Councils that require landlords to be licensed take more than twice as much enforcement action as those that don’t.

The ban on most evictions was lifted this week and the notice period on Section 21 evictions has been reduced from 6 months to 4 months. But if your landlord has failed to provide you with certain documents you could be protected from eviction - up to three quarters of renters, according to our latest research.  

Our new research has also revealed the lack of knowledge about rights among private renters, which the first Renters' Rights Awareness Week, taking place on 14-20 June, aims to change.

It is winter, so, like clockwork, mould is sprouting on renters' walls and, in response, letting agents are dishing out spurious advice like this:

Our letting agent sent us this letter, to remind us that “lifestyle activities” such as “breathing” may be the cause of condensation in our home. 🙃🙃🙃 pic.twitter.com/U0zgSCbGGY

— Lucy Mort (@Lucyhbmort) November 17, 2020

More responsible landlords will look to their professional bodies for guidance to improve their tenants' living conditions. The National Residential Landlords Association (NRLA) are sharing this factsheet with its members to pass on to renters who are complaining about condensation, damp and mould.

We decided to take a look - and found that it is unfortunately little better than the cowboys' efforts.

With candidates for London Mayor starting to set out their pledges, we reveal that half of London’s boroughs did not fine any landlords for letting out unsafe homes in the past year.

Join our campaign to demand the candidates fix the city's renting crisis.

The winner of the mayoral election could step up the fight against criminal landlords overnight by letting tenants check online if their home needs and has a licence. An estimated 130,000 private rented homes in London do not have the correct licence, making 1 in 8 private renters eligible for a refund of rent. Those are good odds.

Right now, the private rented sector is a wild west which at best costs a fortune for somewhere you can’t call a home and at its worst is dangerously unsafe. In fact, it’s so unregulated that right now the government doesn’t actually know how many landlords are out there.

The Mayor of London has come out firmly in favour of our campaign to end unfair evictions - and has pushed the government to give him powers to bring in rent controls in the capital.

He was elected in 2016 on a pledge to shake up London's private rented sector, and now, after a long consultation period, Sadiq Khan has unveiled his proposals.

The letting fees ban is great and all, but now fees are out of the way, you still have to scrape together a large deposit before you can move home. 

Well, we thought about that - last year we proposed a system where you could transfer part of your deposit to your next tenancy, once you'd done responsible things like pay your final month's rent. We called this deposit passporting.

We couldn't get it into the Tenant Fees Act (which came into force this month), but the government has been looking at it and today announced its support for deposit passporting!

Back in October, we learned that Natwest had asked one of its buy-to-let customers to either evict her tenant, who was receiving housing benefit, or pay a draconian fee to switch her mortgage.

The bank’s terms and conditions prohibited customers from letting to tenants in receipt of housing benefit. Yet another example of a bank discriminating against low-income households and fuelling the “No DSS” culture. But this time, 62% of the bank is owned by the government, i.e. us.

The landlord has started a petition urging the government to stop this practice by high street banks, and it’s nearly at 5000 signatures.

Today we publish new research looking at the relationship between the size of the private rental market and rents, in light of the credit crunch, landlord tax changes, and proposals for tenancy reform.

We demonstrate that:

• A fall in rental supply is matched by a fall in demand as renters become home owners
• There is no impact on inflation-adjusted rents - in fact they've been falling
• The experience of the past 14 years suggests rents are most closely linked to wages - i.e. what renters can afford to pay
• This should give the government confidence to press on with substantial reform to tenancies

Two million tenants in London will welcome the fact that getting a fairer deal for private renters is one of the Mayor of London’s five priorities for housing in the London Housing Strategy, which was published at the end of May. Given that Sadiq Khan’s housing powers are highly limited, what is his strategy promising to private renters in London?