Why were we evicted? I had to ask the new tenant to find out – and the reason cuts to the heart of the UK’s housing crisisThe Tories have betrayed renters, and Labour’s plans don’t go far enough. Here’s how they can fix our broken systemhe call about my eviction came on a Friday afternoon in February. The estate agent rang me from an unknown number to let me know my housemates and I would need to leave our home. We had only moved in the year before.
was introduced in Margaret Thatcher’s 1988 Housing Act. It doesn’t matter how long the tenant has lived in their home, or if they’ve always paid rent on time – a landlord can remove them, usually with just a few months’ notice. But it’s not just rent hikes that displace people. Nico, a 43-year-old renter in Hove, East Sussex, has been battling a no-fault eviction for a year. Their landlord, who Nico says owns multiple properties, served a notice of eviction last year. Nico is disabled, not working and, as a result, has struggled to find a new lease, having been on the waiting list for a housing association in Scotland for two years.
After eight and a half years of living in their flat, Nico has no more security than someone who has lived there for six months. “It doesn’t matter how much of a ‘good’ landlord someone is,” says Nico. “There’s a massive power imbalance and at the end of the day my landlord has the power to completely upend my life, and he has and that’s legally OK. Morally, it’s completely not.”