Police in London are to be told to start arresting landlords who illegally and sometimes violently evict tenants after mounting concern about officers showing bias and enabling some unlawful evictions.
After a 41% annual rise in legitimate “no-fault” evictions involving court-appointed bailiffs, frontline officers will be issued with updated guidance telling them to presume any eviction they are called to is likely to be illegal and that the tenant should remain in the home. They will also be explicitly told that landlords using or threatening violence to enter an occupied home are committing a crime.
Renters’ rights campaigners estimate that about 8,000 tenants a year are illegally evicted in England, but only a handful of cases are reported as potential crimes.
Ben Reeve-Lewis, the co-founder of Safer Renting, a charity that advocates for tenants under threat, said in recent years when police were contacted about a suspected illegal eviction they either refused to attend because they saw it as a civil matter or in some cases ended up assisting the landlord to evict unlawfully.
In 24 cases in which police were called to illegal evictions in the past year and where Safer Renting helped tenants, officers stopped only two. In eight cases, 0fficers either endorsed the eviction as lawful or actively helped the landlord. In 11 cases, police declared it a civil matter and refused to attend three times.
Now officers should “arrest where necessary”, the new guidance seen by the Guardian, will say. They will be told a landlord changing locks, forcibly throwing a tenant out, cutting off the gas and electricity, and using threatening and bullying behaviour are signs of an illegal eviction.
The guidance has been drawn up between Scotland Yard, the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, and renters groups including Generation Rent.
Khan identified in 2018 that illegal evictions in the private rented sector were “a major problem” that was most likely to affect vulnerable renters who had little awareness of their rights. But the problem has persisted despite attempts to train thousands of police officers.
Safer Renting had become so frustrated by the situation that it said it referred illegal evictions to human rights lawyers to consider legal action against the police.
Announcing the new guidance, Khan said: “For too long, rogue landlords have been able to take advantage of the fact that, until now, there have been few protections in place to safeguard London’s renters from illegal evictions.”
He added: “[The guidance] will ensure that London renters not only have a much clearer sense of their rights, but that frontline police officers are far better equipped to respond to incidences of tenants being harassed, threatened or illegally forced out of their homes by their landlords.”
A Scotland Yard spokesperson said the force had been working closely with City Hall on protecting the rights of tenants and the guidance would be posted on its internal intranet.
Dan Wilson Craw, the deputy chief executive of Generation Rent, said: “Renters need the full protection of the law when threatened with an illegal eviction. Police officers must not dismiss them as civil matters or, worse still, assist any landlord in these criminal acts.”
The effectiveness of the guidance will depend on it being take on board by thousands of frontline officers who are called to attempted evictions where court-appointed bailiffs are not present.
Police will be told to separate civil from criminal acts and that harassment, assault and use of force or violence to gain entry are crimes. They must warn landlords they are committing an offence if they proceed, arrest where necessary and make sure the landlord lets the tenant back into the home.
They should also report the landlord to the local authority’s private rented sector enforcement team and log them on the “report a rogue landlord tool” for London. This feeds a public database of dozens of landlords and property companies that have received civil and criminal penalties.
