Why is the Renters’ Rights Bill a hopeless sham for landlords and tenants?

There is a huge elephant in the room surrounding the Renters’ Rights Bill (RRB) and its hapless legislation, and guess what? It isn’t bogey landlords. The true cause of homelessness, high rents, and lack of social housing has little to do with landlords. It’s simply and very obviously a ‘LACK OF HOUSING’.

Insufficient housing leads to more competition, higher rents and homelessness. Unsurprisingly, the RRB is useless and misdirected as it completely fails to address housing supply.

Further, the people who will suffer most with this damaging legislation are vulnerable social tenants whom Labour have traditionally helped. The evidence is under politicians’ noses, but they are obsessed with a hopeless policy that will make matters worse as they are blinded and distracted by side issues, missing the real problem. A preventable train crash.

Look at the facts, smell the coffee! Imagine if there were twice as many houses as people needing them. Lots and lots of empty houses. Landlords are bleeding money, unable to find tenants. Owners paying double or triple council tax but unable to sell their houses due to nobody needing them.

In these scenarios, the economists would understand prices would be low. Additional houses would be an expensive burden that counters wealth creation, landlords would face severe competition and housing would be cheap.

Successive government policy has been a disaster for housing. Selling millions of council houses at a discount and not replacing them. This has forced millions of needy social tenants into the private sector. The banks’ apparent discrimination against social tenants leaves them with few options but to rent. All the time the population increased as has housing demand.

Successive governments have forced social tenants into the private sector, but created a pressure cooker. They turned the screws by refusing to give social tenants a pay rise. By freezing housing benefits and failing to allow housing benefits to rise with inflation, the government made a cruel decision to squeeze the most vulnerable. These social tenants are competing in a rental market where workers were not under the same pressures.

The government’s previous safety net to set housing benefits at the 30th centile for property was replaced with an abject, cruel policy of freezing benefits as prices have risen. This has inevitably put pressure on benefits claiming tenants who can no longer compete financially for housing due to insufficient stock

In conditions where workers are given inflationary pay rises and there is a lack of housing, there is upward pressure on rents, where social tenants are left behind. A 10-year-old can grasp this, why can’t the government?

As a landlord who has helped many social tenants previously, I have seen the impact from the landlord’s perspective. The government fail to take into account the purgatory and abject misery a landlord faces by selecting a bad tenant and have made sure that if you, as a landlord, do get a bad tenant, you will face a huge challenge. This isn’t measured by losing just money, but often years of mental anguish. The fear of selecting a bad tenant is now sufficient to make many sell or keep property empty while they do.

Government housing policy has made it worse, for example, handing benefits to tenants allows some to keep the money intended for a landlord. The inability to remove what are bad tenants quickly ensures a prolonged, challenging period of misery and financial worry for many landlords. The lack of rights for a landlord to even visit the property he is responsible for, or be prevented from maintaining the property, compounds the misery.

So, yes, a landlord will be more picky about who is chosen as a tenant. Social tenants are now not given sufficient money to afford at the 30th centile and, with insufficient housing, find themselves in more expensive B&Bs.

The RRB can only make matters worse for the very tenants the government is purporting to help. The evidence is already there as councils face increased B&B costs. But how will this evidence affect policy? Nobody takes accountability or acts to address the housing crisis in a way that would benefit the public interest.

What do Property118 readers think?

Thanks,

Paul