Comment: ‘evicting tenants faster won’t put a stop to anti-social behaviour’

A central pillar of Michael Gove’s rental reform is his plan to stop unfair evictions and insecure tenure for private tenants.

While the Housing Secretary’s Renter’s Reform Bill has faced delays, Rishi Sunak this week announced proposals to make it faster to evict anti-social tenants.

This is not a new power — landlords can already use eviction as a last resort for anti-social behaviour.

But according to The Times, the proposed change would speed up eviction times for behaviour “capable” of being described as antisocial. I wonder how widely that could be interpreted.

Could you lose your home for having a party or a loud fight, say, or for running a noisy washing machine at night, whether or not your neighbours mind?

I’m not suggesting this is a blanket “anti-tenant” policy, or a paranoid pro-eviction move — we shouldn’t underestimate the misery that can be caused by a genuine problem neighbour, and we need the means to tackle this.

But making people homeless or leaving it up to their council to rehouse them (presumably in another rented home) seems unlikely to resolve these issues for anyone involved.

A genuine intent to tackle anti-social behaviour would call for investment in social care, mental health and domestic abuse services and the NHS, rather than making it the landlord’s problem. After all, homeowners can be anti-social too.

Merely making it easier to evict tenants on potential nuisance grounds smacks of a covert route to no-fault eviction, after all.