Safer Renting works to tackle criminal landlords and support their victims across London. The Project Director Roz Spencer, as seen on Channel 5’s Nightmare Tenants, Slum Landlords, has over 30 years’ experience working with private sector and social housing in London. This blog details her experiences tackling criminal landlords and working with some of the most vulnerable tenants in London.
It is still early days for Safer Renting, but it is hard not to notice some patterns emerging in the casework we’re taking on. Both of the boroughs where we have started working have embraced discretionary licensing for landlords as a way of driving up standards in the private rented sector. One of the two has whole borough licensing – so any and all rented property must be licensed, regardless of size or degrees of self-containment.
One of the trends we’ve noticed is so apparent it hardly needs stating at all: levels of eviction and attempted eviction by private landlords– usually through no fault of the tenant – are very high. The driver for many evictions is this: rents are rising faster than wages in these London boroughs, so it pays the landlord to trade a tenant who can only barely afford the rent for a new tenant who can afford a higher rent.
I used to be one of many sceptics about the value of licensing schemes – and I still believe that we need more powers and more resources to tackle the worst of the private rented sector abuses. On the other hand, by working hand-in-hand with the licensing teams, we are led to the poorest quality properties; ones that should be licensed, but aren’t.
There are other benefits to the licensing scheme aside from identifying the worst perpetrators. .One of the keys to our success has been that landlords who fail to licence a property that should be licensable are not legally able to use ‘no fault’ (Section 21) evictions. These are currently the most prevalent forms of private sector eviction and have emerged as the leading cause of homelessness in the UK. Indeed, reviewing our casework statistics, I saw that we have been able to help the tenant to sustain the tenancy in 92% of cases where the landlord had tried to evict the tenant.
Despite these welcome successes, it’s only growing more obvious that there are so many things that could and should be done to protect tenants in the private rented sector; for example, many tenants don’t even enjoy this protection from eviction because the landlord has used loopholes to avoid granting any tenancy at all in return for cash-in-hand rent; but until there is a radical change in powers and resources, don’t underestimate how much licensing can do to protect people’s homes.
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