Renting in Wales needs to change. Time’s up for fiddling around the edges, says Sam Coates.
Average private rents in Wales jumped by 15 per cent last year, according to the BBC. As the Renting Homes Act came into force, we saw a huge increase in no-fault evictions.
As a community union, we at ACORN felt the harshness of this winter viscerally. We fought and won several cases with our members: getting thousands in illegal ‘late fees’ cancelled and blocking the eviction of a young mother and her family.
Right now, we’re working with a house of five members to get their rent back from a landlord who’s allowed mould to spread to every room, ruining clothes as well as mattresses. Every week, we get messages from people whose landlords are trying to hike their rent, or evict them without reason.
We’re proud that through strength in numbers, and working in solidarity, our union is winning time after time for members that have been wronged. But we are fighting a system that fundamentally leaves landlords holding most of the cards.
All the relevant laws stem from the mindset that rented homes are there for the profit of their owners – not to provide a safe, affordable home for those forced to rely on the sector. The Renting Homes Act, delayed for six years, neither bans no-fault evictions, nor limits the spiralling rents pushing people into destitution. We’ve seen from our work in Cardiff that new protections, like fitness for human habitation, are difficult to enforce in practice, and come with the financial risks of going to court.
For growing numbers of people, especially younger generations, renting privately is the only way to find a home. The combination of low wages, spiralling prices, and growing rents traps people in the sector. With all this, few are able to save the huge deposits needed thanks to decades of stagnant wages trailing growing house prices. Readers will be more than familiar with the endless waiting lists for socially-rented homes.
When the structure of the economy is driving growing demand for renting, leaving the private sector to take advantage is simply unjust. The brutal logic of ‘supply and demand’ is putting many of us in impossible situations. As the rental trap pushes up demand for limited available homes, landlords are demanding months of rent in advance, and high-income guarantors to super-insure their profits. These demands have grown exponentially in the last few years, and discriminate against huge sections of the working class, especially LGBTQ+ people, disabled people, and anyone estranged from their families.
Fundamentally, the private rented sector is too big, and we should stop relying on it to meet so many people’s needs. The new Act has shown exactly what happens when we become so reliant on the private sector – new requirements, however timid, have led to a flurry of landlords selling up as what was easy money suddenly requires a bit of effort.
Let’s be clear, those scared off by needing to make homes ‘fit for human habitation’ never had any business being a landlord. But in a market of supply and demand, and without the deposits to buy these houses themselves, renters are caught up in a shrinking of supply – leading to even higher rents – on top of the wave of evictions this has caused. Now that regulation has begun, it needs to go much further to catch up with these developments.
The way the Welsh Government has regulated second homes and holiday lets is a fundamental challenge to the dominant mindset of ‘supply and demand’ – and that’s the only way to make real inroads into the problem. We need to see the same boldness to close loopholes in the new legislation, and to bring in a true rebalance of power away from landlords to the tenants who actually live in these homes.
ACORN Cardiff will carry on organising and winning for our members whenever landlords abuse this imbalance. But to do more than treat the symptoms of it, we need a fundamental rethink of how we house Wales.
Sam Coates is chair of ACORN Cardiff