Month: October 2025

Rachel’s tenant problems

Rachel from Accounts is a landlord, we find, and a criminal one. Not that she has done anything wrong, apart from breathtaking hypocrisy. It is all a muddle caused by her own party. Still, at least she will be getting better rents when the private rental sector supply collapses and tenants become desperate.

From what we read, Rachel Reeves let out a four-bedroom house in Southwark or thereabouts, through an agent, and failed to compy with a local registration scheme. In other local council areas, there would be no need for a landlord to hand their details to a prying council, but this one demands it. Was it her decision to ignore the law, or an oversight by the letting agent? We may never know, but it is hardly mugging or bank robbery. Actually, mugging people and robbing banks is what Rachel the Reiver does as her job.

The thing is – she has experience with residential lettings, but still helped push the Renters Rights Act through, knowing surely how destructive it is.

I attended a talk on the new Act. The speaker started by saying that it is the end of private landlords, and that is the Government’s intention. We are no longer free to let out a flat or a house: only professionals with the right computer systems and negligence insurance to navigate the impenitrable  network of befuddled and contradictory regulations will be able to do so.

The housing rules were a mess and a burden before – now they are impossible. Landlords will be taking a chance  whatever they do, with a lottery of prosecution or having their rent demands voided at any point. Tenants – well, they can do what they like: their landlords are powerless.

I once watched a man beginning a nervous breakdown in front of me. To see a grown man cry shakes the very soul, but there he was in tears, in a court office, told that his case to regain possession of his own property had been adjourned for several months again for no discernible reason, while his defaulting tenant who had not paid rent for almost a year would have another few months living for free and wrecking the flat, and all the time the landlord’s mortgage had to be paid from no income. That was under the old rules – the new rules will make that the norm.

All a landlord can do is sell his property to a faceless conglomerate or hand it to an equally faceless management company, who will treats tenants likewise in a faceless manner; or clear the tenants out and sell it for redevelopment; or become a slum landlord, letting flats to the transient and the desperate. There is no point in keeping properties clean, let alone improving them, as the money will not be recoverable.

Rachel must know this. She must have checked her tenants’ circumstances before letting them in – although that is now to be called unlawful discrimination. Even though she passed responsibility to a letting agent, she must know that her own legislation will hammer her.

More tellingly, she has been caught breaking a rule from the old system and has therefore seen that even in that regime a landlord can be tripped up by unseen rules. That should have been a lesson to her that complicated rules willcatch an annocent landlord – and yet her government has introduced even more rules and traps.

Her colleague, Rushanara Ali, had the common sense to evict her tenants in advance of the Act’s coming in, and had to resign. Quite right – people with sense have no place in a Labour government.

See also

Books