Inside the 10-year battle to change the law and help renters feel secure in their homes

When I joined Generation Rent over a decade ago, the government’s only policy for renters was the Help to Buy scheme, and calling for landlords to lose section 21, the law that allowed them to evict tenants without needing a reason, would get us laughed out of rooms.

Now, parliament has passed the Renters’ Rights Bill which means landlords will soon need a valid reason to evict a tenant, alongside a host of other reforms to give renters greater security and drive up the quality of homes. The biggest reforms to renting for 37 years will build trust between landlords and tenants, making it easier for renters to plan for the future and complain about disrepair without fear of reprisals.

It has been a long and bumpy road to get here, overcoming multiple false starts and threats to scupper the reforms. At a time when good news is in short supply, this is a moment to celebrate and reflect on the ingredients of our success – lessons for anyone who wants to make a difference to the world.

Have courage in your convictions. When we started out in 2014, we thought longer tenancies were what would fly with politicians, and Labour did go into the 2015 election promising three-year tenancies. But we found this proposal left some tenants cold, with perceptions of losing flexibility, while still being vulnerable to eviction with no reason at the end of these tenancies. We believed getting rid of section 21 evictions entirely would go much further to rebalance the relationship between landlord and tenant. At this point, it looked like we had at least five more years of a Cameron government obsessed with homeownership, so we decided to push for section 21 abolition instead of palatable but uninspiring half-measures.

Speak politician. Lots of things motivate politicians, from ideology to financial interests, but the biggest is votes. Under Theresa May the Conservatives identified the “just about managings” as a group of voters who were being ignored at the government’s peril. With the private renter population having doubled in the previous decade or so, we took the opportunity to pitch tenancy reform as a way of helping a lot of these voters. The government announced its intention to scrap section 21 in April 2019.

Expect delays but keep the pressure on. The pandemic halted progress on the bill under Boris Johnson’s government, but this bought us time to bring together a broad alliance of charities, renters unions and think tanks to form the Renters Reform Coalition. Through this we could build up the evidence that change was needed and what could be learned from Scotland’s experience of reform, and draw on the courage of ordinary renters speaking out about their experiences to keep reminding parliamentarians of the human impact these changes would have. By the time the government published its plans, we had persuaded them of the need for a landlord register.

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Don’t neglect ideology or vested interests. While many in the Conservatives were onside, or were at least persuaded by the electoral argument, the reforms faced repeated attempts to derail them from MPs who felt even the modest changes being proposed were an affront to property rights. Later on, members of the House of Lords who owned rental property supported measures to weaken the bill. Every time we needed to, we pushed back, highlighting the electoral cost of abandoning support for renters, while making the case for a stronger bill.

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good. We pushed both the previous and current governments to cap how high a landlord could raise the rent, and compensate tenants forced to move by a landlord selling or moving in. While neither of these were accepted, we still needed reforms that would work as well as possible. Landlords won’t be able to evict tenants in most cases if they’re not registered, and rent rises challenged at tribunal won’t be backdated – protections we won that go further than the original bill published in 2023.

Make your own luck. The prospect of getting a bill this strong through parliament was not assured, with the Lords amending it several times back in the summer, for example, to loosen safeguards against landlord abuse of the eviction ground for sale, and weaken security of tenure for mature and postgraduate students. For a few days in October, the Renters’ Reform Coalition made a Herculean effort to bring together the votes to reverse the summer’s vote tallies, and it paid off, demonstrating how timely and persuasive campaigning can change everything.

Celebrate, but look ahead. The frequent delays under both the previous and current governments have meant thousands more renters have faced eviction than if the bill had been passed sooner. But we’ve tried to make the most of every hold up to make sure we end up with an act that will make a real difference to renters’ quality of life and make it harder for unscrupulous landlords to operate. Our next task is to make sure it is implemented and enforced properly so that it actually does this – and start building the case to go further.

Dan Wilson Craw is deputy chief executive at Generation Rent and joined the organisation in early 2014.

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