By Banning landlords from evicting tenants without giving a reason will have catastrophic consequences for renters on housing benefit and universal credit, experts have warned.
Government’s recent Rent Reform White Paper proposed a raft of changes to the rules governing private landlords, including scrapping “no fault evictions”, getting rid of fixed term tenancies and limiting rent reviews to one a year.
The plans, announced by the previous Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Secretary Michael Gove, are currently in consultation and aim to improve living standards in the private rented sector and give tenants more rights.
But speaking at the National Landlord Investment Show at Old Billingsgate in central London on 5 July, several property experts said there will be “unintended consequences” which have the potential to hurt social tenants and even result in homelessness.
Paul Shamplina, host of Channel 5 TV show Nightmare Tenants, Slum Landlords and founder of Landlord Action, warned the government’s decision to scrap Section 21 rules allowing landlords to give notice to tenants without a specific reason would leave social tenants in particular worse off.
A chronic shortage of social housing, exacerbated by Conservative prime minister Maggie Thatcher’s Right to Buy scheme in the 1980s and subsequent governments’ failure to build new social housing stock, has led local authorities to rely more on private landlords to house social tenants.
Of the 1,614 registered social housing providers in England, 68 are privately owned for-profit registered social landlords, letting agents and companies, according to government data.
“We know from our experience at Landlord Action that most Section 21 notices are issued because a tenant is in rent arrears, or because a landlord wishes to sell or move back into their property, said Shamplina.
In many cases, landlords could have used Section 8 for rent arrears or anti-social behaviour, but their lack of faith in the associated court process, which is undoubtedly more protracted, is why many revert to Section 21.”
The incidence of antisocial behaviour and unpaid rent is anecdotally much higher for tenants claiming housing benefit and universal credit.
Late rent payment by social housing tenants has also been worsened by the fairly recent move to pay universal credit directly to tenants instead of the landlord.
With initial UC payments taking up to six weeks to come through, social tenants often get into arrears from the very first month of their tenancy.
Shamplina told the show’s delegates – the majority of whom are landlords themselves – they would still be able to evict tenants after the Rent Reform plans are implemented but would have to use the Section 8 process.
It’s going to mean the pressure on courts to hear eviction cases goes up even more and the legal cost of going through the process will ultimately end up being paid by tenants,” he added.
Forcing landlords to rely on slow and costly Section 8 evictions, will inevitably put them off renting to tenants on benefits, he argued.
As a landlord, who are you going to rent to?
A professional couple who can pay £300 a month more or a single mum with three kids living on universal credit? They all need somewhere to live, but that’s just economics.”
There were around 20,000 no fault evictions under Section 21 rules in 2021, demonstrating just how widely used the measure is by private landlords.
Shamplina said he expects scrapping the rule won’t bring down the number of evictions, it will just slow the process down and pile more work on the court system.
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