Last week saw the UK’s housing minister, Michael Gove, introduce his long-awaited Renters’ Reform Bill. As the private rental sector provides homes for 11 million people, often the most disadvantaged, it could have marked a major reset. Instead, the proposed amendments are neither enough to reassure nervous tenants, nor sufficient to dissuade many of Britain’s 2.75 million fed-up landlords from continuing their exodus from the market.
The central plank of the bill is the proposed abolition of so-called “no fault” (known as Section 21) evictions. From a tenant’s perspective, removing the threat of a landlord being able to evict without citing any reason is an obvious improvement. But it fails to fully address the reason why no-fault evictions became the most practical means of regaining possession of a property from a delinquent or disruptive tenant. The alternative is to involve the police, with wider societal ramifications. Then it's a long battle with England’s creaking court system, where possession orders frequently take 12 to 18 months to enforce.
