Anyone who has been looking for a new home to rent knows the market is brutal. Navigating mass viewings and intrusive referencing processes, and making agonising decisions on space and location in order to find something in your budget, is exhausting. When you finally sign a tenancy agreement and get hold of the keys, you feel like you can breathe a sigh of relief.
Unfortunately, any sense of security that your home is yours is a mirage. After the initial fixed term of the tenancy, landlords can ask you to leave with only two months’ notice and without specifying a reason.
There is a law that lets them do this. Section 21 of the 1988 Housing Act, the so-called “no-fault evictions” rule, essentially provides that if you complain about disrepair, such as mould sprouting through the paintwork, your landlord can avoid fixing it by serving an eviction notice. Councils have powers to intervene but rarely use them.
Thankfully this is all set to change, with the renters (reform) bill published by parliament yesterday proposing to abolish section 21 and require landlords to prove a legitimate ground for eviction. The government originally promised this four years ago under Theresa May, so it has been a long wait to get to this point, during which nearly 65,000 households have faced homelessness after receiving a section 21.
The bill proposes creating a property portal, where landlords will be required to register their properties and tenants will be able to check their compliance. An ombudsman will provide an alternative to the courts and local authorities for renters whose landlords are ignoring their complaints. And renters will be given a legal right to ask to keep a pet – though landlords can decline this if they have a good reason.
All these measures are the consequence of tireless campaigning by Generation Rent, our allies on the Renters Reform Coalition and the thousands of renters who have taken action. In March, hundreds of us from around England congregated in Westminster to meet our MPs and demand the bill be published.
But even though we now have a bill, we haven’t secured all the rights that renters need. There are still gaps in protection and potential loopholes that could undermine security of tenure and allow dodgy landlords to continue to exploit tenants.
For example, landlords who seek eviction to sell or move into the property themselves will be banned from re-letting the property after the tenant moves out – but only for three months. Many landlords have no mortgage so could use this as section 21 by the back door.
And even though tenants will have more power to negotiate rent increases or challenge them at a tribunal, there is nothing stopping rents rising as fast as they are in the wider market, meaning renters will still be vulnerable to unaffordable hikes that force them out.
Even when a landlord evicts tenants to sell up or move in, tenants will benefit from no more protection and support than they get under the current system. They would only be immune to such evictions for the first six months of the tenancy and then only have two months to move out, with no discretion for judges in cases of hardship and no financial support to mitigate the stress of being uprooted.
There are many other improvements we want to see to the bill, but one of the most important is to make the new rules enforceable. There’s no point requiring landlords to register or prove genuine eviction grounds if underfunded councils are responsible for identifying those who do not. Tenants could have a huge role to play in this. Just as failure to comply with existing landlord licensing schemes means tenants can claim back up to a year’s rent, we need compensation for tenants whose landlords break the rules. That would give renters an incentive to visit the portal, check their landlord – and, if the government designs it properly, learn about their rights as tenants.
The bill won’t solve everything – without increases in local housing allowance and housebuilding in areas of high demand, rents will remain unaffordable. But after years of campaigning, this is a huge opportunity to rebalance the relationship between tenants and landlords. It’s not a time to sit back – renters now need to start contacting their MPs and put pressure on them to pass a bill that brings renting into the 21st century.
Dan Wilson Craw is the acting director of Generation Rent
