Croydon had the highest number of renters made homeless by private landlords in south London over the last two years, according to figures obtained by Generation Rent, the housing campaign group.
Turned out: there are 37,082 households under private landlords in Croydon
Figures released this week show that more than 40,000 households in England have been threatened with homelessness by landlords using no-fault eviction grounds since 2019, when the Tory government promised to abolish these evictions.
Generation Rent’s research found that, since 2019, 494 households in Croydon have been made homeless through a no-fault eviction by their private landlord.
Croydon has more than 37,000 households in private rented accommodation; Generation Rent calculates that there were 13.3 no-fault eviction cases per 1,000 renters over the two-year period, the highest rate among all south London boroughs.
Neighbouring Sutton had a similar eviction rate, 13.3, after 198 households suffered no-fault evictions (from a total of 14,870 in private accommodation).
Among south London boroughs, Lambeth was the next worst affected, after 469 no-fault evictions over the same period. With more than 42,000 households in private rent, that gives a rate of 11.1 per 1,000.
Generation Rent’s latest campaign has discovered high rates of evictions in Croydon
As the government develops its White Paper on the Private Rented Sector, Generation Rent is calling for measures that allow renters to challenge evictions when the landlord wishes to sell, and provides them with financial support if forced to move for reasons outside their control.
In April 2019, the government announced plans to abolish Section 21 of the 1988 Housing Act, which allows landlords to seek an eviction without needing a reason. Landlords use this when selling up, but can also abuse it to re-let at a higher rent, or to avoid making repairs. Councils record these reasons when renters seek their support with threatened homelessness.
Between April 2019 and March 2021, councils dealt with 557,030 cases of homelessness, of which 91,710 were private tenants facing eviction. Of these, 44,040 households were facing eviction due to their landlord selling up, re-letting or evicting following a complaint by the tenant.
This figure represents 0.9 per cent of England’s 4.7million private renter households.
Baroness Kennedy: ‘unimaginable stress’
Baroness Alicia Kennedy, the director of Generation Rent, said, “Being forced to move for reasons outside your control creates unimaginable stress, uproots you from your community and disrupts children’s education.
“Right now landlords need no reason to inflict this on their tenants. The government has rightly committed to the abolition of S21 evictions, but this is too late for the thousands of renters who have faced homelessness while the reforms have been delayed.
“To give renters the security that everyone should expect from their home, the government must make sure that the use of new eviction grounds for sale is minimised and landlords who force their blameless tenants out provide adequate financial support.”
- A summary of the data for each local authority is available here.
- Further information about Generation Rent’s proposals for tenancy reform are available here
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I am a landlord and my tenants always praise me for being a good landlord. But, that is not newsworthy [deleted because it is a false allegation and clearly libellous of the head of a national charity]
No landlord evicts a tenant for “no fault”. Usually the tenant decides to stop paying their rent, so we can’t pay the mortgage, insurance, utilities repairs to the home we provide for them. So we want to replace them with someone who will pay. Is that so unfair?
If I was a social service, absolutely I need to suck up the losses. But I took the risk of purchasing properties to rent out in order to make a profit so that I can, as a single parent, pay for my children’s school uniforms etc. It is the government’s job to care for people who can’t pay for essential services. But it is easier and cheaper to make the landlord soak that up because of the picture painted that they are all millionaire money-grabbers lying on a beach in the Bahamas.
On top of that, governments have created a swathe of traps for landlords that do nothing to improve conditions for tenants. But they do give lovely excuses for councils to levy enormous fines for even the most minor breach and to bully landlords so they can get more money out of them. Of course, councils only chase the good, law abiding landlords. The unscrupulous landlords who actually live way beyond these shores and use multiple identitities are much too difficult to chase.
This is why people like me are selling up. Tenants and commentators will of course forget all our warnings about this unjustified war on landlords when rents rise because demand for properties outstrips supply. And landlords have their properties repossessed because they have no rent income to cover their mortgages.
Time and again articles like this quote massaged figures from Shelter, Crisis, Generation Rent and other organisations that have an ideology that wants ALL housing to be a social good and to push private landlords out of the market. Not even a single balancing quote from any landlords or landlord organisations in this piece.
Tad bitter there, Andy?
A landlord seeking some sympathy? Poor you…
Of course, if any of your tenants, past or present, wish to post a comment here to confirm your claims, we’d be very happy to publish them, once we have ascertained the comments are being made by verifiable individuals, and not you using some hotmail account under a bogus name you set up five minutes earlier.
Hi insidecroydon,
I’ve been Andy’s tenant for a bit more than a year and I need to say that he is not like others landlords. And I can ensure that because I’ve been living in London for 7 years and I’ve been in several houses. He always come clear and all documented (inventory of the room, protected deposit, etc…).
It is true that there are some landlords that try to get advantage, but that is tenant’s fault as normally the problems come up when there is nothing in paper (Oh I get this room cheaper than usual but not have contract or the landlord didn’t give me a receipt for the deposit), then the shit comes up and all is protesting in social media about how abusive the landlords are.
My advice, instead of generalizing about all the landlords, use this place to encourage tenants to do things legally and with written prove, otherwise things like you said happens.
Best
My daughter got treated terribly by their landlord who kept promising to do repairs jobs to the flat they were renting, it was all sweetness and light at first and then they just kept fobbing them off. When they reported the landlord to Croydon Council the landlord asked them to leave and said they had forfeited their deposit for some obscure reason. The landlord was just plain nasty.
Steve, I hope your daughter ensured she complained first to the deposit protection scheme that the landlord would legally have had to be part of for the last 10 years. They always side with the tenant so she would have got it all back if the landlord didn’t have cast iron justification. Oh, and the landlord would only have been able to evict her following the strict Section 8 or Section 21 clauses which afford considerable protection to tenants.
Presumably she wanted to move to a property that was in good condition and managed by a professional landlord anyway?
I have huge respect for what you do and am glad that I advertised with you a few months ago, regardless of your tone.
I wouldn’t waste my time looking for sympathy (certainly not in this forum, as the thumbs show!) – you and others have made your landlord-bashing agendas clear. I was seeking to inject a bit of balance that the article lacked. But again, I am used to most articles about the landlord and tenant market taking that tack.
I worked as a trade journalist for nearly 10 years and always sought to get some sort of balance, even if I was taking an angle.
There is no “agenda”, Andy, as you continue to seek some sympathy for your apparently desperate plight as a property-owning landlord.
Our report is based on facts, from research conducted by a charity and using figures supplied by the Office for National Statistics.
Are you claiming that there were not nearly 500 “no fault” evictions resulting in homelessness in Croydon in the 2020-2021 period covered?
Perhaps you want to offer up some “alternative facts”. Are you saying you know better than the ONS?
Thing is, the truth doesn’t require “balance”, or some well-paid PR spinner spouting some vacuous line about regrets.
Good journalism always lets the facts speak for themselves.
And, as we have always done, we offer the right of reply in our Comments section, which you have made good use of.
We had to moderate your first comment because in your bitterness towards homelesssness charities, you included what we considered to be a serious libel of a well-respected national figure.
Your first comment also included some absolute corkers of untruths and self-justifying nonsense. These cannot be allowed to go unchallenged.
You wrote:
No landlord evicts a tenant for “no fault”.
This is untrue, as you almost acknowledge in your reference to Section 21 in another of your comments. Theat is the law, which gives landlords the right to evict tenants without reason. This government said that they would change S21 in 2018. They are yet to do what they promised.
You wrote:
I took the risk of purchasing properties to rent out in order to make a profit.
What risk? You invested your money, or borrowed some, in property, assured of a steady return in rents and appreciation on your capital.
That’s not something which those who have to run the gauntlet of the private rented sector can afford. And as you well understand, not all landlords are the model of propriety that you claim to be.
You write:
Governments have created a swathe of traps for landlords… [that] give lovely excuses for councils to levy enormous fines for even the most minor breach and to bully landlords so they can get more money out of them.
Let’s deal with specifics here. Croydon Council had a landlord licensing scheme for five years, to 2020. How many times were you fined under that scheme? How many fines did the council levy in total in those five years? How many poor, put-upon landlords were “bullied”, as you allege?
The truth of the matter is that the licensing scheme, in concept, was there to offer some protection to private tenants, and also to private landlords, as it could have whittled out the rogue landlords and provided some kind of guarantee assurance. That it was poorly implemented and provided few proper inspections or refused licences is just one more reflection on Croydon’s badly run council.
You wrote:
Of course, councils only chase the good, law abiding landlords.
Seriously? Good grief…
You wrote:
This is why people like me are selling up.
And when you do, you’ll have banked your rents, having paid for your kids’ school uniforms, and you will, given the crocked state of the property market in London, walk away with a tidy profit on your investment, too, no doubt.
The reality for those 500 or so households that suffered no fault evictions from other private landlords in Croydon in the past year is that they were foisted on to the local authority as its responsibility, or faced sleeping on the streets.
Life must be really tough for private landlords like you, Andy. But its even tougher for many families living in private rented accommodation.
The facts speak for themselves.