Labour MP questions landlord role in tackling tenant anti-social behaviour

Reply to the comment left by John Milbank at 01/06/2026 – 14:28
I’m not a fan of Tony Blair but at least he just came out and said that Labour are not growing the economy and they are damaging young people’s prospects:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/03/01/labour-is-damaging-the-economy-says-tony-blair/?msockid=0b8a4155c7db6ba1058955b1c6196a07

He is absolutely right and the government IS damaging young people’s prospects. This is because this government is obsessed with politics, not policy, obsessed with re-allocation of wealth, not generation of it, and because collectively they don’t have any real understanding of business.

During the Tony Blair years they were trying to give every young person the chance to get to University. The result was the creation of a lot of non-courses trying to teach things that were better learned in the workplace. I don’t know what other landlords find, but I find that these people are now cleaning and painting my property because within a couple of years of graduation their Computer Sciences Degree or Social Media Studies Degree from the University of Central Labourshire that hadn’t given them the skills they required in the workplace in the first place became completely obsolete.

Another long-term legacy of the Gordon Brown labour years and Harriet Harmanesque diversity policies is the fact that if any student wants to identify as a Meerkat then you’ve got to respect their rights and allow them to do it even if their behaviour is disruptive or ‘antisocial’. Not only do you have to respect their ‘rights’ (their rights to be disruptive) whatever powers you have to address the disruptive behaviour are removed from you whether that’s in education, the workplace, or in the provision of housing. Labour encouraged students to expect the world to adapt to them, rather than equip them to adapt to the world and that’s probably why some now vote for a non-green Green party.

But Labour missed the point about diversity entirely. What is important is a diverse economy. In a diverse economy there is a job, or a place somewhere in business for everybody even if they are a bit different, on the margins. And in that kind of economy everyone gets the chance to learn the skills they need in entry-level jobs.

What this labour government has done is to harm the economy and cause it to retrench with their Up the Workers Rights Down With Employers and Employment Politics. As Angela Rayner headed south from rainy Tameside to her flat in sunny Hove, a lot of the entry-level jobs went south with her.

The same is happening with the Labour Renters Rights Act. Housing provision needs to be diverse with a healthy PRS and lots of tenant choice. Younger people and people on the margins are going to find it harder to find places to live, because the accommodation is not available in the social housing sector, and The Labour Renters Rights Act just created an environment in which landlords cannot risk taking a chance on the high-risk tenants. That’s not the fault of any landlord. It’s more Labour Ivory Tower nonsense from people who completely out of touch with the real world and have no significant experience of business.

It’s why this government has made so many U-turns…it’s the only thing that they are good at, apart from pretending that everything that goes wrong is somebody else’s fault.

PS: If a POLITICALLY competent (as opposed to economically competent) prime minister wanted to find someone to work with who was good at making everything that goes wrong somebody elses fault then an ideal candidate for chancellor would be somebody who had run the complaints department of a bank. As anybody who tries to make a payment from a bank finds, if something goes wrong it always has to be somebody elses fault.

There is a very simple answer for Mr Naismith. Why not pass a law giving power to local authorities to evict anti-social tenants if the landlord agrees?
The landlord would have a duty to co-operate with the council but the landlord would not have to spend time and money in pursuing a tenant only to find that the victim of the ASB is unwilling to give evidence.

If behaviour is bad enough to justify action, let the councils take that action.

Reply to the comment left by Ian Narbeth at 03/06/2026 – 14:28
I agree with this and I think that this is critical. As a landlord your rights are limited to a landlords’ inspection having given 24 hours notice. That 24 hours notice is enough for a tenant to clean away their needles and their syringes. Your rights of inspection also do not include rummaging through tenants’ possessions to look for the heroin, the coke, or the crack pipe. Only the police can do that.

As for allegations of antisocial behaviour, I have rented to tenants of a variety of skin colours, to all faiths and none. I don’t care about tenants’ ethnic origins. But some communities and some neighbours don’t feel the same way and they may not like black people, asian people, or people the perceive as palestinians, zionists, gay or just ‘not straight’. As a landlord you can’t put cameras up and if Mr Naismith thinks that landlords can deal with antisocial behaviour he’s just talking nonsense. Only the council and the police have the powers.

But if there was an obligation imposed on landlords to deal with antisocial behaviour if either (a) the Council or (b) the police contact the landlord advising the landlord of a problem of antisocial behaviour at the PREMISES and if that then was grounds for immediate eviction you would be able to apply to the courts to deal with the problem serving those bits of written evidence to the courts as grounds. The tenant would then have an incentive to report problems of antisocial behaviour at or around the PREMISES and the ball would be firmly back where it belongs, with the council and the police…the people with the powers.

Reply to the comment left by Ian Narbeth at 03/06/2026 – 14:28
The councils now have the right to barge in to landlord’s property so why don’t they have the same right to barge in on anti social tenants, who are committing worse crimes than any landlord.

Reply to the comment left by David at 03/06/2026 – 17:41
There is recent government guidance on antisocial behaviour. It was published in 2025:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/68cacba7995dfd01bff0c027/2025_ASB_Statutory_Guidance_updates_final_version_1.pdf

The ‘relevant bodies and responsible authorities’ (you’ll find them on page 9 under section 1.1) are:

Key bodies:
• Councils.
• Police.
• Integrated Care Boards in England and Local Health Boards in Wales .
• Registered providers of social housing who are co-opted into this group.

Landlords have an obligation in law to leave their tenants alone. I think this used to be called a “Covenant of quiet enjoyment”. Landlords don’t have the powers to interfere in tenants’ lives. If the government wanted private landlords to evict tenants who exhibit antisocial behaviour then the people with the powers, i.e. the police and the councils, would need to provide private landlords with the documentation confirming a problem with antisocial behaviour at a rented property in order that landlords could use this as mandatory grounds for repossession at court.

If landlords AREN’T able to evict they have no powers to interfere in tenants lives. And so private landlords now have no powers to tackle anti-social behaviour. This is because, with the removal of section 21 by labour with their Renters Rights Act Labour has taken away all the very limited, residual powers that private sector landlords used to have to deal with antisocial behaviour.

The only option a landlord has now is to ensure that they don’t take the problem tenants in the first place. But because labour has said that landlords cannot withhold information on the availability of a property and cannot discriminate against tenants, the screening procedures landlords have to use to avoid the problem tenants must be applied to all prospective tenants. Landlords cannot charge for this and so the only option to recoup the cost is to put rents up.

I can understand if you were sitting around Westminster considering legislation and trying to prove that you were clever enough to be an MP you might recall the stories of the Windrush days when there were reports of adverts on rental properties saying “…no dogs, no blacks, no Irish.” I don’t know any landlords who would do this and don’t know any landlords who would want to be able to do this. But we already had legislation that would make advertisements of this type illegal today without putting those specific requirements into the Labour Renters Rights Act and the effect of introducing an anti-discrimination requirement, or test for the courts, of putting anti-discrimination into the Act just means that increased costs and more stringent screening requirements and therefore higher rents have to be imposed on all tenants. It means that the good tenants have to pay for the bad ones.

I really doubt that any labour MPs truly understood this as they collectively have almost no experience of business. Most labour MPs have never run a business, most will have no experience of trying to deal with anti-discrimination legislation in a small business. They have no relevant experience but are sitting around making laws that interfere with the freedoms of the majority of tenants and will put their rents up.

IF labour wanted landlords to deal with anti-social behaviour then they would either have to give landlords the powers, or they would have to create an obligation upon the people who do have the powers (councils, police, social housing providers, integrated care boards) to pass the necessary information on to private landlords in order that private landlords could use the information as mandatory grounds for repossession.

And the courts would have to be working effectively.

I’ve had enough of this toxic market. I’ve given both my tenants a year’s notice. I’ve told them that I can’t afford the court process nor the mental stress it will cause just to ask someone to leave my property but hopefully the tenants will go within that time. I’m offering them to buy the property at the market rate but if they do not want to buy and will not leave, I’ll sell the property with them in it. I have fantastic tenants but I keep hearing of more injustices they want to impose on us, for what reasons I do not know and don’t want to know anymore, I’m just sick of being in this game which I find gives me no satisfaction or pleasure how it used to. I’m finding owning two flats is now a worry. I don’t know if anyone saw the story of a 71 year old who started renting and who is now 91 years old and who is in serious debt of £30,000. His story was posted on Face Book but the amount of cruelty and mick taking, along with the amount of hatred towards him because he is a landlord, was totally uncalled for and just shows the ignorance and hatred towards us that our own government and Shelter have created. So all the stupidness, unfairness and destruction of the PRS is another reason to get out of it because the future looks bleak and depressing staying in the PRS. I feel very sorry for the great landlords and the great tenants.

Sympathies….it is the environment that were are presently in. Pat McFadden has apparently recently said that all labour backbenchers do is ask who can we tax to pay benefits:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2026/06/01/pat-mcfadden-all-labour-does-is-ask-who-can-we-tax/?msockid=0b8a4155c7db6ba1058955b1c6196a07
Landlords are an easy target because they are perceived to have something extra or can be presented as having something extra that has been given to them, even if that is not necessarily true. If you are on the extreme left wing and you can no longer talk about class war because class does not really mean anything any more you still need to make somebody an enemy somewhere to justify the existence of your party. You still need to have a target to attack to appeal to a portion of the electorate that might want to believe your lies over the lies of the opposition parties.
Most of the money in the country is in either residential property or pensions. Rachel Reeves just attacked families principle private residences AND their pensions by including pensions in the scope of the inheritance tax net. She still does not have enough money and she has already driven many of the wealthier people offshore. So I think that the attacks are not going to stop and I am presently wondering what the real purpose of the Labour Landlord Database actually is, given that HM Land Registry already exists.
What the electorate has not grasped is that it is GOVERNMENT who are driving up rents, not landlords, because it is GOVERNMENT that is increasing the risk of investing in property and GOVERNMENT who are driving up costs by imposing additional requirements upon landlords that do not benefit the majority of tenants.
Whether that bit of truth will ever make it through the lies, or whether the people voting for the SNP, Greens (who are not really green because their policies are not sustainable), or the left-wing labour MPs will ever want to believe it I do not know.

Reply to the comment left by Beaver at 05/06/2026 – 13:12
and Reeves continues to bang on about a black hole left by the Tories, which has been denied independently, but even if there was one she forgets to mention Convid, which all parties endorsed.

Reply to the comment left by David at 05/06/2026 – 17:04
If I remember correctly, during Covid the conservative party were trying to hold back on spending but SNP and labour were trying to get the conservatives to spend more. And yet they deny any responsibility for the deficit. Then when Labour came to power one of the first things they did was give train drivers more money for a 4 day week without getting the unions to agree to any changes in practice. So yes….everything that goes wrong for this lot is always someone else’s fault. Lawyers always make sure everything that happens is on the basis of “non mea culpa” and if you wanted to pick somebody to work with you whose training and experience was a good fit for making everything someone else’s fault then a good pick would be somebody who had run the complaint department for a bank. Whenever anybody logs in to their bank account ap and tries to pay for something the bank always makes sure that it’s not their fault if someone goes wrong.

However, the Labour’s Renters Rights Act is very definitely Labour’s fault if they don’t fix the courts and it goes wrong.

Labour refused to publish their justice impact test for their renters rights bill (which was nothing like the conservatives were proposing with a rental reform bill). And I cannot find any information anywhere on how things are presently going in the courts.