17 January 2025

Despatch: Think renting is bad now? Just wait

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Alongside CapX’s new weekly podcast The Capitalist, we’ll also be publishing a series of episodes, titled Despatch, which offer an audio version of some of our favourite pieces from the site.

This week, it’s Reem Ibrahim’s analysis of the well-meaning but ‘pernicious’ Renters’ Rights Bill, which, she argues, is likely to make things worse for the very groups it is designed to help.

[H]as the Government thought about the consequences of making it more difficult for landlords to evict bad tenants? Landlords are, rather rationally, going to become much more picky about who they accept as tenants in the first place. For those landlords that do choose to stay in the rental market – many will not – they will inevitably implement stronger vetting to avoid a complex eviction process.
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This incentivises discrimination against riskier tenants. This includes young people, freelancers with irregular incomes and migrants. This legislation would systematically gear the rental market towards older tenants with stable incomes, or those who have access to the Bank of Mum and Dad.
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Is this not the inverse of what the Government intends to achieve?

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Marc Sidwell is the editor of CapX