Bad law is driving Britain’s rental crisis – not landlords
TIM BRIGGS
In the pantheon of destructive, counterproductive laws of the last few centuries, Labour’s new Renters’ Rights Act, which starts today, must be up there with the worst. Perhaps alongside the Corn Laws of 1815, or the Trade Union Act of 1906 that allowed unchecked industrial unrest and economic decline, or the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947 that constrained housing supply. It is that bad.
The Renters’ Rights Act is sold as a moral crusade: a bold attempt to drive rogue landlords out of England’s private rental sector and protect tenants from abuse. As with the soon-to-be-implemented Employment Rights Act 2025, it is a cure that worsens the disease. Just as higher unemployment will come from the Employment Rights Act, so higher rent and fewer tenancies will come from this Renters’ Rights Act. Employment rights creating more unemployed people, renters’ rights creating more people that cannot rent. Classic performative socialism.
Labour’s war on landlords
The premise of the Renters’ Rights Act is simple. There are, we are told, 2.3 million landlords in England; many of them are bad, so the state must step in with tougher rules. Bad behaviour is not unique to landlords. With many more tenants than landlords, rogue tenants are also a real problem – but this legislation prefers to ignore that inconvenient truth. Truth, after all, is the first casualty of both war and political grandstanding.
The ‘oppressor and oppressed’ ideology of the Left means that politicians are predisposed to think that landlords are the problem. Yet reality hardly ever conforms to such neat political stereotyping. Labour MP Jas Athwal – the biggest landlord in the House of Commons – has faced allegations that his own rental properties fell short of the standards he expects others to meet.
Lambeth, a Labour-run council since 2006 and a political nursery for figures including Housing Secretary Steve Reed and MPs Jim Dickson, Florence Eshalomi, Marsha de Cordova, Tom Rutland and Luke Murphy, has itself been repeatedly condemned for housing failures. The Housing Ombudsman has found severe maladministration in cases involving repairs left unresolved for years – making the council a poor advertisement for Labour’s claim that tougher rules are the answer to bad landlords.
Still, we are asked to believe that the solution to poor housing is more regulation from the very politicians who preside over it.
The rise of the professional tenant
Since the 1997 paper ‘Legal Determinants of External Finance’, the legal-origins literature has treated English common law as an economic asset: associated with stronger investor protections, more efficient courts and faster enforcement than civil-law systems. One later study measured that efficiency partly by the ease of evicting a non-paying tenant.
Yet in England the median time from claim to repossession has risen from 22 weeks in 2022 to 27 weeks in 2026 – a small but telling sign of how an economy declines alongside, and because of, the decline in its legal system.
This decline in the effectiveness of our civil court system has quietly created a niche for something else entirely: the ‘professional tenant’. Letting agents often use the phrase to mean a tenant with a stable job who reliably pays the rent. But the phrase can also mean something rather different: people who live rent-free for years while exploiting a legal system so slow and cumbersome that landlords eventually pay them to leave.
I represented a landlord at court whose tenant had not paid rent for two years but continued occupying a central London flat, making a good living by subletting three rooms. For each court hearing he arrived leaning heavily on a walking stick. He would tearfully inform the judge he was dying of cancer. Then came the crucial question: had the judge received the document he had posted to the court? The judge would rummage through the file. Nothing there, so the hearing was adjourned. Eventually a new hearing would be listed – often six months later.
Another landlord I represented faced a tenant who arrived at court with dramatic photographs of a collapsed living-room ceiling, caused by a water leak. What the tenant did not mention was that the leak had occurred three months earlier – and the landlord had repaired it the very next day. But the judge adjourned the case because the facts were disputed, requiring a day-long trial to discover the truth. Nine months later, just days before the trial date, the tenant left the property with a year’s rent unpaid. The landlord was left with a large legal bill and a wrecked house.
This is the system Labour now intend to make even harder for landlords to navigate.
How Thatcher revived private renting
To understand the mess we are in, you have to go back to the late 1980s, when the private rented sector was moribund. Rent controls and lifetime protected tenancies had driven landlords out of the market. Only about 9% of households rented privately.
Margaret Thatcher’s government changed that with the Housing Act 1988, introducing assured shorthold tenancies, allowing landlords to regain possession of their property with a simple two-month notice. If a tenant refused to leave, the landlord filed a straightforward four-page form at court. The tenant could challenge the notice if it was invalid – or move on. It was simple, predictable and quick. Investment flowed back into the sector. By 2013 private renting had grown to around 17% of households.
In other words, the law followed the Simple Rule that should guide almost all legislation in peacetime: does a proposed law make buying goods or services cheaper, and simpler, and increase supply? Or does the proposed law make buying goods or services more expensive, more complicated, and reduce supply? The 1988 Act clearly did the former. But over the past decade, governments have steadily reversed that logic.
Since 1988, the UK’s population has surged, growing by more than 12m people to around 69m. Housebuilding failed to keep pace. Planning laws – largely unchanged since 1947 – choked supply and created artificial scarcity, pushing up rents. The result is obvious in the numbers. In the mid-1980s, average earnings were roughly nine times regulated private rents. Today, private rents consume a far larger share of pay: the median monthly wage is barely twice the average rent. As a result, landlords became a political target, blamed for higher rents and lower living standards, despite taking financial risks themselves to provide homes for others.
How tax and regulation pushed landlords out
The Conservative government in 2015, rather than applying the Simple Rule, decided to attack landlords as an easy political excuse, rather than find solutions. It restricted mortgage interest relief, imposed a 3% stamp duty surcharge on second homes, reduced capital gains advantages and exploded the number of regulations for landlords. The four-page possession claim form mutated into a bureaucratic labyrinth of around twenty pages – sometimes accompanied by hundreds of supporting documents. Local authorities piled in on landlords with licensing schemes the sole purpose of which was to provide new revenue streams, pushing up rents in the guise of helping tenants.
Predictably, landlords began leaving the market. Recent estimates suggest the number of landlords in England fell again in 2023–24. In London the number of available private rental homes has dropped sharply in recent years, with some reports suggesting a fall of more than 40%. Sensing an opportunity, large corporate investors are increasingly stepping in to buy housing in bulk – a trend controversial enough that the Trump administration in the United States has attempted to restrict it.
What the Renters’ Rights Act will change
Stomping into this fragile market comes Labour’s Renters’ Rights Act, beginning today.
The legislation abolishes assured shorthold tenancies and eliminates Section 21 notices entirely. Instead, landlords must rely on specific legal grounds to regain possession of their property – involving more lawyers and even more prolonged litigation.
Notice periods are extended. Every landlord will need to register on a national database to bring a possession claim. Tenants not paying rent face longer delays before eviction proceedings can begin. Landlords who wish to sell their property must give four months’ notice, and once that four months ends, cannot rent the property again for 12 months.
This article (Bad law is driving Britain’s rental crisis – not landlords) was created and published by CapX and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Tim Briggs
••••
The Liberty Beacon Project is now expanding at a near exponential rate, and for this we are grateful and excited! But we must also be practical. For 7 years we have not asked for any donations, and have built this project with our own funds as we grew. We are now experiencing ever increasing growing pains due to the large number of websites and projects we represent. So we have just installed donation buttons on our websites and ask that you consider this when you visit them. Nothing is too small. We thank you for all your support and your considerations … (TLB)
••••
Comment Policy: As a privately owned web site, we reserve the right to remove comments that contain spam, advertising, vulgarity, threats of violence, racism, or personal/abusive attacks on other users. This also applies to trolling, the use of more than one alias, or just intentional mischief. Enforcement of this policy is at the discretion of this websites administrators. Repeat offenders may be blocked or permanently banned without prior warning.
••••
Disclaimer: TLB websites contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of “fair use” in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, health, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than “fair use” you must request permission from the copyright owner.
••••
Disclaimer: The information and opinions shared are for informational purposes only including, but not limited to, text, graphics, images and other material are not intended as medical advice or instruction. Nothing mentioned is intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of The Liberty Beacon Project.
Leave a Reply