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The Residential Landlords Association (RLA) is calling on one of the UK’s leading housing charities, Shelter, to stop campaigning against landlords in the private rental sector. As an example, the RLA refers to a recent report published jointly by Shelter and British Gas, which claimed that more than 200,000 tenants had faced eviction in the previous twelve months.
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An Inconvenient Truth
As we all know, statistics can be bent to suit the purpose, so it is hardly surprising to learn that although 200,000 sounds an outrageous number it is only 2% of all tenants in the UK. Official figures indicate that in fact only 0.5% of tenants across all sectors were being evicted by the courts, so the figures quoted by Shelter don’t quite match up. And apart from anything else, ‘evictions’ doesn’t necessarily refer to tenants being actively evicted —it could just mean tenants facing eviction, which could easily be as a result of them not paying the rent or antisocial behaviour.
“Shelter are once again needlessly playing to people’s fears,” says Alan Ward from the Residential Landlords Association. Whilst the RLA concedes that there are some landlords who don’t do a good job, they would like to remind the public that most landlords provide a much-needed service.
Majority of Tenants are Happy
Indeed, according to the English Housing Survey, most tenants in the private sector are actually very happy with their landlords—83% claim to be satisfied with their property (which is more than the 81% of tenants in social housing).
