As the housing crisis continues, here's how private renting can help end homelessness.

Chris Hancock, Head of Best Practice

20.07.2017

Private renting is increasingly the biggest solution to homelessness and yet, for some time now, the end of a private rented tenancy has been the biggest cause of homelessness. This inevitably causes debate over the private rented sector’s (PRS) appropriateness as a housing route out of homelessness. This debate has been brought to the fore recently with the Homelessness Reduction Act being passed (and the onus it places on Local Authorities to engage more proactively with the PRS, with Shelter’s recent Shut Out Report and last week’s JRF and CIH event on making the PRS work for people in poverty.

At Crisis we have been working since 1997 to make private renting as settled and as affordable a housing option as possible for homeless people. Ultimately, and this seemed overwhelmingly supported as a view at the JRF / CIH event, the only way this will happen for all is through policy reform (the unfreezing of Local Housing Allowance and the lengthening of tenancies being the most common suggestions amongst many). However, whilst we continue to press for these changes, the housing crisis doesn’t stop, people continue to become homeless, social housing continues to fail to be delivered in sufficient numbers and the PRS (with some regional variation) continues to expand.

We therefore feel something practical and local needs to happen whilst wider reform is championed. Projects providing access to the PRS for homeless people can be as varied, with bad practice leading to dissatisfaction from landlords and from tenants. Whereas, if done well, these projects can meet the shared objectives of most landlords and tenants i.e. A long term tenancy offered to someone looking to make a long term home. That’s why our Home campaign is calling on Government to provide new funding for projects and a quality mark to raise standards.

Our Sustain report with Shelter in 2014 and the emphasis in Shelter’s Shut Out report shows how things shouldn’t be done. Local Authority (mainly) run projects using the PRS as a means of meeting (or ducking) statutory duties and therefore often offering little choice and little support leading to struggling tenants and dissatisfied landlords.  Whereas shining examples such as Home Turf Lettings in Bath, PATH in Devon and the Ethical Lettings Agency in Redcar and Cleveland among many others, show how it can work well for landlords and tenants.

Hugely differing housing markets, diverse landlord and tenant motivations, and landlords own mixed financial situations, all contribute to the PRS being an extremely varied picture. It is therefore unrealistic to expect that all landlords would be in a position to provide a tenancy to a tenant restricted by Local Housing Allowance. However, for some landlords the longer term commitment and ongoing support provided by a Help to Rent project provides a much better alternative than a commercial agent where tenancy turnover is a key commercial driver.

Other landlords will be able and motivated to provide a home to someone on a lower income and just looking for support to help them achieve this. We need to get better at raising awareness of good projects so that landlords looking for support can find it (in research we undertook last year we identified that 71% of landlords weren’t aware of such projects in their area despite our own database of UK projects).

We also need to work better together, across charities and Local Authorities to provide a clearer, more consistent offer to landlords so we don’t end up distorting the market ourselves. A recommendation raised at the event on Tuesday was to support the development of locality wide Social Lettings Agencies which could be a way of achieving this.

Clearly, private renting is a mixed bag. But with the right tools (both practical and policy based) we are able to sift between the good and the bad and it can definitely provide part of the solution for ending homelessness. We just need government to back it.