I wasn’t a bit surprised by any of it. The private rented sector (PRS) has always had its unscrupulous side, sliding very easily into criminality as bad landlords exploit the ignorance and powerlessness of their tenants. Indeed, subsidised rented housing – first the late Victorian charitable trusts and then council housing – was a response to the nineteenth century PRS. Until the 1970s a council house was a prized asset, because the alternative was a poor quality and probably overcrowded private rental. Conditions in the PRS have continued to drive improvements in housing legislation, for example the 1977 Homeless Persons Act and its equivalents elsewhere in the UK. Representing Finsbury Park’s bedsit land on Hackney Council in the 1980s convinced me that the kind of landlords who rent to low income tenants usually seek to exploit them rather than to run a reputable business.
So what to do? Dispatches exposed the low end of the business – in both senses of the term – and that needs to be dealt with. But the real question is: how can the PRS work effectively? The UK housing system consists of three components: owner occupation, social housing, and the PRS. The first two are better for people who are settled, although the PRS is playing an increasing role here due to both the state of the housing market and the shortage of social housing. Private renting is best for the shorter term, for example working in a city you don’t plan to move to permanently. It allows the labour mobility that’s important to the economy and also the personal flexibility that is necessary at some stages in our lives.
Here’s what’s needed. First, the PRS need to be properly regulated. Social housing providers are subject to much closer inspection because their building costs are part-funded by the state. The cheap end of the PRS is funded almost entirely by Housing Benefit, which is also taxpayers’ money, but private landlords are not quizzed about their management performance because there’s an erroneous assumption that all tenants can pack up and leave if they don’t like it. There’s also a problem with under-funded Environmental Health departments not having the resources to prosecute landlords.
Secondly, more information and advocacy services are needed for both tenants and landlords. Housing advice is provided by local councils, Citizens’ Advice, Shelter and other organisations, but Dispatches showed that it’s not getting through to everyone who needs it. Obviously the focus last night was on tenants’ problems, but some landlords do suffer from badly behaved tenants and need help to take action within the law. In addition, vulnerable tenants need someone to help them through the system and that’s where advocacy is important – but it’s labour intensive and again needs to be funded in some way.
Finally, there’s a more fundamental point. Poor and vulnerable people should not be in the PRS. They often need social support, which they are more likely to get as part of a social housing tenancy. The social housing sector isn’t perfect – most importantly there’s not enough of it, but there are also still problems of disrepair and poor management. But social landlords are more closely regulated and tenant participation is encouraged. The other side of the picture is that running a responsible private landlord business is expensive. The only way to make money out of poor tenants is to put them in awful housing and never do any repairs. The PRS is best suited to better off, well informed and mobile tenants who want good quality accommodation and are prepared to pay for it, have the resources to put pressure on their landlords if something’s not right – and to walk away as a last resort.
Early 20th-century council housing got people out of the slums and changed their lives. The reason for subsidised housing hasn’t gone away, as we saw last night.
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