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Renters’ Rights Bill and the Future of Tenant Evictions
Elizabeth Blaquiere
Trainee Solicitor
The Renters’ Rights Bill (“the Bill”), if passed into law, will have a significant impact on the private rental market. It seeks to afford greater rights and protections to tenants, such as abolishing fixed term assured tenancies and assured shorthold tenancies.
A key provision of the Bill, and the focus of this article, is the proposed removal of section 21 “no fault evictions” (a provision of the Housing Act 1988, “the 1988 Act”), a leading cause of homelessness. This means that landlords must rely on other provisions of the 1988 Act to evict tenants, such as those within section 8. These section 8 grounds are divided into mandatory and discretionary grounds, i.e. the court must grant possession on the mandatory grounds and may grant possession on the discretionary grounds. The mandatory grounds include death of a tenant and rental arrears (grounds 7 and 8 respectively), and the discretionary grounds include deterioration of the property due to the tenant’s conduct (ground 13).
The Law Society advocates that in favour of balancing this reform, the section 8 grounds for evicting tenants should be expanded, allowing landlords greater freedom to evict tenants if there are grounds to do so. Indeed, even with expanded grounds for eviction, the more lengthy and costly process for evicting under section 8, as opposed to section 21, will likely lead to a substantial decrease in evictions even with wider section 8 grounds.
The Bill is currently in its Second Reading in the House of Lords, and there is an expectation that the Bill will pass into law in 2025. It may result in a number of landlords seeking to sell their properties and leave the private rental market entirely, in advance of this law coming into force. It remains to be seen whether this legislation will impose too onerous a standard on landlords to evict tenants from their properties.