The Renters' Rights Act: Do renters get more rights now?

(my links)

So I’m making this a bit broad not because I expect people outside of Britain to be all that interested but because a lot of people inside Britain aren’t even fully aware. At the start of this month, May 1st 2026 the government brought the Renters’ Rights Act into force. This is a piece of legislation that Tenants’ Unions have been fighting for for almost a decade and was scheduled under the tories but Labour have taken credit for despite voting through a significantly watered down version that will cause a lot of harm.

The bill has abolished Section 21 evictions, which is a fantastic development on the face of it. Section 21 or “no fault” evictions gave UK landlords the right to evict tenants with 2 months notice at any time for no reason as long as they basically had all their ducks in a row - gas and energy safety certificates provided, deposit securely protected, and so on. Abolishing Section 21s is, in my view, a non-reformist reform. It will liberate a lot of people from bad material conditions because they will no longer be at the absolute mercy of their landlords. This means people will be able to settle more in the area they live, put down long term roots and ideally all of this will serve as a stepping stone to more concrete bargaining leverage for renters in the UK in future. In and of itself it isn’t leverage, but Section 21s leave renters with almost negative leverage - the landlord can just evict you any time, that’s the worst possible position to be in.

Now, moving through a hideously immoral government that is corrupted and perverted entirely toward the whims of capital and constantly drawn to capitulate to the far-right in absolutely everything, the bill hasn’t come into force as the best version of itself, and we’ll get to that too, but it’s also worth considering the consequences that banning Section 21s has incurred on its own. In my neighbourhood all of our current problems exist downstream of the RRA being brought in. Our landlord, an until-recently-socially-minded-housing-association responded to the RRA by selling us, since their business had been trending more towards newbuild luxury flats for a while and the hassle of having tenants who they can’t just instantaneously evict overbalanced the economic risk assessment for them. We were sold to an extremely ruthless and greedy (not to mention stupid lazy and incompetent, but those are working to our favour right now) landlord who has begun the process of trying to evict essentially the whole estate. Since the RRA had been announced but the government gave a grace period of a few months before the law would come into effect, our new landlord demanded rent increases between £250 per month and £900 per month extra and firing S21 notices at anyone who refused the increase.

This retaliatory move to use Section 21s while they still can is not the fault of the bill per se, but it is very predictable. The blame here really lies with Starmer’s government for not pushing harder to protect people’s right to stable housing, and once again there we can look at the endless indifferent cruelty of market logic and the profit incentive. Renters and landlords simply aren’t two equal parties who must both be carefully appeased: one is in a position of power over the other and until now has been given every conceivable right to do whatever they want. With the UK’s MAGA party “Reform” looming in the polls it couldn’t be clearer that a meaningful left-wing stance is needed in mainstream British politics (Reform have, among many ghoulish policy pledges, announced they will scrap the RRA if elected) and Labour have been wholly unwilling to embody that left alternative. While they may position themselves as having done something good for the working class by passing the RRA, its real proponents this entire time have been the renters’ unions - Acorn, GMTU, LRU - who have pushed the bill through working against the government at practically every turn. It is Zack Polanski’s Green Party that has a real policy pledge to help solve the UK’s housing crisis in their goal to abolish private landlords in the UK altogether. Chairman Mao is smiling upon us indeed.

The biggest problem with the Renters’ Rights Act, however, isn’t just in inadequate safeguards against the inevitable Section 21 rapidfire backlash, but in its capitulation to landlords, and can be summarised in just two words: market rate. The Act entitles renters to take their landlords to court if a proposed rent increase is too high and the rent tribunals set up for this process are empowered to cap the rate a renter is paying to “market rate”. Of course now we have to ask “who determines market rate?”

Returning to my own estate where I have been furiously organising against our new soulless overlords, this “protection” would actually offer nothing to the devastation facing our community. None of us are paying at or above “market rate”, and that is exactly why we have been able to remain as a community for so long. When housing is a commodity all semblance of human activity is shredded as the basic facts of accommodation are organised through a machine-like logic - the market logic. There are mothers here - grandmothers even - who have lived on the same estate for over 30 years and that is only possible because they pay significantly under market rate. So when our local Labour MP wearing a sleeveless puffer gilet and a chrome kettle on his wrist told us that we could get our rents capped at “market rate” he was not as he thought leaping to our defense but instead demonstrating his complete lack of understanding of our situation. To be told by this man that we could be referred to the council’s “homelessness prevention team” when less than a month earlier we had all been under the impression we would continue to live on our estate indefinitely without trouble was worse than insulting. Frankly, it was degrading.

I am writing about this because I know that many other renters in the UK will be put in the same position by this Act and I think that real momentum needs to be built urgently toward tenant power across the country if we are to avoid the housing crisis evolving into a housing cataclysm. While the abolition of Section 21 evictions was a non-reformist reform creating a possibility of building tenant power, the “market rate” cap has the potential to serve as a secondary method for eviction, as is happening in my neighbourhood and others like it. What is, on the face of it, a completely unreasonable rent increase that has no precedent for people who have lived in the same place for decades would be ruled legal according to this legislation. The only real hope that estates like mine have is organising.

That’s what we’ve been doing.

With the support of London Renters Union we have started to move en masse against the landlord, recruiting the whole neighbourhood into a collective action, filling out paperwork together, researching all options for our strategy. The saving graces of this rent tribunal system are that 1. the UK court system is infamously backed up and it will take months and months for any case to be reviewed, and 2. rent will no longer be backdated after the court ruling, meaning that any rent increase can be effectively frozen for the length of time it takes to bring it to tribunal if challenged before the proposed increase comes into force. During the time in between, we’re betting, our landlord is going to be in a lot of trouble. Cursory digging online shows that they were able to purchase our estate by taking out an enormous loan which some of our calculations suggest they may already be defaulting on. Our bet is that they can’t keep this up for 6 months, but that’s a bet we shouldn’t have to be making at all.

This is a clear case where the right thing to do may not align with what the law currently says, but what is happening is so patently wrong that the government should use any available powers to intervene. I don’t have faith that the Labour administration happy to support Israel through two years of livestreamed child murder and unspeakable atrocities will be compelled by something as low-yield as “the right thing to do” of course, but since the local council elections are just days away they have been trying to get photo-ops out of appearing like they’re interested in helping. (Incidentally if anyone is in touch with the green candidates for Southwark council, please shoot me a DM)

The housing crisis as it currently exists in the UK is so far from anything like “morally neutral” that any given bill or proposed policy change is going to be a little inadequate, or even risk backlash, but the moment we are in right now for tenants and tenants’ rights is a very very fragile one. There are many possible changes that could be brought in, many strategies to explore, but if tenants can demonstrate that they are a seriously political bloc then these are instead a huge variety of potential policies any UK party can offer their constituents.

The right to withhold rent was dropped from the Renters’ Rights Coalition’s demands before the bill reached parliament, but if any single change could empower tenants more than rent controls that might be it. The ability for TRAs (Tenants and Residents Associations) to publicly campaign for political change - at least within the scope of renters’ rights - would enable tenants’ unions to grow rapidly using pre-existing democractic structures within communities to build capacity. A recognition of the essential nature of housing could even prompt a more socialist (or eco-socialist) minded government to insist on a state-owned enterprise model where any corporate landlord past a certain size enters a proportional track towards local-council control.

The backing up of the courts with renter-versus-landlord cases is actually somewhat strategic. I said as early as mid-2024 that overwhelming the courts would be an effective way for tenants’ unions to pressure the government, and now it looks set to really start putting that pressure on. The problem is, if the court, however slowly, works through its backlog and hands out “market rate” rents then to many people it will still serve as a de facto eviction. This is what makes this moment so important for organised tenants. Unions have to seize on the backlog and the pressure it creates and call for change now. They have to pick up on stories of neighbourhoods like mine and use them for their media value in shaming the government into developing new powers, new ways of challenging scumbag landlords and new renters’ rights.

The pressure on renters’ unions to grow both rapidly and strategically is enormous, because everyone knows that there is a housing crisis in this country, and some people even have very practicable very obvious answers for what to do about it, but without organised tenant power none of it will happen. That means tenants unions that are able to organise in working class neighbourhoods, able to scale fast, able to coordinate and organise well with communities without bringing them entirely into the union themselves, able to see the opportunities and follow through on them. We’re all hoping they can live up to the challenge.

Join your local tenants’ union today.