The new UK Labour government has released more information on their Renters Rights Bill, which is expected to be introduced to Parliament later this year. The change of title from the Conservatives “Renters Reform Bill” contains most of the same aims, but still no detail.

During the King’s Speech earlier this month, there was a reference of “Legislation will be introduced to give greater rights and protections to people renting their homes, including ending no fault evictions and reforming grounds for possession.”

 The Labour party are fixated (like the Conservatives) that “More than 11 million people in England live day in, day out with the knowledge that they could be uprooted from their home with little notice and minimal justification, and a significant minority of them are forced to live in substandard properties for fear that a complaint would lead to an instant retaliatory eviction.”

Not sure what world they live in, but in the real world it takes months of court action, delay after delay either by the tenant, or a judge who believes everything the tenant says before an eviction is issued.

So, what is the solution?

In the section where the government talks about the abolition of section 21, there is nothing about how they propose to make it possible for a landlord to regain possession of a property or reform the courts. All Labour have stated so far is that as well as eliminating the “no-fault” evictions, they will create “New clear and expanded possession grounds” supposedly to make life easier for landlords to reclaim properties. Yet again we say that the repeated failure to address these issues, with specific intentions, will cause property owners to sell up – reducing the private rental housing stock even further.