Should Section 21 Notices be Banned? Croydon Council Think so

Image By A P Monblat from Wikimedia Commons

Croydon Council has pledged support to the campaign calling for an end to Section 21 notices. The campaign, headed up by Generation Rent, ACORN, and other pressure groups, is asking the government to end a landlord’s right to evict a tenant using a Section 21 notice.

What is a Section 21 Notice?

Section 21 notices are called no-fault eviction notices because they allow a landlord to serve notice on a tenant without citing grounds for eviction. If a landlord wants to evict a tenant so they can sell a property, all they have to do is serve a Section 21 notice and the process to end an Assured Short-hold Tenancy begins.

Croydon Council is leading the charge to remove Section 21 because it feels no-fault evictions are fuelling a homelessness problem in the borough. Alison Butler from Croydon Council says evictions in the PRS are the main reason why people end up on the street.

“With Croydon having lost around 70% of its budget since 2010, we are struggling to deal with the scale of this problem, and it is unacceptable that private landlords are able to evict vulnerable tenants so easily, leaving the public sector to pick up the bill,” she says.

The motion to scrap Section 21 notices has also found favour with the shadow housing secretary, John Healy.

Landlords Under Pressure

In defence of landlords, Richard Lambert from the National Landlords Association (NLA) claims the main reason why landlords resort to using a Section 21 notice is because a Section 8 procedure takes too long to pass through the courts. It is also expensive.

He argues that homelessness is a symptom of many other underlying problems, not the cause, and that Labour needs to look more closely at the many causes of this issue.