Members of the House of Lords started their further examination of the Renters’ Rights Bill last week and unsurprisingly some Labour Peers who are landlords are finding some of the proposals are not to their liking.

Labour Peer Lord Hacking started by declaring “my wife and I own five one-bedroom flats in the next-door house to ours, and we have been renting out those flats for the last 30 years.” He went on to add “Out of the 300-odd amendments tabled in Committee, the Government did not accept a single one……. it cannot be right that the Government were always right in Committee on all these amendments and that the rest of us were always wrong.”

He continued by saying “Under English contract law, it is the right of any two, three or four parties—whatever the number of contractors—to agree what they like, provided that the contract is a lawful contract. It is therefore quite wrong for the state to jump in and say, “You can’t do that because we don’t like fixed-term tenancies”. This is a fundamental breach of English contract law. In Committee on a similar amendment, noble Lords made several arguments that short-term tenancies benefit the letting market, and I am very happy to adopt all those arguments—I remember the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, was very active on this issue in Committee. But my principal argument is that, under English contract law, parties if they wish are entitled to create fixed-term tenancies and the state has no right to interfere. I beg to move.”