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Categories: government and politics | renters reform bill
The National Residential Landlords Association (NRLA) has released a statement on their recommendations for the controversial Renters’ Rights Bill.
Having grown steadily more critical of the Renters’ Rights Bill over the past several months, the NRLA recently implored ministers to back pragmatic changes to their reform plans to make their goals more realistically achievable – and less punitive for private landlords.
The bill has just entered the Committee stage in the House of Lords. This is the part where peers intensively scrutinise the bill line-by-line and propose amendments. Time is running out for major changes to be implemented.
Amendment recommendations
The NRLA has echoed calls by the Liberal Democrats for the government to review the impact of the upcoming reforms on the justice system.
The Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook has already admitted that the courts system is “on its knees”. Courts minister Sarah Sackman gave a statement to the Justice Select Committee, indicating that progress on improving the system has been slow:
We are not where we want to be in terms of timeliness and the digitalisation of the court process.
Concerns have been raised about the courts’ capacity to deal with the expected influx of possession cases before Section 21 is removed from law.
The process of issuing a Section 21 eviction notice takes seven months on average to be enforced. Many landlords rely on Section 21 as a last resort to use against tenants with antisocial behaviour problems or significant rent arrears.
The Lib Dems’ Housing Spokesperson in the House of Lords, Baroness Thornhill, was the one advocating for these further reviews.
Student housing concessions
Student housing has also been a hot topic. The removal of fixed term tenancies means that landlords will have less certainty about whether they can rent to new students at the beginning of each academic year.
As a compromise, the government proposed a possession ground for properties with more than two bedrooms.
So that properties with one or two bedrooms (which make up a third of all student accommodation in the UK) are not left out, an amendment has been proposed to extend the possession ground to all student housing.
U-turn on rent arrear increases
Lastly, there is the matter of rent arrears. Labour intend to increase the amount of rent arrears a tenant can accumulate before they can be evicted on those grounds. On top of this being inconvenient for landlords, it does not present clear solutions for tenants struggling with debts.
The situation may also become more difficult for would-be tenants with existing debt problems, as landlords would have less incentive to rent their properties to such people.
As such, there has been a proposal to completely reverse this decision, which the NRLA also supports.
NRLA chief executive Ben Beadle concluded by saying:
Ministers must back these constructive, sensible proposals to ensure the Renters’ Rights Bill works in practice.
Without changes the justice system will not cope, students will struggle to plan where they will live and responsible landlords will avoid the risk of taking tenants with a poor, or no, credit history in the UK.
