News
Renters’ Reform Bill: Are we sleepwalking back to the past?
Tuesday 30th April 2024
Property Industry - Simon Tyrrell
Has enough energy been directed by landlords and agents into drafting elements of the Renters’ Reform Bill (RRB).
I feel guilty that I had thought that greater bodies and minds than mine were working on this Bill, but recent investigation has alerted me to a type of group-think that is just trying to get the bill passed, before any new government may take over and introduce more draconian elements to it.
This is not good for the bill or the people it affects.
In this piece I am talking specifically about Houses in Multiple Occupation (HMOs) let to small to medium (three person to seven person) groups of student sharers. There are thousands of these HMO student let houses up and down the country serving a very important part of the housing industry. Over the last twenty years the standards of management and pastoral care of these properties and tenancies has increased exponentially and this specialised market, in the main, works incredibly well.
If passed as it is drafted and with the amendments tabled, the RRB significantly impacts and weakens this market. It will lead to increased rents for the students and lower standards and more damage to the properties.
I believe when drafting a bill, one should first look at what the parties involved want.
All the research is absolutely clear; students want to live in houses as a group of friends, and most importantly they, their parents, the landlords and the agents of these student HMO shared houses all want the security of knowing when the tenancy starts and ends.
As drafted, if one of a group of students in a shared student HMO (not a PBSA block) decides to drop out of university or wants to go and live with a new partner or friend or for any other reason for that matter, because the tenancy will be periodic and not for a fixed term (shorthold), they could give two months’ notice after month four to end the tenancy after only six months and the WHOLE tenancy will have to end mid-term.
Hence the advice being mooted (from lawyers, member bodies etc. not practitioners!) is that landlords will revert to room by room letting to negate this potential total loss of income.
This is a disastrous outcome and is depressing at best. If the shared student HMO model reverts to room by room letting, we will see individual periodic tenancies, locked bedroom doors, no responsibility for communal shared areas, locked kitchen cabinets, the isolation of young people who don’t know who they are living with and, who may, in the end be living with people who may not even be at university or even of the same age bracket. Three nineteen-year-old student girls could end up unwittingly living with a fifty-year-old man! sharing kitchens and bathrooms.
No one wants to see this happen. It hails a return to the old days of bedsit student letting but it appears no one has really thought it through fully. The students don’t want this, mums and dads don’t want this, landlords don’t want this, agents don’t want this, the lawyers advising landlords and agencies don’t want this, the National Union of Students can’t want this, MPs writing the RRB can’t want this. But as a result of dodgy politicking this is what has been written. This policy has dangerous unintended consequences and is directing us down the wrong path!
It is not too late! I have written to members of the House of Lords, and I urge you to do the same, to ask them to carefully consider the outcome of the Bill in this particular regard and to suggest to The House of Commons that they take a more pragmatic approach to protect this vulnerable sector of the market, and introduce a Specific Student Ground which permits fixed term, joint and several, student HMO shared student accommodation.
Simon Tyrrell is the owner of Specialist Letting
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