This Wretched Renters’ Rights Bill Legalises Theft from Landlords

Angela Rayner vowed to get it into law ‘as soon as possible’ in her attempt to end the ‘cruel threat’ of no-fault evictions to children and families. It will certainly provide greater (indeed permanent) security for the country’s 11million private renters. In addition to making evictions near-impossible and restricting rent increases, it will make it easier for tenants to keep pets. Kemi Badenoch is quite right to say it shows that Labour don’t understand the value of property rights and they can’t see landlords as anything other than exploiters; that it will reduce the supply of rental homes, drive up rents and deter the building of new homes for hard-pressed young people.

All true, but it is even worse than that.

In effect, this package of new state interventions and tenant rights legalises the theft of a landlord’s property. Since theft is wrong, these state interventions are wrong too. The idea that tenants have greater rights to security and stability than the landlord’s right of ownership does not stand up to scrutiny. Indeed, such positive rights of tenants simply turn all property simply into a resource to be used by others, likewise the landlord into a forced servant for others.

To be clear, the proposed ban on no-fault evictions will prohibit landlords from taking back their properties when a lease ends; it will ban fixed-term tenancies. Instead of the landlord and tenant freely entering into a contract which they can renew or not when the terms expire, all tenancies will continue indefinitely until terminated by the tenant. This is nothing less than legalising the theft of a landlord’s property, because it enables tenants to take possession of a landlord’s house without his consent. This so plainly wrong that it is amazing it got past the civil servants responsible for drafting the bill. If you lent a friend your car for three months on the condition you would take it back afterwards, and after three months he carried on using it, paying a bit of compensation in return, you’d call it theft. The ban on no-fault evictions is no different. It betrays any concept of contract. There is no contract. The landlord is eliminated.

Yet people are not entitled to have their ‘right to security’ protected by the state. As the American philosopher Robert Nozick wrote: ‘No one has a right to something whose realisation requires certain things or activities that other people have rights and entitlements over.’ If ‘the ability to stay in their homes longer’ and ‘build lives in their communities’ are such important interests, it raises the question of whether grown-up children have an indefinite right to stay in their parents’ homes provided they pay a certain rent. After all, the Renters (Reform) Bill aims to end no-fault evictions for alltenants, including lodgers which would include adult children paying rent. It could be argued that parents have a stronger interest and corresponding right to an exclusive home, yet this is a wobbly stand from which to object to grown-child trespass. If parents could otherwise rent out their child’s room for £1,000 a month (the average price of a room to rent in London) and yet are paid only £500 a month by their child, the £500 of inconvenience not covered represents the greater extent of their stronger interest. Should this setback be taken as reason for them rightly to exclude their children, the similarly costly 30 per cent reduction in the value of a house with a sitting tenant should be taken as reason to exclude tenants too.

Perhaps social democrats construe important interests differently, allowing them to avoid this conclusion. But since the Bill will inevitably test this new ground if it passes into law, I want to press Nozick’s point

An important interest is of course your health. On many occasions people will suffer or die because medical labour, whether from doctors, nurses or scientists developing drugs, is unavailable. Why is it unavailable? In part because such specialists retire to their gardens, go on holiday, or work fewer hours. An ethic which guaranteed people their important interests would require them to be put to forced labour. This is wrong: the natural principle of human respect requires that each person should be free to pursue their own happiness in their own way. This natural principle is not the creation of mankind, nor does it admit of exceptions.

In today’s civilised society we hope everyone agrees that forced labour is wrong. Therefore, taking the embodiment of a landlord’s labour in the form of the bricks and mortar he has laid via state regulation is wrong too. Admittedly the former instance is worse due to the greater violation of freedom, yet both instances involve the subordination of an individual’s energy to the purposes of others. Theft is simply an efficient means to achieve what violence does with forced labour.

Besides displaying the utmost disrespect for man, these restrictions will increase costs to tenants too, as Badenoch has pointed out. With the prospect of being stuck with bad tenants because of the ban on fixed-term tenancies, many landlords will simply sell up; this will diminish the supply of tenancies and hence increase their price. The harmony of interests ensured by the free market will also be impeded by the ban on bidding battles because landlords will not be able to discover the true height of the clearing price. The same reasoning applies to stopping excessive rent increases, which enable rents to rise to a new equilibrium when demand goes up. Stopping them will only retard such adjustments.

The Renters’ Rights Bill is an immoral piece of legislation which simply legalises the theft of a landlord’s property by its tenants. This is wrong. The positive rights which the Bill asserts underpin no-fault evictions are fictitious. Justice demands the defence of private property against these wretched restrictions.

This article (This Wretched Renters’ Rights Bill Legalises Theft from Landlords) was created and published by The Conservative Woman and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Charles Amos

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