Michael Gove has vowed that no-fault evictions will be banned this year, as he warned separately that democracy was under threat if young people were shut out from owning their own home in future.
Ministers have come under fire in recent days from campaigners who have said its bill to get rid of so-called section 21 evictions in England, whereby landlords can remove tenants for no reason, is inadequate. The ban was also a pledge made in the Conservatives’ 2019 manifesto.
However, the UK housing minister insisted in an interview on Sunday that the practice would have ended by the time of a general election, despite his previous concerns that the courts may not be able to cope.
“We will have outlawed it and we will put the money into the courts in order to ensure that they can enforce it,” he told BBC 1’s Sunday Politics show. Last year, Gove delayed the ban until after a reform of the courts was achieved, prompting accusations from the opposition that he had betrayed voters.
Pressed by the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg on whether he could guarantee 11 million renters that the ban would come into effect before the election – which Rishi Sunak has indicated will take place in the second half of the year – Gove replied: “Yes”, adding that the renters reform bill would achieve this.
It comes after figures last week showed a surge in no-fault evictions, with the number of households repossessed after receiving a section 21 notice rising by 49% last year.
Separately, he said he was doing everything he could to persuade the chancellor to put more money into housing in the spring budget after warning that a political failure to tackle the housing crisis could endanger democracy, as well as his party’s chances at the general election.
“Every day I send him a note or a message emphasising the importance of doing more to unlock housing supply,” said Gove, speaking ahead of the expected announcement this week of plans to build tens of thousands more homes by allowing developers to convert empty office blocks, department stores and commercial buildings.
The cabinet minister used an interview with the Sunday Times to warn that the traditional route for young people to get on the housing ladder had gone.
“It’s a barrier to young people feeling that democracy and capitalism are working for them,” he said. “It’s simply harder for us to make that case if people who’ve got broadly ‘small c’ conservative values, or actually no particular political agenda at all, feel that they’re being shut out.”
He continued: “If people think that markets are rigged and a democracy isn’t listening to them, then you get – and this is the worrying thing to me – an increasing number of young people saying: ‘I don’t believe in democracy, I don’t believe in markets.’
Gove’s pledge on the renters bill was described as “weasel words” by Labour’s shadow levelling up secretary, Angela Rayner, who said: “Having broken the justice system, the Tories are now using their own failure to indefinitely delay keeping their promises to renters in the most underhand way.”
The Liberal Democrats said, meanwhile, that Gove’s comments would “ring hollow”. The party’s deputy leader, Daisy Cooper, said: “It is shocking that this Conservative government has repeatedly chosen to delay their promised ban on no fault evictions.”
