The price of tenant activist politics: When campaigns collide with reality

They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but in England’s private rented sector (PRS), it’s currently being paved with the ruins of retirement funds and dreams.

I read this week in the Telegraph of the heartbreaking case of a couple who invested in rental property to bolster a meagre pension, only to find themselves 15 years later, they are now in their nineties, drowning in £30,000 of debt.

Their ‘crime’? Trying to be decent landlords.

They held off on evictions, listened to the pleas of a struggling tenant and waited for a local council that moved with the glacial pace of an indifferent bureaucracy that can’t be sacked.

The result wasn’t a ‘social good’; it was the financial destruction of two good people.

And let’s not forget, as we watch these tragedies unfold, there is still no plans for a ‘rogue tenant’ database to protect the rest of us from repeating this cycle.

Lack of self-awareness

Also, the ‘brass neck’ of the current narrative that all landlords are bad reached a new peak this week.

A leading charity has begun warning about an ‘increased reliance on guarantors’ now that the Renters’ Rights Bill is law.

For many of us, there’s an almost comical lack of self-awareness.

Having successfully campaigned for the Act, groups like Crisis and Generation Rent are suddenly squinting through the smoke of a one-sided battlefield and realising that actions have consequences. The latter is also calling this week for rent controls again to stop ‘soaring rents’.

For years, these activist groups have bad-mouthed landlords as a monolithic block that needs to be controlled.

They championed the abolition of Section 21 and the ending of rent-in-advance requirements.

Now, they seem shocked — shocked! — to find that when you strip away a landlord’s security, the entry requirements for tenants to find a home go through the roof.

If a landlord cannot easily remove a non-paying tenant and cannot ask for rent in advance to mitigate risk, they will naturally demand a bulletproof guarantor.

Poor tenants squeezed out

The very people these activists claim to help, that is the poorer tenants, the benefit recipients and those on the edge of homelessness, are being squeezed out of the PRS by the very ‘protections’ designed to save them.

This isn’t the fault of the landlord; it is the direct result of years of ignorant campaigning by those who treat economic reality as an optional extra.

The hypocrisy is breathtaking.

We are effectively being told we should be ‘forced’ to accept the highest-risk tenants while the legal mechanisms to protect our assets are dismantled.

Meanwhile, local councils, many of whom couldn’t manage their own housing stock if their lives depended on it, are quick to levy massive fines on small landlords for minor paperwork errors.

And that’s while simultaneously advising tenants to ignore legal possession notices and wait for the bailiffs.

Landlords pay the price

This is the buyer’s remorse phase of the housing crisis.

The country has spent years now politicising the right to have a roof over people’s heads to such an extent that the maths no longer works.

When you turn a mutually beneficial contract into a political battlefield, the small people on both sides are the ones who get crushed.

Decent people who tried to make their money work harder by providing homes are now counting the cost of a debacle they didn’t create.

The activist groups have won the legislative war, but they are losing the reality.

They have successfully made the PRS so unattractive and high-risk that the smaller landlords, the ones with a conscience, like the couple in the Telegraph, are fleeing in droves.

What’s left behind won’t be a tenant’s paradise; it will be a barren landscape of institutional landlord giants and a housing shortage that no amount of virtue signalling can fix.

I hope the couple featured in the newspaper find some semblance of solace, but for the rest of the sector, the bill is only just coming due.

In the rush to demonise those willing to house the benefit recipients and poor families, the activists have finally succeeded in delivering a situation that fails both sides.

Who thought that when the Conservatives first unveiled the Renters (Reform) Bill that the entire PRS would see a massive shake up of landlords leaving and tenants being left with nowhere to live?

That’s right, all of us did but no one listened and here we are with small landlords being made poorer and poor tenants being made homeless. Shame.

Until next time,

The Landlord Crusader

P.S. My wife was watching Ever Decreasing Circles on U&Gold the other morning (because, I think, BBC Breakfast was more boring than usual) and I noticed in the pub scene the old Space Invaders machine. So, here’s a call out to the Property118 website boffins, I sometimes drop into the old school games page, and I would throw down the gauntlet to all readers if you created an asteroids game. I will play under ‘CRU’ if you do!