‘The law around eviction of tenants needs to change’

• ONCE again Alex Shinder makes some interesting points in his latest letter, (Bad landlords will flout the law, February 17).

On the Housing Act 1988, when he says the private rented sector, (PRS’s), “main concern about the removal of section 21 is the inadequacy of section 8”, what he really means is that this is the landlords’ “main concern”.

We know it’s the case because a number of them have been highlighting the section 8 issue for a while now on various online forums, and Ben Beadle, the chief executive of the National Residential Landlords Association, recently said on a property site webinar that they were hoping section 8 would be “reformed” and “strengthened” by the government.

Our concern, shared by all of the groups / organisations in the Renter’s Reform Coalition, is that section 21 will just be replaced by other means of evicting tenants, such as a beefed-up section 8, thus creating a new “back-door” route to eviction that will essentially be section 21 but by any other name.

What we would to like to see is the introduction of periodic, long-term tenancies, with a requirement for all the grounds for ending it being discretionary, so the tenant can go to court and provide a legal defence, should they so wish.

He also goes on to say “…saddling the regulated part of the PRS with additional cost and risk aversion is no good for tenants”.

One of the reasons that the private rented sector has been likened to the “Wild West” is because successive governments have not only failed to regulate all of it properly but they have also failed to adequately resource councils, so they can carry out their enforcement duties effectively in an ever expanding PRS.

In Camden the council has spent many years grappling with the private rented sector, which has always been very large (currently it provides homes for around one-third of households) compared with most other London boroughs; but due to recent growth many of them are now on a par with the size of the one we have here.

Alex Shinder also seems to assume that always passing on additional costs to their increasingly hard-pressed tenants is a given for landlords; but it does not have to be this way.

During the coronavirus pandemic businesses of all types and sizes have had to decide whether to absorb or pass on rising costs to their customers.

And the smarter and less greedy ones realise that there can – and will – be consequences to relentlessly trying to extract more money out of people who will inevitably become poorer during what is now being described as a “cost of living crisis”.

ROBERT TAYLOR
Camden Federation of Private Tenants