Home is not an address. It is a feeling. Millions of people have the keys to a property, yet enjoy none of the security we associate with the word “home” because their housing is not decent, safe and affordable, or because they have no idea how long they may remain there. Private renters are particularly vulnerable.
The proportion of private tenants in England doubled in the first decade or so of this century, to around a fifth of the population. The proportion of their incomes consumed by rent also increased sharply. So did the amount that taxpayers hand over to landlords.
Many young people no longer aspire to buying property. But “generation rent” is a broad category. A quarter of families with children are renting; one in five has moved at least three times in the past five years, according to Shelter, often disrupting schooling. Hundreds of thousands of older people are vulnerable.
While they have little power as tenants, they still have an impact at the ballot box: the last general election saw a massive swing to Labour among private renters. The government promised changes, and this week Theresa May and the communities secretary, James Brokenshire, announced a consultation on abolishing no-fault eviction, one of the leading causes of homelessness. Wales has also promised a change; Scotland has already improved the rights of tenants.
The proposed changes are welcome, if long overdue. The use of section 21 in “revenge evictions” – punishing renters who dare to complain about unsafe or substandard properties – was a particular concern. But it reflects a system tilted much too far towards the interests of landlords, already richly financially rewarded, and against the basic rights and needs of tenants.
Existing laws must be better used. The Guardian has established that not one slum landlord has been banned from letting out property, a year after the new power was introduced. Only four have been placed on the centralised rogue landlord database, and the public cannot access their names because the government has yet to act on a promise to open it to tenants; in contrast, a standalone London database has hundreds of entries and is accessible. Austerity has hit councils’ capacity for enforcement, even as it leaves tenants scrabbling for somewhere to rent.
An independent regulator and an inflation cap on rent increases (included in Labour’s last election manifesto) would help renters. But the real need is for the massive investment in social housing that looks increasingly necessary to many, but which this government will not contemplate. It remains wedded to long-standing Conservative doctrines, even as so many of the properties sold under Thatcher’s right-to-buy scheme are rented out privately. Rogue landlords are an extreme manifestation of the underlying problem: the transformation of housing into a financial instrument, which exists to produce a profit rather than provide a home.
