Right to rent: peers to discuss scrapping anti-immigrant housing policy
Tenants and landlords want the controversial duty binned. An amendment to the renters’ rights bill by Labour peer Ruth Lister could be the first step
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Peers are expected to discuss scrapping the “right to rent” duty on landlords as early as next week, in a move to end a decade-long hostile environment policy accused of leaving Black and Asian renters less able to find a home than their white counterparts.
The duty, created by the 2014 Immigration Act, requires prospective tenants to prove they have the right to be in the UK — and imposes fines and even prison sentences on landlords who let to anyone without legal migration status. In practice, campaigners say, it can result in anyone without a British passport — including millions who genuinely have the right to live, work and rent in the UK — being refused a home as landlords find carrying out the proper legal checks too onerous.
Labour peer Ruth Lister is leading a group hoping to get it scrapped by tabling an amendment to the government’s flagship renters’ rights bill, under which “no fault” evictions are already set to be banned. The amendment could be discussed in the House of Lords on Tuesday if selected.
“Right to rent is the worst element in the hostile environment, discriminating against migrants and minority ethnic private renters alike, regardless of whether they have the right to live in the UK,” said Lister.
“It is high time we abolished it in the name of social justice.”
Lister and her supporters face an uphill challenge to get the numbers needed in the Lords for the amendment to pass, and to persuade MPs in the House of Commons to back it when the bill returns there.
They do, however, have the backing of an unlikely alliance: the Renters’ Reform Coalition (RRC) and the National Residential Landlords Association. Lister’s allies in the Lords include fellow Labour peer Michael Cashman, Lib Dem Graham Tope and the Bishop of Manchester David Walker, who sits in the Lords as an independent.
Lister also said she was seeking to strengthen the bill’s provisions to protect renters from discrimination on the basis of being in receipt of benefits or having children. “In particular,” she said, “I want to ensure that landlords cannot use the requirement of a guarantor as a condition of a tenancy as a way of circumventing the bill’s anti-discrimination clauses.”
Lister added that the right to rent was strongly criticised in the Windrush Lessons Learned Review, an independent report by Wendy Williams, the then HM inspector of constabulary. “The department didn’t consider risks to ethnic minorities appropriately as it developed the [right to rent] policy,” Williams wrote. “And it carried on with implementing the scheme after others pointed out the risks, and after evidence had arisen that those risks had materialised.”
The Williams review was commissioned by Theresa May’s Conservative government and published its 30 recommendations in 2020, all of which were accepted by the then prime minister Boris Johnson’s administration, though scrapping right to rent was not among them — possibly because its use had been suspended by the courts at the time.
“Many private renters have spoken to us about how difficult it makes finding somewhere to rent, particularly people who are born abroad,” said Tilly Smith from Generation Rent, part of the RRC. “They report immediately receiving pushback at the moment they start inquiring into properties.”
Landlords, she added, often tell tenants: “No, we can’t look at renting to you because of right to rent.” This is irrespective of whether the person has the right to rent, Smith explained: “They’re not willing to engage with the lengthier process that involves going through right to rent checks.”
As a result, Generation Rent has seen cases of people having to live in hotels and Airbnbs at huge financial cost, including one case where a person had to live in an Airbnb for three months because landlords would not accept they had a right to rent. Their findings echo those of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI), which carried out a mystery shopper exercise in 2017 and found 85% of prospective tenants did not get a response when they asked a landlord to carry out a right to rent check using the available online system to do so. All did, in fact, have the right to rent.
A survey by the Tenancy Deposit Scheme in 2024 found 24% of landlords felt unable to rent to someone without a British passport, with the majority of those saying it was due to the risks of penalties under the right to rent law.
Right to rent was challenged in the courts by the JCWI in 2019 and found to be discriminatory. However, the government successfully challenged the ruling a year later in the court of appeal, and the duty was reinstated.
One of the challenges in seeking to overturn it is the difficulty in showing how the policy may have led to a specific person being discriminated against when the rental market is notoriously opaque, explained Sairah Javed, solicitor and senior caseworker at JCWI. All a landlord needs to do is fail to call a prospective tenant back or say that someone else has been successful — tenants will often not know the true reason they have been refused a home.
Muslims are more likely to live in rented housing than the UK average, and less likely to own their home outright or hold a mortgage, data from the 2021 census shows. Some 76% of Muslims in the UK hold a British passport, while 19% hold passports for other countries and 5% do not have a passport at all, according to analysis by Hyphen of the 2021 census.
A 2024 academic study found that a renter with a “typically white sounding name” received on average 25% more responses when applying online to rent a home compared with someone with a traditionally South Asian name. The research, carried out by the universities of Sheffield, Exeter and Wisconsin, involved applying for 7,000 homes across Bradford, Rotherham, Reading and Sandwell.
The Home Office did not respond to requests for comment.
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