| “We’ve gone from that June 2022 position of promising to make life safer and fairer for renters to Gove having to bolster protections for landlords as a result of pushback on his own side,” Rob said. “All of the confidence on delivery drained away last year.” In the original consultation, the government proposed banning landlords ending tenancies by saying they wanted to move back in or sell the property - a leading cause of homelessness for renters - for two years. That has since been reduced to six months, and offers no more protection than the existing system. After further pressure from backbenchers, and even though the bill did not need their backing given Labour’s support, the government has made more changes that largely benefit landlords – adding a minimum six-month commitment for tenants and saying that the ban on no-fault evictions would be delayed pending an assessment of the readiness of the court system. Two months after he vowed that the ban on section 21 notices would be in place by the end of the year, Gove has now softened that promise to an “aim”. That prompted Polly Neate, the CEO of Shelter – the leading housing charity which had previously backed the bill – to write that she was “sad and angry” to conclude that the bill “is just not supportable”. Neate later said the government “has led private renters down the garden path”. “Shelter was a critical friend of the bill,” Rob said. “So that’s a big deal.” The need for court reforms, allowing evictions of problem tenants more easily, is cited as the reason for the U-turn. But even before Gove pledged to push the changes through this year, the ban on no-fault evictions had been indefinitely delayed to allow the court reforms to be carried out. “My impression is that when he said it, it was already untrue,” Rob said. How was the vote received? The Renters’ Reform Coalition, an influential grouping of organisations that support renters, published an open letter yesterday warning that the bill would “be a failure”. They noted that ministers met with lobbyists for landlords and estate agents twice as often as they met groups representing renters. Landlords, on the other hand, welcomed the bill’s passage. One cause for the hostility to the government: the fact that so many Conservative MPs are landlords. Eighty-three of the 100 MPs who earned more than £10,000 a year during this parliament from renting properties are on the government benches, Sky News reported yesterday. (Paul Howell, the Tory MP for Sedgefield, tops the list. He has 17 houses and flats listed on the register of interests, in Durham, Darlington and Spain.) Some might view that critique as unduly cynical. But it’s also true that MPs are far less likely than the average member of the public to be renting – which might explain the lack of urgency. “I think that’s really important,” Rob said. “The reality of having to move two or three times every couple of years is quite remote to a lot of MPs. But polls show that in 2019, 14% of voters said housing was their top issue – and now it’s 23%. This is a big issue now for a lot of people who will be voting in the next election, and they won’t feel that very much has changed – other than that they’re paying more.” Are there any plausible solutions coming? Labour has said it would scrap section 21 evictions on its first day in office – which is certainly a big deal. More generally, “its policy is not fleshed out in huge detail”, Rob said. “They’re proposing to get private developers to contribute more to build affordable housing – but that’s been tried repeatedly, and it generally ends with two sets of lawyers negotiating on what’s required, and the developers’ lawyers winning.” In the long term, more housing is the real issue. That is a mighty task, with an estimated 380,000 homes needed each year for the next 15 years to deal with the problem – not much solace to those trying to find a place today. More immediate solutions, detailed in this piece by Rob from November, include the creation of “rent pressure zones” and the radical suggestion of giving tenants in the private sector the same right to buy as those in council houses – but that is a long way from the political centre at the moment. Instead, renters must make do with the trivial changes advanced by last night’s vote. “There’s a tragedy to this, really,” Rob said. “On building safety after Grenfell, on the death of Awaab Ishak because of mould and the introduction of Awaab’s law to fix it in a certain timeframe, Gove seems to get it. Even on this he has spoken in an enthusiastic way. But he just seems to have run into the ground – and he is unable to be the reformer he considers himself to be.” | 