Cleaning up the private rental sector

In what has been termed the “shadow” private rental sector (PRS), highly vulnerable tenants in the UK are being targeted by criminal landlords and letting agents, who are deliberately taking advantage of tenancy and housing law loopholes to maximise their rental profit and exploit vulnerable tenants.

These landlords and agents are not simply “rogue landlords”, a term often used to describe them. Their profile has changed over recent years, from chancers bending the system a little to hardened criminals.

And these criminals are often organised, using the UK’s relatively unregulated and under-policed PRS to profit from crimes such as sex and labour trafficking, overcrowding, and the use of properties for cannabis farms.

They the UK’s criminal landlords – and they are operating all over the country.

The extent of this criminality was highlighted in a report published in 2020 called Journeys in the Shadow Private Rented Sector, (Cambridge House and the University of York) which reported aspects of the PRS to be “underregulated, exploitative, and characterised by dangerously poor physical standards and insecurity of tenure”.

The report included expert testimony from legal housing advisors and environmental health professionals who related multiple cases of threatening behaviour and fraud and specific cases of women being trafficked into the UK, where their passports were taken, and they were forced to work in the sex industry. Other stories included how tenants were forced by criminal gangs to tend illegal cannabis farms in houses and how some were coerced to come to the UK from Eastern Europe and forced to renovate old properties without pay. The properties were then sold for profit and the tenants moved on to another property to do it all again.

Criminal landlords also use non-standard, subdivided properties to increase rental yield through high-density overcrowding, filling properties with many very desperate and vulnerable people, who are easy to exploit. These landlords can apply for a higher rent from local authorities by claiming to be supporting their vulnerable tenants.

The report set out a series of recommendations for how policymakers could take more effective action to tackle this criminal exploitation that affects so many people stuck in the low-income PRS. It also called for law enforcement and the court system to deal more effectively with criminal landlords who often evade detection using identity fraud and the unregistered ownership details of many rented properties on the market. It is often the case that authorities simply don’t know who owns a particular property.

The Journeys in the Shadow Private Rented Sector report highlighting these issues was published and widely reported three years ago, but it seems the problem persists, and many more vulnerable people are still suffering.

Indeed, Dr Julie Rugg of the University of York’s School for Business and Society and part of the team that produced the 2020 report, claims that “little, if anything, has changed” in the sector in England since its publication and “illegal landlords are exploiting the vulnerable more than ever and largely getting away with it”. 

She claims that the plans to address the problem that are in place are continually delayed. “The Renters Reform Bill proposes a form of landlord registration, similar to that used in Wales and Scotland. However, the bill has been stuck in a parliamentary loop since it was first proposed in 2019,” she says.

Now, Dr Rugg is leading a team of experts in a major new study that seeks to understand the pathways landlords take to criminal activity in this sector. The team includes criminologists from the University of Sheffield and the University of Northumbria, housing law experts and a housing charity based in Bradford. The study will be focussing on how police, local authorities and the courts can deal with the problem more effectively, including how victims are dealt with and helped.

The study is focused on Yorkshire and the Humber area and involves all the regional police forces, local authorities in the region and the justice system. “We will be looking at finding effective ways of dealing with the criminals,” says Dr Rugg. A key aspect of the work will be to understand criminal landlords’ behaviours and how they interact with other types of crime.  Dr Rugg explains: “We want to understand what makes it easy for criminals to operate and how best to disrupt that operation.”

With support from so many local authorities and the police, Dr Rugg is also confident of being able to understand what works and what doesn’t in terms of dealing with this criminality. “We will be working with statutory authorities to collect and learn from good practice, and to find out the best ways of sharing that best practice.  

Another key part of the study will be working with the courts in the region. The Shadow report found that many enforcement officers believed that the courts do not take landlord crime seriously.  Prosecuting a landlord takes substantial resources, but often results in a minor fine.  “We want to gain a better understanding both of the processes involved in taking a landlord to court and sentencing decisions” explains Dr Rugg.

Finally, Dr Rugg will be focusing on the victims of crime in the PRS – the exploited tenants themselves. Not only will it be important to understand better what they want from the authorities dealing with criminal landlords, but tenants often need encouragement to access the help that is available.

“We know from previous work that many people feel excluded when services intervene,” she says. “They sometimes even feel criminalised themselves by the way local authorities and the police work.

“Vulnerable people might be forced to tend cannabis farms, for example, but police might well see that tenant as a criminal rather than a victim of crime”.

This new study, which is receiving close to a £1million of funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), aims to deliver a suite of interventions that are effective disrupting crime related to private renting.

It will showcase clear pathways that take criminal activity by landlords through the court system and guide local authorities and the police to be able to work more effectively together to progress these cases through the courts.

“We want to stop the private rental sector being an opportunity space for criminals. “Everyone has an experience of a bad landlord that they want to talk about – but this is a distinctive piece of work that takes us beyond that and deals with serious criminality like trafficking, modern slavery, drugs and fraudulent benefit claims totalling many thousands of pounds.  

“This is not a story about housing – this is a crime story.”