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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Rent payments made in advance are capped at one month. Rent increases must follow a formal legal process, and if challenged at a land tribunal, the rent increase is stayed until that long tribunal process ends, and the increase is not backdated, incentivising formal challenges from tenants without them paying any legal costs.
Individually these changes might sound reasonable. Together they represent a regulatory avalanche. And they send a clear message to small landlords: this Government does not want your investment.
Sadly, the issue runs deeper. The ideology of the Left means that it dislikes landlords owning property, and assumes that landlords contracting with tenants to ensure their well-being has to be at odds with a landlord’s financial interests. Yet as every good landlord knows, keeping tenants happy to the point that the tenants share responsibility for the property protects the long-term stability of the landlord’s investment.
The economics here is not complicated. When you make providing a service more expensive and riskier, fewer people provide it. Fewer landlords mean fewer rental homes. And fewer rental homes mean higher rents. The further irony is that the Renters’ Rights Act will likely reward exactly the behaviour it claims to prevent. Professional tenants who exploit slow courts and free Legal Aid will face even fewer consequences.
The successful parts of the rest of the world are moving in the opposite direction. In Argentina, President Javier Milei scrapped strict rental controls in 2023, allowing landlords and tenants to negotiate contracts freely. The result? Supply surged. Listings in Buenos Aires reportedly jumped by 184% within a year. Rents fell by 40% as properties flooded back into the long-term market.
If the government genuinely wants to improve housing for renters, the answer is straightforward, if politically difficult. Several reforms need to happen at once.
First, reform planning to increase the number of homes being built. Local authorities should be required to approve or reject planning applications within six weeks, or face a presumption of approval. Smaller builders and landowners should face no tax penalties for building or bringing properties onto the market, simplifying or reversing several recent tax changes – restoring mortgage interest relief, removing stamp duty surcharges on additional properties and reintroducing capital gains incentives for investment in housing.
Second, Britain needs new housing infrastructure. That means aggressively creating the conditions to allow new towns to be built, or for existing towns to be expanded, as has happened successfully around Cambridge. New towns should not just be new housing developments and estates. The Left cannot understand that every beautiful and expensive house that is built helps satisfy a demand that ultimately makes other houses less expensive.
The Government could even explore programmes similar to Peru’s ‘Own Roof’ scheme, which helped low-income families buy or build homes through government-approved infrastructure and land development. Under a similar system in the UK, non-profit intermediaries could also purchase land, build roads, sewage systems and power networks, and then sell individual plots to first-time buyers. Profits could then fund further development. The Left’s focus could shift from rights-based lawfare to charities actually helping people on lower incomes get a home.
Third, government procurement should be radically changed to be radically transparent. Every bid for public contracts – national or local – should be published on Gov.UK as a condition of bidding. Commercial confidentiality as an excuse for secrecy would end. Full transparency would immediately increase competition and reduce costs.
Fourth, landlord-tenant law should be simplified. A new Landlord and Tenant Act could restore a straightforward possession process: a two-month notice to tenants followed by a simple court filing confirming service of the notice. At the same time, strict safety standards should remain in place to ensure landlords quickly rectify dangerous hazards and maintain habitable properties. Legal Aid for most housing possession defences should be withdrawn. Tenants with taxpayer-funded defences mostly just delay the inevitable possession, while increasing costs for everyone involved, including taxpayers, who have no interest in keeping tenants in properties they cannot afford. A bold Reform or Conservative government should ignore the inevitable pushback from lawyers, dressed up as moral outrage. The entrenched defence by lawyers of their privileges is centuries old: in the 19th century, reforming lawyers trying to change German property law were labelled Mestbeschmutzer by those who had no interest in change, or ‘birds that soil their own nest’.
Finally, demand pressures must be addressed. Large-scale migration places additional strain on the housing system. Simple maths suggests that reducing that pressure would lower demand for private rentals and lower rents. After all, housing markets obey basic economic laws whether politicians like it or not. If supply is constrained and demand rises, prices go up. If government policies make supplying housing more difficult, the shortage becomes worse.
The Renters’ Rights Act is presented as protection for tenants. In reality it will achieve the opposite: fewer landlords, fewer homes, and higher rents.
In Britain’s already strained housing market, that is the last thing tenants need, and a bitter irony for the very tenants that the Government wants to help.
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