The Renters’ Rights Bill is not anti-landlord says KC

Reply to the comment left by DPT at 19/03/2025 – 15:41
How sensible to disallow letting for 12 months in the middle of a housing crisis.

Reply to the comment left by TheMaluka at 19/03/2025 – 16:05
It’s not a tenancy, yur onner, rather a decorating job with safeguarding responsibility. Yes, 12 months are required for a proper job after many years neglect.

Reply to the comment left by Cause For Concern at 19/03/2025 – 15:04
I have left property vacant because of the worry of not getting it back and loosing control of our assets and I am sure that there are others doing the same.
This is not solving the housing problem!

“Elsewhere in the talk, he also points out that if the government had really been anti-landlord, they would not have agreed to include eviction grounds 1 and 1A.”

Even the people who dreamed this up have worked out the obvious consequences of taking away all mandatory grounds straightaway.

(Eviction ground 1 already exists, they aren’t ‘including’ it.)

Making all possession grounds discretionary is next on the agenda for the activist lawyers, ‘charity’ industry and career politicians.

Cui bono?

Who really benefits from the Renters Rights Bill? Or any of the other housing legislation of the last 10 years?

It’s certainly not landlords, taxpayers or tenants.

Reply to the comment left by Monty Bodkin at 19/03/2025 – 19:50
“Even the people* who dreamed this up”

*halfwits?

https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/half-wit

The underlying sentiment of those speakers, and those who organise such, should not go un-noticed by Landlords.
Its surely a wonder why attendees would pay to listen to such anti-landlord rhetoric ?

Reply to the comment left by Stella at 19/03/2025 – 16:37
I’ve been in County Court in the late 1980s spending tens of thousands of pounds at that time, trying to get possession back from a tenant who wouldn’t move out so that I could move back in after returning from work abroad. Tenant is funded by Legal Aid and supported by the Law Center from the local council.
It’s simply not worth letting your property for a
3% taxable annual return and risk losing it to a tenant with bad intentions.

Reply to the comment left by Cause For Concern at 20/03/2025 – 10:20We had protected tenants in the early eighties and the council drew up plans at their request to turn their 2 bed flat into a 1 bed flat.
There was no worry about the cost to us or the reduction in value of the property and the first we knew about it was when we received the plans in the post.
This was a couple that were paying circa £4.50/wk which at that time even bedsits in the area were at least £7.00/wk
We refused to carry out the work and even when the council offered to house them they would not move.
I am not surprised to hear that you had problems getting your home back but I would be surprised to hear that you did get it back.

The trouble with Justin Bates is that he is too young. He doesn’t have first-hand experience of the PRS before 1988. I do. My family has been involved one way and another for 60 years.

Between 1984 and 1987 I took an undergraduate course in estate management as a mature student. It was made very clear that only a lunatic would buy a vacant house or flat and let it. A Rent Officer came to give us a lecture. By the end of the questions it was clear to all the students that we would never have anything to do with an investment whose performance depended on people like him, not if we could help it.

The year after I graduated the 1988 Act changed everything. It abolished rent controls and provided a reliable method of evicting bad tenants. Slowly and tentatively investors started to consider residential property again. Eventually the rules about lending were relaxed and buy-to-let mortgages began to be available. The pendulum swung to the point where the private sector was investing vast sums to provide rented housing. The 1988 Act was a huge success.

What will happen now is that this flow of capital will dry up. We are told there will not be rent controls. Nonsense, of course there will eventually be rent controls because the only certain way out from a letting that has gone wrong will be mandatory ground 1A, each bad tenant will lead to another net loss from the PRS, rents will rise as the supply diminishes, and the pressure from Shelter and Generation Rent will be overwhelming. As the years go by landlords, including the much-hyped Build-to-Rent landlords, will discover the hard way that the 1988 Act was brought in for good reasons.

Of course the decline in the PRS won’t mean that homes will vaporize. Of course they will become owner-occupied. Whether that is a good or a bad thing is a political question. All I am saying here is that I am old enough to have seen the pendulum swing in housing policy, and indeed in every sphere of policy. Each new cohort of politicians, civil servants, and lawyers thinks they will solve problems with policies which, more often than not, have been tried before. So far as housing policy is concerned it is only a few old codgers like me who have first-hand memories of the pre 1988 world. All Justin Bates has is book learning. Never mind, he’ll get the first-hand experience now all right.
(re-posted from Tessa Shepperson’s blog)