Properties should be confiscated from rogue residential landlords, the chair of the levelling up committee has said.
Clive Betts, a senior Labour MP, said that handing courts the power to seize homes would create a “significant deterrent” to landlords who treated fines for letting out squalid, unsafe and overcrowded properties as simply a cost of doing business.
Confiscated homes could become the property of councils, which could then use them to house people in need or sell them to raise money for social housing, he said.
The committee previously proposed a version of the idea in 2018 but it was rejected by Theresa May’s government.
