This is where the housing pressure-cooker explodes. This is Manchester’s civil court, like others all across England, where people are made homeless, hundreds every day. Those unable to pay rocketing mortgages have houses repossessed here. Tenants unable to cope with stagnant incomes lose their homes here when budgets no longer cover rising rents. From here, court bailiffs are sent to remove them.
The great scandal is the spiralling number of tenants evicted on “no-fault” section 21 orders: these allow a landlord to turn someone out even if they have always paid their rent on time, however many years they have been there, however well-behaved they have been. The 2019 Conservative manifesto contained a promise to abolish this power, finally introducing the renters’ reform bill. But then abruptly, in October, the government suspended it indefinitely, with no timeframe, only a hazy statement that it would wait for “reforms” to court delays – sometime never, given the state of the courts.
