One of the key planks of the imminent Renters’ Rights Bill is that Section 21 ‘no fault’ or ‘no reason’ evictions notices are to be banned, leaving landlords with just a (slightly) bolstered Section 8 process to fall back on when tenants won’t budge.
Section 21 notices have been the bête noire of the tenant rights movement for many years with organisations such as Shelter and Acorn arguing that they give landlords too much power over tenants. And finally, with a Labour government, they have got their way.
Margaret Thatcher will be turning in her grave – Section 21 was introduced by her Government to persuade more people to invest in the private rented sector by offering a guaranteed route to repossession if tenants misbehaved or stopped paying the rent.
Landlords vs. Tenants: A Misguided Narrative
And this is the problem with the Renters’ Rights Bill. As I have said before in columns for BuyAssociation – this approach assumes all landlords are devious, money obsessed malcontents, and that all tenants are innocent victims needing rights.
Banning Section 21 is part of this ‘evil landlord’ playbook much loved by earnest young activists, and as the Renters’ Rights Bill has progressed through parliament (and will soon become law) several organisations and even wannabe Labour deputy leader Lucy Powell, have said the private rented sector needs either abolishing completely or reducing significantly.
Apart from the obvious idiocy of such statements given nationalising 2.4 million landlords would be tricky and that it would trample over property rights established for hundreds of years, it’s worth shining a brief light on the real evictions picture.
The Reality Behind the Numbers
Shelter and other organisations love to portray landlords ‘kicking out’ tenants using a Section 21. But the official figures, which are often selectively quoted, paint a different picture.
First of all, the number of tenants being evicted by landlords has not yet reached the pre-pandemic levels, so to claim ‘more landlords are kicking out tenants’ is not true.
The number of warrants (actual evictions) that were granted during the first quarter of this year reached 11,000 compared to 16,000 for the same period the year before Covid.
Of these 4,500 were by private landlords, the rest by social rented landlords – i.e. councils and housing associations.
As has been highlighted by the BBC recently, this illustrates how more councils and housing associations evict via a Section 21 than private landlords do – and yet it is private landlords who are vilified.
Nevertheless, the Government data shows it is true that more private landlords are evicting tenants through ‘accelerated’ evictions, which is the technical name for Section 21 repossessions.
These were going down in number up until the Covid pandemic, but have risen sharply since, although this is not surprising given that the other route, via a Section 8, is taking much longer as the County Court system has continued to melt down following the previous Tory Government’s austerity programme.
And some, but not many, landlords have also sought to evict troublesome tenants ahead of the Section 21 ban.
To quote the data – warrants issued for the first three months of this year for accelerated claims totalled 4,000, or about 1,000 more than the same period in 2019.
But given there are nine million rented households in the private sector, this is small beer, even if of course some of the stories of families losing their home are heart rending.
Evictions Will Continue – Just More Slowly
My last point is the most important, though. Tenants will always need to be evicted – most repossessions by landlords take place because tenants have stopped paying the rent or have been behaving badly. Yes, some bad landlords and letting agents use Section 21 to remove tenants who complain about poor quality housing or rent increases, but they are a significant minority.
Banning Section 21 will not stop people being evicted. It will just allow them to stay in their homes for longer as landlords are forced to use the more lengthy and expensive Section 8 process – but if they are behaving badly or have stopped paying the rent then the inevitable will happen anyway.
