“With rents doubling in the area since I last looked, I was priced out of the community I call home,” he said. “I couldn’t afford to move out of my flat, and found it particularly difficult to find a new home, facing discrimination from landlords and estate agents due to being in receipt of benefits.”
He added: “I have been forced into private renting due to the chronic shortage of social housing, which has a significant impact on my mental and physical health. While I am lucky to have friends who could help me, I worry I will never feel secure enough to call anywhere home again.”
While the new Renters’ Rights Bill is set to introduce several protections for renters, including making it illegal for landlords to discriminate against tenants on benefits or with children, RRC has laid out several proposals to strengthen these protections.
They proposed longer protected periods, preventing renters from being issued a no-fault eviction for the first two years of a tenancy, as well as a cap on in-tenancy rent increases, a National Rental Affordability Commission to investigate bringing rents down relative to incomes, and more.
The report also highlighted the need to introduce the right to pause rent payments in cases of serious, unaddressed disrepair, which would allow renters protection if a landlord fails to carry out essential repairs within a defined timeline.
A renter who wanted to remain anonymous explained that they, alongside their husband and two children, are “moving from one nightmare house to another”.
“They always look fine in the viewing, the problems start once you move in. In our last house, we complained to our landlord after a flood from a leak in the roof which was so bad we had to get up in the night to replace the buckets collecting water. It took weeks to fix,” the renter explained.
“After waiting six months for the landlord to replace the water-damaged sofa, we replaced it ourselves. Next thing we knew we were served a section 21 eviction notice and the landlord called the police, accusing us of theft of the sofa and fraud saying we had edited the emails to fit our own narrative. The whole situation made me so ill we just left.”
They added: “We have just moved house again and discovered subsidence at the property that we weren’t told about prior. The back door is nailed shut and doesn’t meet the door frame so wind and rain can get through, there is a drain issue, the shower doesn’t work, we think the beam holding the house up is slowly moving. The whole house smells of damp when it rains and it is freezing cold.
“So we are again in a position where rather than repairing the property, the landlord has point blank refused to repair anything and wants us to leave.”
Esther, who has lived in Hackney since 1998, claims that protections set to be introduced by the Renters’ Reform Bill may be too late, and that the “damage has been done”.
The 63-year-old told the Big Issue that she has been forced to move multiple times, facing higher rents each time due to what she describes as the “gentrification” of Hackney.
Esther, who is a member of the London Renters’ Union, explained that as well as abolishing no-fault evictions – which she hoped would be a “great achievement” – rents must be capped to ensure they are affordable to communities. Even with rent caps, however, she is “cynical” that renting will become more affordable.
“It’s been many years of not feeling secure in society whatsoever, because you wake up in the morning and your rent has doubled… the speed that this is going is crazy,” she explained.
“Housing is a human right, and should be defended as a human right,” she said, adding that housing in the UK is “like an ecosystem that is completely toxic”.
The Renters’ Reform Coalition explained that it “welcomed” many of the changes to the Renters’ Rights Bill, which it claims are a “significant improvement” on the Conservative government’s previous attempt. The group, however, calls on the government to go further if it wants to “decisively level the playing field between landlords and tenants”.
“It’s frankly ridiculous section 21 still exists,” Tom Darling, director of the Renters’ Reform Coalition, said. “We’re approaching six years since the previous government first promised to abolish it, while every indicator on the dashboard has been going in the wrong direction.”
“We as renting campaigners have welcomed the government’s Renters’ Rights Bill… as drafted it will already make a difference for a lot of people. The government should hold their nerve in the face of threats from landlords of a wave of evictions before the reforms come in. This threat in itself shows why change is so desperately needed.”
Darling added that despite the benefits of the new bill, the group is “concerned the legislation may still fall short of the mark”.
“Today, our coalition has come together to publish our vision for what we believe it will take to achieve a future for renters where we can live in affordable, decent homes, in secure tenancies, free from all forms of discrimination,” he said. “We look forward to engaging with the government as the legislation progresses.”
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