On 1 May, the much anticipated Renters’ Rights Act (RRA) came into law.
Seven years and five governments in the making, this ‘once in a generation’ reform has immediately failed to impress.
Far from shifting the balance of power to the hands of tenants, it has exposed the true depths of Britain’s housing crisis and just how much the balance is tipped towards the landlords today.
Broken promises
Several of Labour’s key promises tied to this bill have already failed to materialise.
Awaab’s Law – named after two-year-old Awaab Ishak, who lived in social housing and died after prolonged, severe damp and mold exposure – forces landlords to ‘promptly’ deal with health hazards like mold.
But its enforcement in the private sector has now been pushed back until 2035 after landlords made it clear they would not stomach the monumental repair costs for Britain’s dire housing stock.
Labour’s promised rent controls have also been watered down. Under the RRA, landlords are limited to an annual, ‘market rate’ rent increase. The law suggests this increase be capped at ten percent a year, but there is nothing binding to it.
And even if landlords stay below this ten percent, it would still mean rents outpacing wages. In the North East of England, for example, wages have increased five percent in the last year. The ‘market rate’ for rents, meanwhile, has increased six percent, with no sign of slowing.
‘No fault’ eviction
While the RRA’s long-awaited ban on Section 21 ‘no fault’ evictions will undoubtedly come as a relief to many, it will not end the grinding precarity of renting. Renters can still be subject to Section 8 evictions: unpaid rent, occupation by the landlord, or sale of the house.
And this assumes evictions happen legally at all. Before the RRA, Section 21 only accounted for 37 percent of evictions in Britain – the majority occurred informally, outside of the bounds of the law.
The law is like a spider’s web: the small are caught up in it, while the big tear straight through! There is no doubt that corporate landlords, slumlords and the like will continue to act outside of the law – and face simply a slap on the wrist if they’re caught.
In 2018, a landlord was found to be raking in £360,000 by ‘housing’ 40 people in a four-bed home in London. The case was not resolved until 2022, where he was given a five year renting ban. He’ll be back renting houses as soon as next year!
Housing crisis
For all Labour has paraded it about, the Renters’ Rights Act has been met with little enthusiasm from workers and youth.
Just 22 percent of renters are aware of the changes the bill involves, dropping to 19 percent among students. 88 percent of tenants have not sought out any guidance on what their new rights are at all.
And yet the housing crisis – and the government’s inability to deal with it – is undoubtedly a major factor fueling discontent in Britain today. Labour’s local election wipeout in May saw its vote share halving across all the key renting demographics.
While we welcome any reform which genuinely improves the lives of working people, the RRA is a wet bandage over the gangrenous wound that is Britain’s housing crisis.
Over a third of young people aged 20-34 still live with their parents, up ten percent since 2013. A home in London costs ten times the average wage, and over the last decade UK rents have increased 46 percent faster than the minimum wage. In 2024, rents ate up 44 percent of people’s wages each month.
The small relief from banning no-fault evictions will be short-lived. Rents will carry on rising above inflation, the courts and ombudsman will backlog further, and tenants’ arrears will continue to stack up.
Property portfolios
Yet even this watered down act has seen an almighty backlash from landlords who are jumping ship to avoid rising risk and costs.
The renters’ union Acorn found that from October 2025 to April 2026, no-fault evictions rose from accounting for one in five of eviction cases to one in three. The Financial Times even reported a case of a single mother undergoing breast cancer treatment being evicted under Section 21 in response to this bill.
Swathes of rental properties have also been sold up this year. Estate agent Savilles found over 700 buy-to-lets hit the market every day in March before the RRA came into effect on 1 May – a 28 percent increase on March 2024.
However, only 14 percent of those sold have been returned to the rental market, shrinking Britain’s available housing stock by thousands. Instead of properties being bought up by landlords looking to let, they are being purchased by big ‘institutional’ landlords aiming to expand their portfolios and make capital gains down the line.
London-based Landsec, for example – whose portfolio already comprises over £10 billion of commercial and industrial property – has declared its intention to raise £2 billion to gain a corner of the residential market for this purpose.
Planning
The problems facing Britain’s housing market do not end with the existing housing stock. Labour has extended their target to build 1.5 million new homes, but reality shows a ‘near-decade low’ in new constructions.
Meanwhile, their plan to build whole new ‘towns’ only amounts to 70,000 homes – a drop in the ocean compared to the 17.5 million adults living in “overcrowded, dangerous, unstable or unaffordable housing”.
Unison, Britain’s largest public sector union, have sown illusions in Labour’s housing strategy. They claim the RRA “finally dismantles” the “outdated system” which had swung so heavily in landlords’ favour.
But nothing in the Renters’ Rights Act will prevent another child dying of mold inhalation, another family from being made homeless, another student cramped into a damp ‘house in multiple occupation’, or another Grenfell.
To truly fix Britain’s housing crisis, enormous investment and centralisation of resources is necessary. All of the resources exist to build millions of clean, efficient and safe homes.
You cannot plan what you do not own, however. And under capitalism all these resources lie in private hands. Any government will find itself at the whim of the markets; that is, the landlords, billionaires, and bankers. Starmer’s Labour has proven itself to be no exception.
What is needed is to break with this system entirely. With a bold, socialist programme of nationalising the big construction monopolies and expropriating the largest landowners, we could quickly put in place the mass planning needed to solve Britain’s housing crisis for good.
Greens call for rent controls
To be a renter today is a bleak picture. Before the pandemic, yearly rent rises sat between one and three percent. Now, they have skyrocketed to nine percent. It is the norm for low-income renters to spend just under half of their income on rent.
In London, the average monthly rent is now £2,268 and in Glasgow, one young worker explained that she expects to spend 60 percent of her income on rent, just so she can stop her four-hour daily commute from Dundee.
These haunting statistics go to show why rent contributes significantly to financial anxiety, and why, according to one poll, rent controls are incredibly popular: 75 percent in favour, climbing to 88 percent amongst Green voters.
The Greens are clearly tapped into this, with Zack Polanski recently stating his party would “ultimately” want to see controls on all rented properties.
Even this mild call has seen the spectre of ‘unhappy landlords’ being invoked, however! Already under pressure from the recent Renters’ Right act, it is said that even more landlords would likely sell up in the event of rent controls.
This would certainly worsen the already-strained housing market, which is currently running a deficit of 4.3 million homes.
But for many workers and youth attracted to the Greens, bold and decisive action to tackle the recurring nightmare of covering rent is essential. The popularity of the Greens’ ‘Abolish Landlords’ policy (now forgotten by Polanski) attests to this.
We must be clear, however: the extent of this crisis requires more than limited reforms like rent controls. So long as you remain bound by the logic of the market it will ultimately be the billionaires, bankers and parasite landlords who call the shots.
What we fight for is not just reigning in the landlords who profiteer off basic human necessity, but abolishing their system entirely.
Kieran Lee, Brighton
A lose-lose game
I work as an insurance claims handler. In the weeks leading to the new Renters’ Rights Act, we received an influx of claims related to Section 21 no-fault eviction notices. Landlords and letting agents contacted us in a panic, desperate to push claims through in time.
To assess whether a claim qualifies for protection, we have to meticulously comb through the documents provided by policyholders.
The process revealed just how careless the industry can be with tenants’ personal information and sensitive documents. And how, in cases which involve rent arrears, there is almost no consideration for people’s circumstances.
The system treats defaulting as an individual moral failing rather than a reflection of wider social conditions.
But with rising unemployment and stagnant wages, falling behind on rent is rapidly becoming a reality of working-class life.
One tenant, having lost his job, was unable to pay rent for two months. Despite three years of consistent payments, his landlord deemed him a ‘risk’ and began the eviction procedure. This is continuing, even though the tenant set up a repayment schedule and found a new job.
The Renters’ Rights Act doesn’t prevent these kinds of cases happening – it merely pushes them back by a few months. But for many, it isn’t as simple as a few months and finding a new job. One of my colleague’s claimants are in over £36,000 arrears!
The system is fundamentally rigged against the poor. As long as housing is treated as an asset, not a human need, legislative reforms are a lose-lose game.
An insurance claims handler, Bristol
