Ghoulish landlords made my life hell – the renters’ rights bill can fix that

I have lived in houses that had black mould, damp and even bees, says Imogen West-Knights. This new law will give millions a chance to put their rental horror stories behind them

Despite the best efforts of senior Tories and various bigwig landlords, the Renters’ Rights Act has finally passed into law. At last, I thought, one in the eye for the passive income ghouls.

Is ghouls too much? Am I failing to think of the difficulties that come with renting out one’s property? You’ll have to forgive me. I have been renting in in the UK for most of the past decade, and it has hardened my heart to the alleged plight of the landlord.

Oh, the fun I’ve had over the years trying to have a place to live. There was the period in my early twenties where my housemates and I lived in three different homes in the space of eighteen months because two consecutive landlords turfed us out at the break clause because they wanted to sell the place.

‘It is a human right to have somewhere to live. A place to feel secure in, somewhere you can nest, have a pet, put some roots down’ (PA Archive)

There was the first time I rented a property, as a student at university, a house that was so full of black mould and damp and, incredibly, bees, that the place was declared unfit for human habitation by the council after we moved out. Our landlord, who owned a whole string of dilapidated properties and flogged them from his “office” in the front room of his own, much nicer house to wide-eyed 18-year-olds, went to prison towards the end of our tenancy for human trafficking.

Then there was the time I had a devastating and sudden break up and needed to move because I could no longer afford to live where I did without splitting the rent, and the landlords charged me a huge early contract termination fee.

And then there was all the excitement of trying to fight off hordes of the other soon-to-be-homeless to find another flat. I remember attending a group tour of a rental maisonette in Brixton that I knew my friends and I would need to bid in order to secure, and gritting my teeth as an estate agent in a shiny gilet lamented that the competition for flats being “so hot” meant he was having to do more paperwork than usual.

All of this was legal, but all of it was horrible, and made me feel like an inconvenience to the people I paid for the apparent privilege of having a place to live. These are all run-of-the-mill stories, though. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone renting in the UK who hasn’t had a crummy time of it, one way or another. And it’s a system you can’t opt out of except by, somehow, magicking up enough cash to buy a place yourself.

Perhaps now, finally, things will get a bit better. It is a human right to have somewhere to live. But what the Renters’ Rights Act will allow more people is the right to a home. A place to feel secure in, somewhere you can nest, have a pet, put some roots down, a place that you can’t be evicted from on the whims of someone trying to wring as much cash out of their property as possible, whatever the spiritual expense to the people who live there.

There are naysayers to this law change, and some good reasons for saying nay. It is my understanding that one unintended result of the act might be to prompt a load of landlords to sell their for-rent properties, taking homes off the rental market, indirectly leading to higher rents, yada yada. Maybe. But I think, on the whole, this is a win for renters, a tip of the scales in our favour. About time.