Safer Renting Director Roz Spencer shares insights into London’s broken private rented market and demands proper protections for renters in The Guardian.
Safer Renting creates pathways out of slum rentals for victims of criminal landlords.We influence social policy to create better conditions for renters and drive slum landlords out of business, and it’s great to see our work getting out there. You can find out more about what we do on our Safer Renting page, and can support our work here.
An excerpt from the article is below, and you can read the full piece here:
“Evictions from a private tenancy are a major part of the 78% rise in homelessness since 2011. So-called allow private landlords to turf tenants out without any reason, and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation attributes 80% of the recent rise in evictions to this process. We must be able to hold landlords to account if we are to lower the numbers of people that end up at local authorities’ doors.
The long awaited Homelessness Reduction Act has come into force, but already stretched local authorities are understandably concerned about the implications of this new duty, which places new legal duties on councils to ensure that anyone who is homeless or at risk of homelessness has access to meaningful help, irrespective of their priority need status.
London councils have stated that even with the £61m additional funding provided nationally over the next three years to help them fulfil this duty, they will be left with a gaping financial black hole to fulfil this obligation.I am all for obliging councils to invest money in preventing homelessness – but we need to address some of the key reasons increasing numbers of people are becoming homeless in the first place.”
By Roz Spencer.
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