‘The Renters’ Rights Bill increases protections to all renters; the good ones and the bad’

• AS I write, the Renters’ Rights Bill was due to receive its second reading on Wednesday, October 9 – in other words before you publish this letter.

I don’t think anyone was expecting the reading to be more than a formality. The bill in the previous government’s form was debated thoroughly and well thought out.

It added protections to renters and had many good elements to it such as removing arbitrary evictions and high rent increases and also introduced a landlord redress scheme and commitment to a decent homes standard.

There are some points that perhaps need to be ironed out to make sure that measures such as inflation-based rent increases, can in practice be made.

The bill increases protections to all renters; the good ones and the bad, both. It doesn’t intend to help bad renters but due to the courts workload it will.

This was understood by the previous government but not by this one and this is a crucial point.

I understand that court evictions which are mainly for non-payment of rent currently take
10 months on average. That’s 10 months without rent which for a small landlord (70 per cent by number) is ruinous.

With the new bill the workload of the courts is expected to double when formerly uncontested cases become contested.

Courts are not protected from budgetary cuts and with no capacity increase expected things will presumably take twice as long.

To add to this, the non-payment of rent will be allowed to go on longer by seven weeks as proposed in the bill.

So the average scenario of non-payment of rent and or other serious breaches can stretch to nearly two years, with associated legal costs.

This compares with current practice that need not involve the courts at all.

With court reform the bill will improve the lot of renters and also good landlords but without it how can small landlords expect to continue?

If they don’t what will they be replaced with not in five years’ time but in the coming months?

ALEX SHINDER, NW3