Last month, I was working with a young homeless family on England’s south coast. The local council had found them a privately rented flat with an agreed rent, and provided a “landlord incentive” payment of £1,500. But, when the council emailed the landlord to confirm the arrangements, he replied to say that he was increasing the rent by £100 a month because “the market is moving in that direction”.
The property was mortgage-free, so the price hike could not be blamed on rising costs. This is not uncommon: Zoopla estimates that 70% of landlords have either no debt or a small mortgage. Nor was there some sort of supply shock: the council’s statistics showed that many thousands of homes in the local area (more than 8%) were sitting empty. The flat was not suddenly in a nicer location, nor in a better condition than before. The rent had gone up simply because there was nothing to stop the landlord from naming his price.
What this means is that two children are now growing up £100 a month deeper into poverty, and totally needlessly. It also means that the flat will now be more valuable if it is sold to another landlord, or (by the same token) more expensive for the first-time buyers who are forced to compete with them. Next year, the landlord is likely to raise the rent again (because of the direction of the market, naturally), which would probably price the family out of their new home. The whole process of homelessness and rent-hiking will begin once more.
Unless, of course, the government’s renters’ rights bill manages to break the cycle. The bill goes some way towards rebalancing landlord-tenant relations, bringing them closer to international and historical norms. Most importantly, it proposes to ban “no-fault” evictions and abolish England’s notoriously insecure tenancies.
Important and necessary as the proposed reforms are, the new measures do nothing to tackle the cost of renting. The Westminster government (unlike its counterparts in Scotland, Sweden, Germany and many other places) believes that rents should continue to be set by the “open market”, despite its mysterious tendency to self-inflate. If we want rents to fall, experience shows that regulation is the only realistic option.
That is not to say that the government’s reforms are completely hollow. As well as the direct benefits of secure renting (imagine knowing that your children can finish their schooling without the constant worry of 12-month rental contracts), the quality of rented homes is likely to improve over time. The precarious nature of the current system has created a terrible imbalance in bargaining positions, which deters renters from enforcing their rights. In the social sector, by contrast, tenants are much more confident about demanding repairs – and the government is proposing to replicate the same sort of security for private tenants. Social tenants routinely take their landlords to court, force them to carry out works, and win significant compensation – in some cases up to 100% of the rent. Rigorous repairing deadlines will be introduced where a home is unfit for human habitation.
Under the proposed system, private landlords would have to accept that this was the cost of doing business. Repairs and compensation can be expensive, and many would find this a stark contrast to the “passive income” attitude that has characterised the housing system over the past few decades.
The bill would also formally ban landlords from discriminating against benefits claimants and households with children. There is a proposal aimed at preventing lettings agents from starting “bidding wars”, and a prohibition on demanding large upfront rent payments. Landlords will not be allowed to unreasonably refuse permission to keep a pet. In many parts of the world these measures are seen as basic, but in England they are revolutionary.
Landlords, of course, are furious. They successfully derailed the previous government’s attempt to implement the same changes, eventually winning a four-year war of attrition when the Conservatives failed to pass their proposals before the election. There is a sense of panic now that Labour’s bill looks likely to pass. Rent increases once again broke records in 2024, no-fault evictions are at an eight-year high, and landlords are somehow convinced that tenants are the villains.
The current concern is that landlords will capitalise on the last remaining no-fault evictions, and re-let at the highest possible price before the new scheme comes into effect. The government expects the changes to be implemented by the summer of 2025, and campaigners are worried that the next six months will see mass evictions and last-minute rent gouging.
Landlords, we are often told, are mostly decent people. There is a small number of rogues, but the vast majority are conscientious and fair. We do not yet know how they will behave while the rental reforms are being finalised, but if the campaigners’ fears are correct – if landlords do take advantage of the last easy evictions, and wreak havoc on people’s lives over the next few months – their argument will never hold water again.
Nick Bano is a barrister specialising in renters’ rights and homelessness law and the author of Against Landlords: How to Solve the Housing Crisis (Verso, £16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
