Renters (Reform) Bill

Kim Johnson Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 23rd October 2023 Commons Chamber

[Kim Johnson (Liverpool, Riverside) (Lab)]

I join colleagues across the House in welcoming this long-overdue Bill and share their dismay at the delay in implementing a ban on no-fault evictions. Renters have been left with soaring rents and disrepairs, and are at the complete mercy of landlords, powerless under the current system of no-fault evictions to demand fair rents and humane living conditions.

This is a massive housing emergency. Across the country, renters of all ages and backgrounds—from students to families, young couples and single retirees—are struggling to pay their rent, let alone save for a deposit to buy. Only half of private renters have any savings in their name. With a desperate lack of social housing, Liverpool alone has more than 15,000 applicants on the council’s housing register and almost 1,000 households in temporary accommodation. The frontline housing options and homelessness service is seeing nearly 400 new approaches a month. Councils are relying on the private rented sector as the only way to ease the pressures on the system, and renters are left with no viable options.

An entire generation have been betrayed by the Tories, with 13 years of austerity and rising rents, frozen wages and diminishing opportunities. On top of that, they have faced unprecedented challenges caused by the financial crash, recessions, the pandemic and, now, the cost of living crisis. Thirteen years of Tory attacks on workers’ and tenants’ rights have left renters facing soaring insecurity and plummeting conditions. We urgently need the Bill to be passed into law to begin to redress some of the worst impacts of the deregulation.

Nearly five years since the Government proposed to outlaw no-fault evictions and give renters desperately needed protection from exploitative landlords, some 70,000 households have been threatened with homelessness by section 21 notices. Homelessness has skyrocketed during the last year, with the number of households in England who became homeless or were at risk of homelessness up 7% in the year to March. Each day that we delay, 172 families are handed a no-fault eviction notice. We cannot wait for improvements in the courts; renters need protection now.

In my constituency, as across the country, we have increasingly seen private landlords using no-fault evictions to turf out tenants on fixed-term contracts in order to hike up rents in line with soaring market rates. Not content with waiting out one-year or two-year-long contracts to raise rents and bolster profits, landlords are taking advantage of the cost of living crisis to line their pockets while tenants are turfed out with nowhere to go. Citizens Advice has found that a shocking 46% of renters who complain about their conditions receive a section 21 notice within six months. Research by Shelter supports that, with its findings showing that private renters in England who complain about poor conditions are 2.5 times more likely to be handed an eviction notice.

Ending pernicious section 21 evictions is a major step in rebalancing power in favour of tenants, but there are a number of areas where we need to go further to ensure that the Bill’s measures have their intended consequences, as called for by the Renters Reform Coalition of the 20 leading housing organisations. First, we must increase the notice period from two months to at least four months: a move that will drastically reduce the number of people made homeless as a result of evictions. We must also protect renters from eviction for the first two full years of tenancy, not the six months proposed. We must introduce strong safeguards to prevent abuse of the new grounds for eviction, including a financial incentive for tenants to prevent abuse, and a one-year ban on re-letting a property after invoking new landlord circumstances on the grounds for eviction. Courts must be given maximum discretion to identify reasons why an eviction should not take place, and a cap on in-tenancy rent increases in line with inflation and wage growth must be introduced to prevent unaffordable rent increases being used as a way to evict tenants via the back door. Lastly, we need action to raise local housing allowance in line with inflation to prevent renters on benefits from being penalised by rising rents, and local authorities must be given extra financial support to take action on rogue landlords.

Everyone deserves a safe and secure home. The Government must bring the Bill into law immediately, with the additional safeguards that Members have outlined, to deliver desperately needed robust legislation that protects renters.