From the BBC:
Ministers are considering a short extension to the five-month ban on landlords evicting tenants in England. From Monday, courts are due to resume cases put on hold owing to the coronavirus crisis, under stricter rules.
Now the government is understood to be considering an extension to the ban. Renters have argued the financial and practical effects of the crisis mean they should not be thrown out.
Lots of people are still out of work through no fault of their own, so there is no reason not to extend the evictions ban.
I accept that a Home-Owner-Ist government needs a certain low level of homelessness pour encourager les autres, but even the Tories realise that if they allow mass evictions that's going to cost them a lot of votes.
UPDATE, they've just extended the evictions ban by four weeks. Why such a short extension?
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A large landlord can self-insure. If you own a thousand homes and one or two hundred tenants can't pay any rent but you can't evict them, well so what, your unearned income has gone down by ten or twenty percent, you're still laughing.
This should be extended to all landlords; they all pay (say) 20% of the rents they receive into the 'Housing Benefit Fund'. If a tenant loses his job and can't pay, the Housing Benefit Fund pays the landlord (say) 70% of the gross rent from that home which he had previously been declaring and paying the Housing Benefit Levy on (or a lower % if it's a bad year and more than 20% of tenants aren't paying rent).
No need for the taxpayer generally to step in. Taxpayer aren't expected to pay landlords' home and contents insurance, why should they pay their "loss of rent" insurance (aka Housing Benefit)?
Friday, 21 August 2020
The facts haven't changed; the logic hasn't changed.
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9 comments:
No. Let landlords make their own provision for loss of income. I'm sure it would cost them less than 20%. Keep the government out of it.
MW and MiM. I thought landlords could insure for loss of rent?
MIM, true, it might work out better if LL's sort this out for themselves.
L, yes they can, this would just put it on a statutory basis.
I'm guessing that a landlord's costs don't drop just because the tenant stops paying rent.
Dec, why is that relevant? They claim to be running a "business" and there are always risks.
This blog has often ridiculed the “disappearing homes” argument sometimes used by landlords to justify their “businesses”. Isn’t the idea that evictions will create homelessness a variation on the “disappearing homes”argument? Presumably landlords are not going to evict tenants unless they believe there are other tenants willing to take their place, in which case the evicted tenants can go and live in the properties newly vacated by the new tenants of their former landlords.
Ed, yes, spot on.
In a stable situation, there are no disappearing homes.
In extreme situations, like now, landlords are sometimes dumb enough to evict more tenants than they can get new ones (see 'tent cities' in 1930s USA), and would rather leave a home empty "until they find the right tenant prepared to pay the market rent" (not realising that the market rent has plummeted).
It's also the rate of change that matters.
If a few per cent of tenants up sticks each month, it all cancels out. If ten or twenty percent are chucked out in a few weeks, it gets ugly.
It's the same with business failure. If a few per cent of people lose their jobs each year because their employer's business model is superseded, hopefully they can all get new jobs with a new employer who is a bit more up to date, we can cope with that.
If half of employers go out of business, it's a downward spiral.
"In extreme situations, like now, landlords are sometimes dumb enough to evict more tenants than they can get new ones..."
I'd put that "In extreme situations, like now, most landlords are dumb enough to evict more tenants than they can get new ones..."
B, a heartless but rational landlord would ease out the non-payer ASAP and then reduce the rents enough to attract a new tenant. As you say, a lot of them aren't even rational. Is it "most"? Only time will tell...
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