The Residential Landlords Association (RLA) has accused Shelter of embarking on another “scare campaign”.
According to the RLA, the proportion of private sector tenants leaving their homes at the direction of their landlord or letting agent has fallen over the past year.
It says the most recent English Housing Survey for 2012/13, shows that just 7% of tenants who had moved in the past three years said that it was because they had been asked to leave by their landlord or agent. This compares with 9% in 2011/12.
Research by the RLA has shown that the vast majority of such evictions happen for legitimate reasons. These include landlords wanting to sell or move into the property, needing to perform extensive work on it or because tenants aren’t paying their rent or are committing anti-social behaviour.
Shelter, meanwhile, reported this week that over 60,000 families were threatened with eviction in the past year, just for complaining about bad conditions in their homes.
The charity also claimed that more than one in 10 renting families have suffered health problems in the past year because of their landlords failing to deal with bad living conditions.
The RLA described Shelter’s campaign as “irresponsible scaremongering” which can only serve to unnecessarily frighten tenants.
RLA Policy Director, Richard Jones, said: “The official figures show quite clearly a fall in the number of tenants having their tenancies terminated and by far most of these are for perfectly good reasons.
“Shelter’s campaign on so called revenge evictions is totally inaccurate and irresponsible. To severely restrict landlords’ right to regain possession as Shelter advocates would severely damage confidence in the sector. This would reduce supply at a time of high demand causing more people to be homeless and we thought Shelter is all about reducing the number of homeless.
“In the past, Shelter have put out highly questionable statistics, which bear little resemblance to reality which we again see today.”
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Comments
shelter is another public-funded nulab organization
If you ask Shelter clients, you get shelter stats, based on their own client type, this does not reflect the country as a whole. The shelter client would be with shelter for reasons that relate to why Shelter are there in the first place. Look at their service list and you get a client type. The same example would apply if you took a national landlord that only accepted a certain client type. The stats would be different again. There are so many factors that affect stats that unless you had a compulsory national public audited weekly reporting system it would be just another stat that we could not and did not learn from. I ask this one question, how much money has the government given to tenants for landlords who never passed it on....then i ask and since you new all this then why do still not stop... Then why did you not recover from the tenants and suspend the claims further still...in fact you do nothing about millions you gave to tenants.. why have our evictions gone up nationally due to arrears (duh!)...perhaps that's because the government made thousands of people in arrears then just to add to the issue... the government increased the costs of evictions in courts so as to make even more money from the ever increasing evictions. There was a trial for direct payments and those stats were just the same. Hmm Quality area with quality tenants who did bother to fill in the questionnaire... fact but what about the thousands who couldn't be bothered to complete questionnaire they wouldn't be included it the stats but they didn't mind getting that payment direct. Bet they are on the evictions list. Lets divert the issue..Or could it just be landlords have suddenly decided to evict tenants due to "revenge" for repairs. ...Really. Just my 2 pence worth.