Did you know that in 2022/23 over 1 billion pounds was spent in this country on temporary housing for homeless people and that one in 21 children in London is legally homeless?
On 11 and 12 March, we ran an online conference about the Renters Rights Bill. The headline speaker was Justin Bates KC who we invited to introduce the bill to delegates and explain the reasoning behind it.
Justin gave a superb talk, which many of our delegates have told us in feedback has helped them come to terms with the bill. So, we decided to publish an extract here.
In this talk, Justin explains that the bill is not aimed at punishing landlords but is designed to stop the massive societal problems we have at the moment largely caused by section 21 no-fault evictions, including:
- their impact on homelessness
- their impact on Local Authorities’ budgets and public money generally
- the number of children who are legally homeless
- the harm that evictions do to society
Further information:
The Renters Rights Bill page on the Parliament website
Our blog posts:
What does the government seek to achieve with the Renters Rights Bill?
The Renters Rights Bill – report on the second reading
I work in homelessness for a local authority.
I think the Renters’ Rights Bill will be bad for homeless households and for local authorities.
Most landlords do not evict good tenants just for the sake of it; it’s not good for their business, they evict because of tenants breaching rules, or because they want to sell.
Some landlords are already selling up due to the Bill, this will reduce supply, increasing competition for an even more limited supply and will increase rents.
If it becomes harder to evict tenants, landlords will be more selective about who they will have as tenants; this is likely to disproportionately affect homeless applicants who are more likely to be unemployed or on low incomes, and more likely than the general population to have mental health and substance misuse issues.
If local authorities find it harder to rehouse into the private rented sector, homeless applicants will spend more time in expensive, often unsuitable, temporary accommodation.
I remember under the Rent Act 1977 some large landlords would buy up large HMOs and prefer to keep them empty than have them occupied with tenants that they could not evict, and would benefit from the capital gain, rather than the revenue from rents.
The trouble with Justin Bates is that he is too young. He doesn’t have first-hand experience of the PRS before 1988. I do. My family has been involved one way and another for 60 years.
Between 1984 and 1987 I took an undergraduate course in estate management as a mature student. It was made very clear that only a lunatic would buy a vacant house or flat and let it. A Rent Officer came to give us a lecture. By the end of the questions it was clear to all the students that we would never have anything to do with an investment whose performance depended on people like him, not if we could help it.
The year after I graduated the 1988 Act changed everything. It abolished rent controls and provided a reliable method of evicting bad tenants. Slowly and tentatively investors started to consider residential property again. Eventually the rules about lending were relaxed and buy-to-let mortgages began to be available. The pendulum swung to the point where the private sector was investing vast sums to provide rented housing. The 1988 Act was a huge success.
What will happen now is that this flow of capital will dry up. We are told there will not be rent controls. Nonsense, of course there will eventually be rent controls because the only certain way out from a letting that has gone wrong will be mandatory ground 1A, each bad tenant will lead to another net loss from the PRS, rents will rise as the supply diminishes, and the pressure from Shelter and Generation Rent will be overwhelming. As the years go by landlords, including the much-hyped Build-to-Rent landlords, will discover the hard way that the 1988 Act was brought in for good reasons.
Of course the decline in the PRS won’t mean that homes will vaporize. Of course they will become owner-occupied. Whether that is a good or a bad thing is a political question. All I am saying here is that I am old enough to have seen the pendulum swing in housing policy, and indeed in every sphere of policy. Each new cohort of politicians, civil servants, and lawyers thinks they will solve problems with policies which, more often than not, have been tried before. So far as housing policy is concerned it is only a few old codgers like me who have first-hand memories of the pre 1988 world. All Justin Bates has is book learning. Never mind, he’ll get the first-hand experience now all right.
I totally agree with Michael’s comments above. I have also seen the transformation that 1988 Act brought about.
The Renters Reform Bill boils down to the Government’s crude attempt to solving housing problems that Justin Bates has highlighted at the expense of the landlords rather than the public purse. A close analogy would be It is a situation when the Government would dictate to company shareholders that they can only sell their shares under certain strict conditions by applying to court at their own expense and waiting at least two years to get a court order to allow them to “sell their shares”.
Introducing the bill without putting the courts in order and reducing the exiting lead times to get a hearing to at the most a few months is madness.
I also agree with Michael’s comments.
Ironic that it was the Tories who introduced s21 and then following pressure from tenant activist groups, it was the Tories who took the initial steps to proceed with abolishing it.
Scrapping s 21 will not halt evictions. The RRB raises the bar by making it more difficult and costly to evict, eg ground 8 requires longer notice period and higher amount of unpaid rent.
But nevertheless there will continue to be bad tenants. And Landlords will, post RRB, have no choice but to rely on Ground 8.
In all this, the views of Landlords and their representative bodies have not got through to Government. Tenant activist groups have won hands down.
There are no Landlord friendly measures and the new requirements are complex. Just look at the proposals on rent in advance.
The new criminal sanctions and civil penalties are also quite concerning. Nothing to worry about…. until you or your agent makes a mistake. A convenient way for cash strapped local authorities to bring in easy money.
It’s all very short sighted. More landlord regulation makes the PRS unattractive and supply will dry up. Then what?
And while we focus on the RRB we should not forget to highlight the tax environment imposed on landlords (s 24, SDLT etc). Plus more onerous tax reporting requirements are on the way when making tax digital comes in.
“A report by the London School of Economics, commissioned by Crisis, found that councils in England spent £732 million on temporary accommodation for homeless families in the year to April 2024, an 80% increase on the previous year.” (Quote from Landlords Defence) If this is the case, the the temporary accommodation bill for year 22/23 was £406m, not £1b as Justin Bates states without any reference to a source. Hmmm….
Let’s see facts and sources. Everyone seems to be throwing round BIG numbers but the LSE / Crisis duo seems credible
“Did you know that in 2022/23 over 1 billion pounds was spent in this country on temporary housing for homeless people and that one in 21 children in London is legally homeless?”
Did you know that attacking landlords will make it a lot worse?
“helped them come to terms with the bill.”
Confirmed they should exit the PRS?
“Did you know that in 2022/23 over 1 billion pounds was spent in this country on temporary housing for homeless people and that one in 21 children in London is legally homeless?”
Did you know it was a tenth of that before they announced scrapping Section 21?
What’s the solution then to prevent agents and landlords aggressively using Section 21 (or instead the proposed new Section 8 grounds which look to be easily open to abuse) to threaten and bully tenants into agreeing to steep rent rises, side-stepping the extortion-appealable Section 13 process, or to stop them from complaining about disrepair?
Also, nobody seems to want to address the fundamental problem in the private rental sector – the issue of landlords desiring to sell with vacant possession to optimally realise their investment no matter how good a track record their tenant has maintained. Surely most of the problems in the PRS would be solved if selling with tenants in situ attracted perks and tax incentives to make it a viable and much quicker alternative to spending months evicting otherwise perfectly good tenants at the risk of those tenants then turning delinquent and spiteful, especially if they have invested in the property themselves over a number of years.