More than one in three Conservative voters believe the government is doing a bad job at improving housing in Britain – more than those who believe it is being effective, exclusive polling for the Guardian has revealed.
As Michael Gove, the secretary of state for levelling up, housing and communities, published a long-delayed bill reforming aspects of private renting on Wednesday, Ipsos found 34% of people who voted Tory in 2019 now think the government is failing on the issue and only 29% believe it is doing a good job.
It also found voters believe building social housing is more important than increasing the supply of homes to buy, despite a focus by the government and the Labour opposition on reigniting the dream of home ownership.
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Fifty-four per cent of the more than 2,000 British adults polled last weekend said more council housing and homes to rent from housing associations were most needed, compared with 35% who said more homes to buy outright or with a mortgage were the national priority.
Rishi Sunak is reportedly considering reviving a multibillion-pound help-to-buy scheme to boost home ownership. On Wednesday, Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, said he would build more houses, “backing the builders, not the blockers”.
“We understand the dream of home ownership and the sense of security it gives to working people to have a roof over their own head which is their own,” Starmer said, as he claimed that Sunak’s plan to drop housebuilding targets would result in a dramatic fall in the number of homes being built.
The polling is unlikely to cheer Labour, however. Compared with Sunak’s administration, only 35% thought a Labour government would do a better job at improving housing in Britain, while the same amount thought Labour would make no difference and almost one in five thought it would make things worse.
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As the full renters’ reform bill was published on Wednesday, Gove told the BBC Newscast podcast: “No-fault evictions go. And one of the big reasons is that these evictions, or the threat of these evictions, have been used by rogue landlords to intimidate tenants into accepting poor standards or extortionate rent increases.”
With stronger laws allowing evictions for antisocial behaviour, involving as little as two weeks’ notice, he said renters could be evicted “if you are causing trouble for other tenants … or you are behaving in a way which creates distress and havoc for others”.
On Thursday it emerged that bailiff evictions resulting from “no-fault” proceedings by landlords more than doubled in the last year. Ministry of Justice figures showed a 116% increase to 2,252 households between January and March 2023 from the same quarter in 2022. It means 19,000 households have now been evicted by bailiffs since the government first promised to ban section 21 no-fault evictions in 2019.
Landlords will also be able to repossess a home within six months of the start of a tenancy if they are moving back in themselves, moving in a family member or planning to sell up. But they will be able to put the home back on the market for rent within three months.
Polly Neate, the chief executive of the housing charity Shelter, said: “Such short time periods risk creating eviction loopholes and undermining renters’ security.”
A spokesperson for Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, said the bill was “too little, too late”. He called for powers to apply a two-year emergency rent freeze in the capital, where rents have increased 14% in the last year.
Gove said: “We are going to make sure you can only put up rents once a year and there is a [rent assessment] tribunal if you do feel your landlord is increasing the rent in a way that is not reflective of market conditions.”
The homelessness charity Crisis warned that fast-tracking evictions for antisocial behaviour could result in survivors of domestic abuse being unfairly pushed out of their homes.
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“In other cases, people who have unmet health and social care needs can also face complaints of antisocial behaviour,” said Matt Downie, its chief executive. “Eviction would not solve the problem and just risks pushing them into homelessness.”
The bill states that “evictions will be mandatory where a tenant has been in at least two months’ rent arrears three times within the previous three years”, which Shelter said risked unfairly evicting vulnerable tenants. It wants this to be at the courts’ discretion.
Gove hopes the bill will become law by the end of this year but expects opposition in the House of Lords.
David Frost, a Tory peer and former Brexit minister, on Wednesday called the bill a “dangerous and counterproductive intrusion into private property”.
Landlords have warned that more of their number could quit a sector in which demand is rising and supply is falling, pushing up rents by 11% a year on average.
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Ben Beadle, the chief executive of the National Residential Landlords Association, said: “Whilst we welcome the government’s pledge to ensure landlords can effectively recover properties from antisocial tenants and those failing to pay rent, more detail is needed if the bill is going to work as intended. Ministers must develop a plan to improve the speed and efficiency with which the courts process possession claims.”
The bill will also create a new “decent homes standard” for private rented housing. Gove was asked about the effectiveness of that if people were “dying and suffering” because of squalor in social housing, where the standard already applies.
He said: “We have landlords on our side because the reputation of their sector rests to a significant extent on their being able to say they care not just for their homes, but also their tenants.”
