Criminal landlords will lose benefit payments under Labour plan

Post section 21 we are powerless against ASB and drugs as even in extreme cases judges only temporarily evict problem tenants.

Will there be a parallel push to take action ‘criminal’ tenants too – the ones who receive benefits and don’t pay it over to their LLs. More of them, and probably easier to prove too – its called theft.

Sadly this new announcement is one of many with unintended consequences (and little upside). Many benefits tenants are very good and law abiding, yet scaring away all PRS LLs will make obtaining housing for them even harder. I’m seeing some tough stories at the moment where decent tenants (often single mums and their children) are being forced to move out and find somewhere new because their Landlord, understandably, is selling up.

What kind of country are we becoming that LLs dare not have compassion and let to the less advantaged among us without constant fear of fines or other retribution?

Ms Angela Runaround is clearly either sitting on a high Horse or living in cloud cuckoo land. Brandishing people blanketly as “criminal landlords” is not only despicable but shows crass arrogance on her part. If a tiny number of landlords are providing sub-stand housing funded by the state, should the council and the police not just arrest them, stop paying rents to them until they get issues resolved rather than putting a sledgehammer on the whole PRS? The incompetence and cluelessness of these people in power is shocking.

The political class are incentivised to deflect from the failure of the state, and seek to rebrand it as a failure of the housing provider, for which they are to be the saviour and not the cause.
The days of “police and thieves in the streets” as described by Junior Murvin some years ago is no longer fit for the era of the budget deficit – “landlords and thieves” seems naturally a better way forward.

“Criminal Landlords” – Mon Dieu.
Time for a Landlord Criminal Record Register together with a Rogue Tenant Register I say.
More dangerous hyperbolic utterings from the Ginger Queen.
Carchester

“The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government funding will deliver 2,800 additional affordable homes within the next year.” I don’t bloody believe it – they have never kept their word in the past so why would they keep it now? They will not deliver 2,800 affordable homes. Even if they deliver that number they won’t be affordable and if they deliver that number within a year I will eat my wormery!

Reply to the comment left by SirAA at 13/02/2025 – 15:13
They actually think we can’t see what they are doing!

“The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government funding will deliver 2,800 additional affordable homes within the next year.”

Let’s recall Angela Rayner spouting 1.5M homes over 5 years – this equates to 850 homes a day. If Rayner kept to her promise of 1.5M homes in 5 years it would mean 2,800 homes built in 4 days. It is for these reasons the knowing public are sick and tired of politicians lies and unfilled promises.

Reply to the comment left by Rennie at 16/02/2025 – 23:34They don’t give a damn if we know or not. They know that they hold all the aces, and that they can do whatever they want.

So, in 2023 there were just over 9000 section 21 evictions, but these houses were generally re-occupied (apart from those that went to FHL) but there were 900,000 new immigrants.

This is why they are desperate to identify landlords as the cause of the big housing problem, they know trouble is coming but keep trying to hide the reality under an increasingly threadbare carpet.