The Renter’s (Reform) Bill gets watered down even further – and it’s students who will lose out

In a letter from housing minister Jacob Young to “all members of the Conservative Party” (that may give us some clues as to who the country’s landlords are), housing minister Jacob Young reveals that the promised ability for tenants to cancel a tenancy on two months notice is to be subject to a minimum six-month period.

The problem that the original proposals would have solved was students being tied into contracts egregiously early – often almost a year before the tenancy is due to start – leaving them (often jointly and severally with other students) liable for the full rent due across the fixed term tenancy.

This at least chops that back to six months – but landlords will still be pushing for the retention of fixed term rather than rolling tenancies, on the basis that groups of students in HMOs will be busy issuing notices to quit in March. That will almost certainly mean that the increasing proportion of landlords that let on an 11 and 12 months’ basis will threaten to jack the rent up for the rest of the year.

Students aren’t mentioned in that section of the letter – because if you’ve never recognised the problem, you don’t need to apologise for removing the solution. There will be exemptions for deaths (!) not least because one backbencher during the last stage raised the case of a family whose son died by suicide was pursued as the guarantor by the landlord for the full year’s rent. In this confection there will also remain the issue of joint tenancies being able to be brought to an end on that 2 months notice without others being happy – something they at least found a compromise solution on in Scotland yesterday.

Where students are mentioned is the government’s amendment to its own bill to allow landlords to evict over the summer, which Young will now broaden to all off-street student properties (not just those that are formally HMOs).

The previous concern about students who might need security in a property disappeared before Christmas – and now it’s even more likely to hit those without a family property to “return” to after university. And it remains the case that apparently not a single minister or DLUHC appears to have noticed that plenty of students aren’t on September to September academic years.

There will also be a long delay on implementation while they clear a backlog in the courts (although we might assume Angela Rayner will be in more of a hurry) and there will be a review of the whole thing 18 months into implementation.

Overall, it remains the case that students haven’t really been thought about here – PBSA (halls in both universities and the private sector) are missing from the legislation altogether, the weak provisions about rent only increasing once a year will only apply to tenancies rather than to properties, and it remains the case that you get the impression that DLUHC thinks students are DfE’s problem, and vice versa. A poor, poor show.