06/06/2026
Do you agree?
Rent arrears used to end quietly. Now they end in court.
With a CCJ. That follows your tenant for six years.
Thanks to a bill designed to protect them.
I want to be careful here because this argument gets misread fast. So let me be clear before I make it.
I've never served a Section 21 notice in my career. Not once.
Every removal I've ever done has been Section 8, legitimate grounds, proper process.
I'm not defending Section 21 because I relied on it. I'm defending what it did for tenants when it was used properly.
Here's what it did.
When a tenant fell into arrears, couldn't pay, circumstances changed, life happened, the old system gave landlords a choice. You could pursue Section 8. Go through the courts.
Prove the arrears. Get a possession order.
That process ends with a county court judgment in the tenant's name. A CCJ. Six years on their credit file. Six years following them into every future tenancy application, every phone contract, every attempt to rebuild.
Or you could serve Section 21. Tenant leaves. Landlord moves on. No court. No judgment. No six-year black mark.
And often, because the eviction was legitimate, the tenant would qualify to go onto the council housing waiting list. A genuinely fresh start.
For a tenant in genuine hardship, redundancy, illness, or a relationship breakdown, that clean exit was often the better outcome.
Not ideal. But better than a CCJ.
The Renters Rights Bill abolished Section 21.
Now there's only one route. Section 8. Courts. And for tenants who can't clear the arrears before the hearing, a county court judgment that will follow them long after they've sorted their life out.
The campaign to scrap Section 21 was framed around protecting tenants from unfair eviction. I understand that. A tenant who has done nothing wrong losing their home on two months notice is a genuine injustice.
But the people who designed this reform didn't ask what happened next.
They removed a mechanism without understanding what it was quietly doing on the other side of the equation.
And in doing so they've made the consequences of falling behind on rent significantly worse for the tenants they were trying to help.
This is what happens when you regulate from ideology rather than outcomes.
The goal, to protect tenants, is right.
The diagnosis, Section 21 is the problem, is too simple.
And the solution, to abolish it entirely, creates consequences that land hardest on the people the legislation was supposed to protect.
This is Point 6 of the Build Don't Blame manifesto in action.
The housing system doesn't get designed. It gets accumulated. Mechanisms get removed. Nobody maps what they were quietly doing. Nobody tracks the second and third order effects.
And the people who pay the price are never in the room when the decisions get made.
What I'd have preferred is straightforward.
Keep Section 21 for defined circumstances, genuine hardship, mutual agreement, situations where a clean break serves both parties better than a court process.
Tighten the grounds. Limit the use. But don't remove the tool entirely because some landlords abused it.
Enforce the rules against the ones who do abuse it.
That's the distinction that keeps getting lost.
The answer to bad behaviour is enforcement.
Not removing every mechanism that bad actors misused, because those same mechanisms were doing quiet, useful work for tenants at the same time.
