Opinion: The Right to Rent farce must come to an end

Expecting landlords to act as immigration agents was a bad idea in the first place and has become a mess.

Recent years have seen landlords hit by all manner of legislative and taxation changes, making their lives significantly harder.

One often overlooked measure has been the introduction of Right to Rent, which was part of the Immigration Act 2014.

It forces landlords and letting agents to check the immigration status of potential tenants before they agree to let to them.

If they fail to do so, and are found to be letting their properties to people without the ‘right to rent’, then landlords face significant fines and potentially even jail time.

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The High Court bites back

However, the Right to Rent scheme has been on the receiving end of two huge judgements from the High Court lately which suggest that the legislation behind the initiative is little short of a disaster.

The first, at the start of March, found that the scheme was discriminatory and breached human rights.

Justice Spencer declared that the scheme was clearly causing landlords to discriminate against potential tenants because of their nationality and ethnicity, while he pointed out that the scheme had also had “little or no effect” on actually helping to control immigration.

This was then followed by a separate judgement last week, which found that if landlords use a formal notice from the Home Office, which has identified a tenant without the right to rent as a basis for repossessing the property, they may be breaching the Equality Act.

To add insult to injury, as the Residential Landlords Association (RLA) points out, the wording of the Act means that Home Secretary Sajid Javid (pictured below) - in whose name these notices are issued - cannot be prosecuted, yet landlords who comply with the notice can be charged.

Landlords are also potentially at risk of a civil claim being made against them.

This situation is a farce

David Smith, policy director at the RLA, said that the rulings made Right to Rent a “farce”, and it’s difficult to think of a more appropriate word.

Turning landlords into unpaid de facto immigration staff, in a bid to serve as the frontline of Theresa May’s old ‘hostile environment’ for people coming to this country, was always a bizarre idea.

But now we know that the legislation that pushes them into these roles is a complete mess too, in itself incompatible with established law and actually ensuring that landlords that follow the expectations placed on them are themselves breaking separate laws, leaving them open to prosecution from all sides.

How can this possibly be acceptable?

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What do we want from our landlords?

Landlords have long been the pantomime villains of the property world, having dared to make money from bricks and mortar at a time when first-time buyers are faced with a host of challenges getting onto the housing ladder.

And it’s true that there have been some people who have seen the opportunity to cash in, without providing adequate places for their tenants to live.

A study from the HomeOwners Alliance, BLP Insurance and Resi.co.uk architects out last week found that two-thirds of people living in rented accommodation have serious concerns about the quality of accommodation on offer to tenants.

There have been a host of measures introduced over the last year or so designed to improve the standard of these rental homes, from requiring the properties to have a certain energy efficiency to ensuring that Houses in Multiple Occupancy (HMOs) have bedrooms of a minimum size.

This is also part of the reason the Government has been so keen on ‘professionalising’ the sector, making it far less attractive for those speculative landlords who might purchase one or two properties.

The thinking is that these landlords are more likely to be tempted by the odd shortcut, but those for whom property is the day job are better suited to meeting expectations.

This really needs to be the focus.

Like it or not, we need a proper private rental market for the tenants who can’t or don’t want to buy their own home, and landlords need to focus their efforts on providing that.

They aren’t equipped to serve as a line of defence against illegal immigration - and this has been made abundantly clear by Justice Spencer - but we shouldn’t expect them to either.

Right to Rent was a daft idea in the first place, but its implementation has been a joke. The sooner it is scrapped entirely, the better.