The Renters’ Rights Bill continues to progress through parliament, but Nigel Lewis explores whether its focus on shaking up eviction rules is misguided.
One of the least logical but most political thrusts within the looming Renters’ Rights Bill is its huge focus on tenancy ‘security’.
This follows sustained efforts by Labour ministers and campaigners to establish the narrative that many tenants face uncertainty in tenure and, consequently, the Bill contains several measures designed to provide a solution.
These include banning Section 21 evictions; giving tenants more time to find a new home when asked to leave; sweeping away Assured Shorthold Tenancies and replacing them with open-ended or ‘periodic’ ones; increasing the amount of arrears tenant must owe before they can be evicted and increasing the notice period in these cases from two to four weeks.
And there’s more. If a landlord wishes to move back into a property, then they will not be able to during the first 12 months of a tenancy and must give four months’ notice of their wish to do so.
Is scrapping Section 21 the answer?
These all prompt several discussions for me. The first is that calling Section 21 evictions a ‘scourge’ (official language, not mine) is unhelpful.
Section 21 evictions were designed to be a failsafe system so that when a tenant stops paying the rent deliberately or behaves badly, there is a simple and effective way to remove them.
Some landlords abuse this privilege and use Section 21 notices to kick out tenants who complain about the poor quality of their homes, but I suspect the two cancel themselves out – i.e. there are just as many badly behaving tenants as there are landlords.
Overall, banning Section 21 will not give tenants more security – instead, they will be evicted via a Section 8 which will be slower but more expensive for landlords, and Labour’s claims that ‘beefing up’ Section 8 will solve this don’t wash with most experts.
I also worry that this will make life more difficult for good landlords and lead many bad landlords to ‘go underground’ and either bribe tenants to leave or attempt illegal evictions.
And the debate around this is not helped by the deluge of articles in local and regional press which blur Section 21 evictions with ‘illegal evictions’ even though the two are very different, both in terms of law and operation.
Most tenancies don’t end in eviction
One other argument around ‘security of tenure’ is the claim that tenants feel as if they are living in their homes ‘temporarily’. This is not supported by the data. The most recent English Housing Survey shows that the average time renters spend in their home is 4.3 years and that in most cases choose to leave themselves as their housing requirement changes.
This is based on data gathered from 676,000 people who moved between one rented home and another – or around 28% of the 4.6 million households within the privately rented sector, so statistically significant.
The elephant in the room here is that all this is irrelevant unless local authorities are properly funded to police the sector adequately.
The slew of council struggling and failing to balance their books would suggest they will not be able to oversee the significant number of regulations and laws that the Renters’ Rights Bill will bring in and that therefore such efforts to increase tenant ‘security’ will come to nowt – and therefore we will be left with what always happens; a great British fudge of fighting regulatory talk without much action either way.
You can find more information about the potential upcoming changes in the Renters’ Rights Bill on the government’s website.
To keep up to date with the latest news and updates in the UK property market, including eviction rule changes, keep an eye on our news pages.
