Labour council evicts 200 private tenants amid housing crisis

Reply to the comment left by JeggNegg at 15/01/2025 - 10:48
They'll just buy their qualifications from their posh schools and universities with Daddy offering brown under-table brown envelopes or the offer of a new rugby pitch.

Reply to the comment left by Godfrey Jones at 15/01/2025 - 11:40
Plus VAT now you know

Reply to the comment left by MartinR at 15/01/2025 - 09:58
GB News should put up a clock, counting down the days until Starmer is kicked out. Hopefully, it will not reach the end!

Have I missed something, is it April 1st today???? So 200+ tenants are being evicted via section 21 so that other other people currently in expensive temporary accommodation can be housed. I would guess those persons being housed are on benefits. Once the original tenants are evicted, at a high cost to council if they fight it, they then have to be rehoused in expensive temporary accommodation because they were evicted and made homeless through no fault of their own. This must be fake news surely, perhaps not its the Labour party. Only reason I can think of for them to do that is to house loads of illegal immigrants at a great cost to the taxpayer. I hope all the current tenants can get "no win no fee" legal advice at great expense to the council, whoops, great expense to the taxpayer once again. I hope I wake up from this nightmare soon. You couldn't make it up as many have said already.

It seems Labour has forgotten the words of their Minister and Deputy Leader, Angela Rayner...

“One of the biggest issues we have to address is Section 21 no-fault evictions, which are having a significant impact on homelessness.”

Seemingly not....or does that apply only to the PRS?

With apologies for the length of this but I quote David Simmonds MP (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con) in yesterday's debate on the Renters Rights Bill:
https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2025-01-14/debates/E7CB5480-DDD4-4F24-AB48-E957C964DC5A/Renters%E2%80%99RightsBill#
I will set out my responses, and the rationale behind a number of the amendments that we have tabled, which will be the subject of debate and votes this afternoon.
Clearly, legislation is about striking the right balance. This afternoon, we will recognise—as we have done in our contributions to debate on this issue—the impact that the Bill will have on tenants, landlords and the stakeholders whom our amendments seek to protect. I highlight in particular the impact on students; on financially vulnerable tenants, such as those with low credit scores; on tenants who have pets; on small landlords, who are themselves vulnerable to financial shocks; and of course on other groups, such as agricultural workers and those with work-related accommodation, including NHS workers, military families and school staff, all of whom were mentioned in Committee and will, I am sure, be covered again later. All our amendments have sought to address practical issues, such as ensuring that when work is required on a property and a tenant is reluctant to allow the landlord in to carry out that work for whatever reason, there is sufficient freedom and flexibility in the legislation to ensure that the work can take place.
...
Although there have been substantial areas of agreement on the Bill, much of which takes forward work that started under the previous Government in their Renters (Reform) Bill, we have concerns that it creates significant new problems for the availability and affordability of accommodation in the private rented sector. That sector, we must not forget, enjoys the highest tenant satisfaction of any private tenure: 82% of private renters say that they are satisfied with their accommodation.
...
[In reply to a question whether s21 should have been abolished sooner]
I say gently to the hon. Lady that had Labour-run Lambeth council not recently rushed to put 200 of its own people on the streets using section 21, because it is concerned about the impact that the Bill will have on its housing situation, that would have more credibility. It is clear that this is a difficult situation in all parts of the country. There is a significant shortfall in emergency accommodation in London in particular, and a rising cost attached to it there, just as other areas of the country have a surplus of accommodation. That is all part of a complex picture. We need to make sure that everything works efficiently and effectively together, and it is absolutely right that we set out our concerns about whether the Bill goes far enough in all areas towards addressing those issues—and about whether, in some cases, it goes too far.
I touched on the impact of the black hole in local government funding. Another area that is driving significant pressure is the Government’s approach to asylum. They are granting refugee status faster, so people are being pushed out of the doors of Home Office asylum dispersal accommodation and on to local housing waiting lists. I am sure that many hon. Members in this Chamber will have been lobbied by their local authority about the impact of that additional pressure—those additional people, who under our laws are perfectly entitled to that housing—on supply in their area. All those things have a huge collective impact on the pool of available housing.
Of course, as we have seen in the news, the declining confidence abroad in our economy is reducing the number of overseas students. That makes it more important than ever to support thriving student accommodation through tenancies that address students’ needs properly—especially the needs of students who are older, have families, or are studying for higher degrees and have a fixed commitment to a location. All those requirements need to be addressed effectively in this legislation.
Does the Bill in its new form rise to those challenges? It is clear that it fails to ensure that landlords can recover their property quickly when they need to. That reduces their incentive to rent it out, especially for small landlords. If the hon. Member for Hampstead and showing location of Highgate (Tulip Siddiq) needs to recover some of her property portfolio to return it to another owner, will she have the assurance under this Bill that due process is available to her? The Bill fails to ensure a flexibility and freedom of contract that allows tenants and landlords to agree a deal that suits them both. Students wanting to book accommodation for a guaranteed period of two years—or shorter or longer—and those moving to a new location for a fixed-term work contract require opportunities and flexibility that are taken away by this legislation.
The Bill takes away landlords’ opportunity to make allowances for financially riskier tenants, such as those with a poor credit record, through rent in advance or other safeguarding arrangements that give the landlord confidence that they will not lose out. That locks financially vulnerable people out of the rental market. The Bill also puts enormous obligations on local councils—one of the biggest additional sets of burdens and expectations in generations—and there is no real clarity yet on how it will be resourced, at a time when all the wider uncertainties that I have described add up to a great deal of additional cost. The Bill also fails to provide the necessary assurance that tenants who have pets and need to access insurance as part of their tenancy conditions will be able to find affordable insurance. That is dealt with in our new clause 21. More concerning still, the Bill is a missed opportunity to provide this House with a proper impact assessment, or the assurance of a future review that would give us really good evidence on which to base our decisions. Our new clause 20 would address that shortcoming, and the House will have the opportunity to vote for it shortly.
Let me give an example of where there is significant uncertainty. In some of the political knockabout, the Government have sought to blame their predecessor for court delays, while claiming that there are no delays worthy of regard in the passage of this Bill, which loads more regulation on to the sector. Both of those things cannot be true simultaneously, so let us properly assess the impact of the Bill before we legislate. There is a lot of good will—for example, on the point about tenants with pets being able to access the accommodation that they need. We do not want to find ourselves returning to this issue in the House because the legislation failed to achieve what we had hoped.
Clearly, it is the role of this Chamber to scrutinise and question, and it is the role of the Opposition to oppose when we cannot see that the legislation before us will result in an improvement in the lot of the people of this country. A pattern is emerging. The Government came after the farmers. They came after the pubs. They came after the small businesses. They came after the private schools. They came after our local councillors. Now this Bill, in its new form, comes after our tenants and our landlords. It is very clear from the number of Government amendments, which the Minister referred to, that the points we made in Committee about the many shortcomings of the Bill that need to be addressed were not lost on the Government.
I return to the point that even a Labour council—a bastion such as Lambeth, led by the Labour chair of London Councils—is rushing to use section 21 to evict its own tenants in advance of this Bill because of the impact it will have. A Labour council and a Labour Government are putting their own people out of their homes.
.....
I know that the Minister is no Corbynista—we have certainly learnt that in the debate; in fact, I even discovered that he has named his dog after Clement Attlee, who I assume is a great political hero—but Government new clauses 13 and 14 will make this Bill so much worse for prospective tenants. Many of us will have had constituents come to our surgeries who are turning their life around. They have got a job, an income and some savings, but they do not have a good credit record, and they face being locked out of the housing market because the necessary flexibilities and measures that would address that credit score concern are effectively prohibited. Foreign workers coming to the UK, needing to access accommodation and provide sufficient guarantees; foreign students; people who are retired and looking to downsize to a rental property; and people who, for family reasons, cannot access a guarantor will all find themselves significantly disadvantaged by Government new clauses 13 and 14, which increase the risk to landlords by taking away mitigations and take away people’s freedom to reach a contract and an agreement that suits them.
I know that Labour Members are very keen on asking Conservative Members for apologies, so I am going to conclude with one.
....
I am afraid that I will not be able to go through all the private tenants individually, but the apology will be fulsome. I say to those in the private rented sector, 82% of whom are very satisfied with their accommodation, that I am sorry that they will be faced with the mess that this Bill will create, whether they are seeking to rent their first home or need to move to a new one.

It would have been good if Reform would have said something in the debate too (as they are sttrong advocates of repealing S24). But they did not so we are on our own on this now. NRLA has failed miserably to make any impact at all.

Its getting a difficult choice now who to trust. - Labour and Conservative NO and unfortunately Reform seems to have associated themselves with the increasingly deranged Musk

SNP, NO and Greenies NO -- so am afraid its back to Monster Raving Looney Party. (who had some very good ideas, they campaigned for seat belts !)

Reply to the comment left by GlanACC at 16/01/2025 - 12:34
Musk recently said that Farage is not the right person to lead Reform following some kind of disagreement and Farage has distanced himself from Musk although he said the party would accept legal payments from Musk . I can't see Farage letting Musk get his claws into his party myself. Reform for me. Roll on the next few years.

Reply to the comment left by PH at 16/01/2025 - 16:03
I think it was about Tommy Robinson, whose past is somewhat dubious. But I think he's right about exposing the Afghan bully boy who got a smack from his classmates, and that's what landed him in jail.