell whether you are making any impression on him at all. His `oh well, really, if you're going to start arguing' manner is somehow not conducive to the cut-and-thrust of vigorous debate. Only experienced obser- vers can tell when the expression on his face turns from the benign to the baleful, and some would argue that there is in fact no discernible difference between the two states. Even Mr Eric Heifer was reduced at one point to intoning 'Arrogant man! Arrogant man!' over and over again in a sort of keening chant, as if nothing more could be done about it.

So it was with cries of relief that Labour seized on what seemed to be the one 'own goal' of the evening, when Mr Ridley explained that his Bill would appeal to `anyone who has a spare house to let'. He listened to the Opposition's jeers with an air of puzzled impatience: did they believe, he seemed to be asking himself, that people with spare houses should not be encouraged to let them? Sure enough, a few minutes later Mr Soley was complain- ing that more than four per cent of houses owned by private landlords were standing vacant. One man's spare house, it seems, is another man's under-utilised private-sector housing stock unit. Nevertheless, the dam- age had been done. Semantics became a major theme of this debate, with Mr Soley accusing the Secret- ary of State at one point of causing criminal harm to the English language. The first part of the Housing Bill lays down the conditions for a new category of tenure, which will encompass nearly all new let- tings once the Act is in force. This category is called 'assured tenancy', but it bears only a partial resemblance to the category of the same name which already exists under the 1980 Act.

For the last seven years, assured tenan- cies have offered assurance to the tenant not because they give him special security of tenure (on the contrary, they give much less security than the 'regulated' tenancies of the previous Acts), but because they are available only from specially approved landlords. The new-look •`assured tenan- cies' will be similar in some ways, except that they will lack the element of assur- ance. It looks as if the Government has indeed been guilty, as Mr Soley said, of mystification and doublespeak.

For Conservative voters, however, the real question to ask must be why the Government has felt it necessary to pay this lip-service to the notion that unassured tenure is obviously a bad thing. The great achievement of this Bill will be to ensure that all new lettings can be made at market rents.

Yet at the same time the Govern- ment seems reluctant to admit (let alone to proclaim) that it wishes to restore the true character of a market to the relations between landlord and tenant. Ever since the Rent and Mortgage Interest (War Restrictions) Act of 1915, governments have taken it for granted that private lettings should be swathed in layer upon layer of statutory interference: controlling, protecting, regulating, fixing or assuring. Now that we have a Government which approves in principle of rolling up these various layers of nonsense and throwing them away, we find that it cannot resist the temptation to cut out and retain one small piece — a piece the size of a fig-leaf.

The word 'nonsense' is chosen carefully here, with arguments about semantics very much in mind. Anyone who finds it harsh should examine the rules set up by the 1965 Rent Act for determining a 'fair rent'. (These rules will remain in force for existing regulated tenancies; and under the present laws of hereditary succession, some of these tenancies will still be func- tioning more than 100 years from now.) A fair rent is defined as 'what the market value would be if there were no scarcity'. Now, scarcity is a relative term, because it can be understood only in relation to demand: a complete absence of scarcity would be an infinite glut, in which each applicant for rented accommodation would be able to take his pick of untold thousands of properties on offer. In other words, a market where scarcity had been abolished absolutely would no longer be a market. To remedy this slight conceptual difficulty, the 1977 Rent Act dictates that the number of people looking for properties shall be deemed to be the same as the number of properties on offer. This is also nonsense, albeit nonsense of a slightly more plausible variety: while pretending to use the model of a market, it relies instead upon the model of a system of allocation.

It comes as no surprise, then, to learn that rent officers do not even attempt to jump through these conceptual hoops when a property is brought before them to have its rent registered. They simply match it up with other similar properties which are already on their books. They are, in short, living in a world of their own, in which each new piece of make-believe is corroborated by a whole history of pre- vious inventions.

There were elements of fiction, as well as mystification, on both sides of the House in Monday's debate. The Labour Party is not opposed in principle to the private rental sector, recognising that it plays an important part in job mobility. And the Conservatives, no matter how nostalgically they mourn for the Edwar- dian golden age when 90 per cent of the population lived in rented houses, are quick to dry their tears when they look at the statistics which correlate home-owning and voting Tory. Among working-class owner-occupiers in the 1983 election, 47 per cent voted Conservative and 26 per cent Labour. It would also be instructive to see figures from the coal strike on the number of miners who went back to work because of their mortgages.

Some of these fictions will have to stay in place. But in the meantime the Govern- ment could strike a small blow for veracity by renaming its new 'assured' tenancies as `fair' tenancies, and re-describing lair' rents as 'arbitrary'.