Rising rents make housing dispute reforms more urgent

The Office for National Statistics has just released its yearly update for private rental properties, showing an average annual increase in rent of 8.6% in England. This comes after Government data estimates over 21% of privately rented properties in England fail to meet the ‘Decent Homes Standard’.  

This makes for an unsafe and unfair environment for private tenants.  Increasing rent, coupled with substandard living conditions, is also a recipe for increased rental disputes.  

The Government must address this issue head-on and take a more ambitious approach to reforming the housing dispute system.

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The Renters’ Rights Bill: much to welcome

In the King’s Speech, the Government proposed bringing forward a ‘Renters’ Rights Bill’. JUSTICE welcomes many of the commitments contained therein, including those that extend protections already present within the social housing sector to private renters.

In particular, we support:  

• The abolition of no-fault evictions.

• Extending the ‘Decent Homes Standard’ requirement to the private rented sector(at present, it only applies to social housing).  

• The introduction of ‘Awaab’s Law’: imposing more robust timelines upon private landlords to fix serious hazards.

• Outlawing discrimination against tenants receiving benefits and those who have children.

• Providing tenants with a right to request a pet

• The creation of a digital database for the private sector, improving enforcement and access to information

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The missing piece: ensuring tenants can understand and enforce their rights

While expanding tenants’ rights is crucial, this must be accompanied by efforts to improve tenants’ ability to understand and enforce their rights when necessary.  

In JUSTICE’s ‘Solving Housing Disputes’ report, we identified several systemic barriers that can prevent a tenant from understanding how to or when to raise a dispute:  

• Information about tenant’s rights is not well communicated to renters.

• There are insufficient safeguards to protect tenants from retaliatory evictions after they raise a complaint to their landlord.

• Too many people cannot access a housing expert due to legal funding cuts, with 2 in 5 people living in a housing advice desert.

• There are too many places people can go to raise a dispute: multiple ombuds, tribunals, courts and ADR providers make the path to redress unclear and confusing.

• At court, significant imbalances in power and resources can impact a tenant’s ability to succeed, including a lack of legal representation.

For landlords too, the legal system’s inability to address the underlying causes of a housing dispute – often involving clustered issues like difficulties accessing benefits, employment and mental health support - limits the range of solutions to fix problems and keep tenants in properties.

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The case for a one-stop-shop Housing Disputes Service (‘HDS’)

The Government’s commitment to introduce a Private Rental Sector Ombudsman, if successfully integrated into the existing system, could widen tenants’ access to redress. However, it risks causing further confusion and disaggregation to an already complicated redress landscape which needs streamlining.

The Government’s appetite for private rental sector reform provides a unique opportunity to consider a comprehensive one-stop shop or entry point to seek redress. This is why JUSTICE recommends the implementation of the ‘Housing Disputes Service’ (‘HDS’).  

The HDS would not be a court, tribunal or ombudsman system, but something entirely new that focuses on addressing the underlying causes of a dispute, holistically. It would combine litigation and dispute resolution methods to provide a tailored one-stop shop for landlords and tenants. It would be staffed by a range of professionals from various sectors such as housing, benefits, and the health sector to tackle the many clustered causes of housing problems. It would also be serviced by legal experts. The HDS would work in 4 stages.7  

1. Investigation: the service would undertake a holistic, fact-finding investigation working with both parties to analyse the dispute and identify additional experts where required.  
2. Assessment: the HDS would produce a preliminary written assessment of the relationship, setting out the parties’ respective rights, the underlying causes of the dispute and its proposals for how they might be resolved.  
3. Consultation: the parties would be invited to agree to, correct, or challenge the preliminary assessment. Where disagreement occurs and alternatives are possible, the HDS would facilitate Dispute Resolution methods such as mediation, structured negotiation or arbitration.
4. Decision: The HDS would provide an enforceable determination of what the parties agreed to during consultation or adjudicate if there is a dispute. This determination, while enforceable, could be appealed to the courts and tribunals.

This holistic service would strengthen legal rights and temper the adversarial nature of housing disputes, helping to foster sustainable and mutually beneficial landlord-tenant relations.

JUSTICE therefore urges the Government to explore more proactive reform and reconsider piloting models like the HDS, which can be tailored to the needs of private landlords and tenants alike.  

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