A Labour MP who last held shadow office under the party leadership of Jeremy Corbyn has attacked the government for having huge loopholes for unscrupulous landlords.

Jon Trickett, a Labour MP in Yorkshire since the mid-1990s, has written on the Labour List website that “the state props up private landlordism with housing benefits” while the landlords themselves increasingly use no-fault evictions and a quarter of them provide ”housing that is not fit for habitation.” 

Then he turns his attention to House Secretary Michael Gove in what he described as “this discredited parliament.” 

He says the Renters Reform Bill contains proposals which “have more holes in them for landlords to exploit than a bag of Yorkshire Tea” – which he puts down to 143 Conservative MPs being landlords.

And Trickett says Gove’s proposals actually make evictions easier because of the apparent vagueness of the definition of anti-social behaviour as a ground for removing a tenant.

He writes: “The proposed legal definition of what would constitute grounds for eviction is ‘any behaviour capable of causing nuisance or annoyance’. It’s not difficult to see that this is a loophole so large that it will be exploited by unscrupulous landlords.”

Trickett also criticises Gove for not tackling “unjustified rent rises.”

The veteran MP – now 72 – says Labour has committed to a massive programme of housebuilding if it wins the next General Election. 

“It is the right thing to do” he says, but insists that more should be done for private and social tenants too, to encourage them – and not just home owners – to vote Labour. 

“We need to abandon market dogma, create more social rented housing, tackle abuses in the private sector, review the role played by private developers and deploy the staggering £16 billion spent on housing benefit annually as leverage to secure social objectives” he concludes.