Change is on the way for the private rented sector. It remains to be seen whether it will be enough

This is no coincidence given that the whole point of the reforms introduced after 1988 – the assured shorthold tenancy (AST), Section 21 and the rest – was deregulation.

Or that, within a month of becoming housing minister in 2010, Grant Shapps was promising landlords that “the government has no plans to create any burdensome red tape and bureaucracy, so you are able to continue providing a service to your tenants”.

But a sector that is now an investment or a pension for 1.5 million individual landlords is also home to millions more tenants, and what is striking from the committee’s report is how much the terms of the debate have changed.

“In a hybrid world, social housing has become more business-focused and private renting has become, by default, home to many of those in the greatest housing need”

For starters, the report concludes that “it is too difficult for renters to realise their legal right to a safe and secure home”.

An estimated 589,000 private rented homes in England (13%) have at least one Category 1 threat to health and safety that landlords are legally obliged to address – and even that may be an underestimate.

It will not come as news to tenants that “many tenants feel unable to exercise their rights and raise complaints with local authorities due to fear of eviction. For those that do want to complain, their access to redress mechanisms is severely limited—the system is highly complex and requires significant time and resource to pursue court action.”

And it will not surprise local authorities to learn that they “do not have the capacity and capability to ensure an appropriate level of protection for private renters”. Some of them inspect just 0.1% of the rentals in their area.

The committee says that this has created a “postcode lottery” in which compliance with legal standards varies across the country and very few councils can afford tenancy relations officers to support tenants facing illegal eviction or harassment.

The government has introduced a series of legal changes in recent years but their consistency and effectiveness is exemplified by the most dramatic of them: only 10 landlords and letting agents have been banned by local authorities since new powers were introduced in 2016. The most symbolic change – scrapping Section 21 evictions – was first proposed in England three years ago this month but has still not been implemented.

Licensing and registration – which must surely be the basis of any system of regulation – are still regarded with suspicion at Westminster.

Local authorities can apply to run a selective licensing scheme but the committee says “it is not clear why the department restricts the use of larger schemes or on what basis it rejects them”.

“Licensing and registration – which must surely be the basis of any system of regulation – are still regarded with suspicion at Westminster”

Meanwhile, the housing department “lacks good enough data to understand the nature and extent of the problems renters face” or even to evaluate the impact of its own legislative changes.

For example, the retaliatory eviction of tenants who raise complaints was theoretically banned in 2015 but the department had no data on landlords’ reasons for evictions.

The government did confirm that it will publish a white paper “later in 2022” and that this will cover security of tenure, enforcement and redress.

This represents an opportunity to make “significant improvements”, the committee said, but the government will not be able to take it without a full grasp of the challenges facing the sector and an overarching strategy for how to address them.

Change is on the way but, even more so than in the social rented sector, it very much remains to be seen whether it will be enough.

Jules Birch, columnist, Inside Housing