Ending no-fault eviction by getting rid of Section 21 would be a small step towards making young people’s lives better, but the Tories can’t even do that. No wonder they’re heading for electoral annihilation, says Morgan Jones
No-fault eviction is a blight on people’s lives, a cause of intense financial and emotional stress, and of personal and professional upheaval. It’s horrible and it’s expensive and it’s happened to me and a great many people I know. In fact it’s a fairly common experience these days having risen 39 per cent between 2022 and 2023 alone.
Abolishing Section 21, the legal mechanism that allows landlords to kick their tenants out without giving a reason has been Conservative policy since the days of Theresa May and was a manifesto pledge in 2019. Yet the Renters (Reform) Bill, which passed its third and final reading in the House of Commons week, utterly fails to fulfil that pledge, instead suspending the decision on Section 21 indefinitely.
Ending Section 21 would be a positive step: a fairly small one in the scheme of the housing crisis as a whole, but a positive one. The Tories, obviously, can’t even do that.
That Section 21 lives on is bad news for renters in the short term. But there is a general election coming, and I would argue the debacle over the Bill – which saw the government let a longstanding commitment get dragged into the long grass by the landlord lobby and its own backbenchers – is a fairly good window into why the Tories are polling so badly.
British politics today is defined by the cost of living crisis and the condition of public services. It’s all the ways in which people’s lives have gotten more difficult under a Conservative government: the housing crisis; not being able to find anywhere to live; the cost of rent and mortgages; the cost of food and energy; getting a GP appointment; being able to rely on public transport to get you to work or on an ambulance to come when you need it.
Stronger protections from spurious evictions would go some small way to improving the day-to-day living conditions of people in the UK – but that’s clearly not what Rishi Sunak’s government is interested in. They’d rather foot the bills for their MPs’ twitter spats and 3am escapades, pay hundreds of millions to make the UK an international human rights pariah, and keep the ossified, parasitic landlord lobby happy at the expense of tenants. As a result, the Renters (Reform) Bill is regarded by every tenant’s group, including Shelter, Generation Rent, Acorn and Crisis as a failure.
The benefits of better renters’ rights would be felt most intensely by younger people, who are half as likely to own a home as they were 30 years ago. We want to be able to rent at affordable rates and not be evicted on a whim. That the Tories cannot deliver on even these moderate demands suggests they are uninterested in the votes of the young. It’s a two-way street: all signs show that young people are not interested in voting for them either. Just seven per cent of under 35s are planning to vote Tory according to one poll from last month.
That shouldn’t come as a surprise. If you run a country like you don’t care about the people who live there, they probably won’t vote for you. But the danger for the Conservatives in pandering to vested interests is that, to put it bluntly, their voters are dying off. The New Statesman estimates that one in 10 2019 Tory voters have passed away since that election. The working-age Conservative is fast moving from endangered species to “rounding error” status.
If, as the polls predict, that causes Tory annihilation at the ballot box, it will be a defeat built on hundreds of decisions like the one we witnessed this week on Section 21.
Morgan Jones is a freelance journalist and former Labour aide. She is a contributing editor of Renewal