The shadow of eviction first fell across Eva, 43, a single mother training to be a solicitor, in April.
A letter from receivers acting for her private landlord’s lender warned that, amid sharp interest rate rises, he had fallen into mortgage arrears on the two-bedroom flat she had called home for six years in Haringey, north-east London. It was the start of five months of turmoil in which she, her seven-year-old twins and their pet cats faced homelessness.
She felt rising panic as long days seeking a new home in an overheated rental market proved fruitless.
When the bank sent agents to measure up the property for a sale “it became clear there was no way out”. It looked as if they would soon be added to the council’s emergency housing list and placed in a temporary bed and breakfast.
On the one hand she was caught in a dispute between landlord and lender, which said the property was in receivership, and on the other she couldn’t secure viewings at alternative rental properties.
“No one wanted to show me around,” she said. “It was often because of the pets and on some occasions the kids.” Sometimes she was refused because she receives universal credit.
“I got to the point of moving back to Hungary,” she said, despite not having lived in her country of birth for more than two decades. “I almost gave up. Nobody wanted to help.”
The crunch finally came when the landlord tried to wrest back control of the home and gave Eva two weeks to leave.
More than a year earlier, she had missed parts of her rental payments over three months, with rising food prices meaning she needed to prioritise nutrition. She started paying again and agreed she would repay the debt. But the landlord issued an eviction notice for rent arrears – even though by then she had been paying the rent regularly for months.
More of these so-called section 8 evictions have gone through the courts in England than “no-fault” section 21 evictions in the last five years. The renters reform bill is set to add to how they can be used, saying courts should award possession to landlords if at least two months rent was unpaid for at least a day on three occasions.
Eva claimed her landlord used the existing clause to get her out on “a technicality”. “The law is going to be changed for all this, but it’s too late for me,” she said.
“I panicked. The council was advising me to get legal advice. But after three weeks I got nowhere. Every day I was ignoring my kids and was on the phone calling everyone – friends, friends of friends – to see if someone had anything,” she said. “But there was nothing available. I didn’t get lucky. Everyone gave up on me.”
Then, the day before her landlord was able to get a court order to throw her out, she found a place outside London, in Watford.
“I saved my kids, I saved my cats, I saved myself,” she said. “But the system absolutely let me down. We live in a society where only about 5% of people care about the others around them,” she said. “It’s all about money. The human side seems to be disappearing and that’s really scary.”
Good family rentals are close to impossible to find in Dorset, said Jon, which made it even harder when his letting agent called in June and “said in a really happy voice: … ‘We’re about to serve a section 21 notice on you because the landlord wants the property back’”.
It meant two months’ notice of a “no-fault” eviction for Jon, his wife, their two primary school-age boys and his 82-year-old father undergoing palliative care.
“I said that’s an impossibility,” he said. “We won’t be moving out. My father is terminally ill and has been given months to live.
“We have morphine deliveries here. We have an NHS bed that’s been put in here. And, you know, just the upheaval to get all of that changed would be a complete and utter nightmare.”
The two children were also only just established in a new school. So the family pushed back against the landlord and with the help of Shelter, the housing charity, the moving out date was delayed. But the threat of eviction remained.
Getting the £2,000-a-month rental had been a struggle in the first place. It went down to sealed bids from six families.
“I’ve noted that in the agreement, there are penalties against us if we decide to leave in that we have to pay for the marketing of the property, all that kind of stuff, but nothing in terms of the landlord. I think the way it was done was appalling,” said Jon.
He described the overall rental system as “woefully inadequate”.
“The rental law was put together by people who had no idea whatsoever about what it was like to be a renter,” he said. “I don’t think the law at all considers that these are people’s homes. They’re where they live, where they, you know, people establish themselves in their local community or in local schools.”
“Dad has said they’re not getting him out. He has said: ‘If I’m still around and it gets to the point of eviction, I’m not moving. They can get bailiffs to carry me out, put me outside on the street.’
“For him to have to move out while he’s on his last legs is just wrong,” Jon said.
• This article was amended on 16 November 2023 to clarify the measures to be introduced in the renters reform bill.
