Mark your calendar: December 3rd will be sleeping bags to get a house day

One of the key features of the Bill is that it abolishes fixed-term tenancies altogether, along with so-called “no fault” evictions. Both measures are designed to give more security to renters.

In addition, renters pick up the right to only ever pay a months’ rent, bidding wars get banned, there’s a new ombuds, some very limited controls on rent increases and the right to leave a tenancy on two months’ notice.

The package has always represented a problem for student landlords – how do you ensure that the annual cycle of student renting can continue and that properties will become available?

Much of the lobbying from groups like the powerful National Residential Landlords Association (NRLA) has, as a result, been aimed at retaining fixed terms in the student market. But for all sorts of reasons that has never been accepted by either government.

The Michael Gove wheeze to fix it when the Bill was in its previous incarnation as the Renter’s Reform Bill was to create a new ground for eviction – that as long as it was communicated at the start, a landlord could nominate a day between June and the end of September on which they intended to take possession.

That survived into the Angela Rayner version of the Bill – despite being pretty ignorant of those students who don’t enrol into a typical September start academic year.

But while it dealt with the “don’t leave too late” issue, the question of leaving early was left hanging.

On the landlord forums (on which I lurk with various pseudonyms), the major concern runs something like this. Where a tenancy runs, say, from August 1st to July 31st, what happens if the students take up their right to leave in, say, March – thus relieving themselves of the requirement to pay rent between May and August if they’re not there.

For the all too common landlords with a portfolio of buy-to-let properties (and often associated mortgages), even losing three months of rent would be a problem for their excel sheets.

So a consensus is forming. Every time I log on, I find landlords concluding that the sensible thing to do to keep twelve months’ worth of rent rolling in is to set their “take possession” date at June 2nd, spent a day pretending to spend the deducted deposit on cleaning and repairs, and then move their tenancy start dates back to June 3rd.

If that happens – and it looks more and more likely every day – it will create two major problems.

The first is that there are plenty of students who are still students in June. Even if we just think about September starts, there’s those with an extended maintenance loan to cover that month, many of whom will be on placement – and plenty of international students, postgrads and those undertaking resits in the same boat.

There is now a real risk that they will be rendered homeless for a month or so.

That will require universities to quantify the problem and come up with solutions. But that’s OK – there’s a year to do so. Or is there?

In the Bill, tenancies become open-ended – or at least will convert to being open-ended – upon commencement. They are tenancies that won’t have been accompanied by a letter from the landlord announcing that they’re intending to take possession June-September.

So the government has written in a special exemption. On commencement, as long as the landlord writes to the student making clear they intend to take possession in the summer within one month, they too will be able to use that “take possession” power.

Set aside for a minute that many will be in the maldives spending their profits and might forget. That does mean that as soon as students get that letter, they’ll likely panic. Universities will need some sort of solution straight away.

As it stands, the Bill is currently on track to pass Royal Assent and become law before Parliament’s summer recess in July, and the commencement date will be a couple of months after that.

But there’s another much trickier issue buried in the Bill.

A well-meaning amendment was put in when the Bill was in the Commons that the government accepted, aimed at the problem of students signing tenancies very early for the next academic year.

If a landlord intends to use that “Ground 4A” summer thing, they can’t agree the associated tenancy until 6 months before it’s due to start.

And so if they do all move their start dates back, it raises the prospect of almost every student HMO in the country becoming available on… December 3rd.

If you’ve seen the coverage of Durham a couple of years ago – which saw students in sleeping bags, camping out near to the letting agent of their choice to get the house they wanted – just imagine that scene being replicated in almost every student town and city in the UK.

If we had some sort of infrastructure around that, maybe that could work. Plenty of countries operate housing lists for all student bedspaces in a municipality, often with the university or SU involved in allocation.

But this is England. There’s absolutely no chance of that happening. And so if I was a university, I’d be placing my order for branded sleeping bags now.

It’s not the only issue in the Bill, of course.

To escape the legislation, those running halls will have to join one of three codes of practice (two for universities, one for private PBSA) which offer different rights.

That means that we’re about to have five different regimes for student renting rights – three in halls, one for students renting in an HMO and one for those renting a smaller flat. That doesn’t feel ideal if we’re keen on empowering tenants.

The Bill brings in stricter regulations on rent increases, limiting them to once per year through a Section 13 notice, with a mandatory two-month notice period, and allowing tenants to challenge increases at a tribunal.

But it applies to tenancies, not properties. So even the wafer thin protection on offer doesn’t work for students whose landlords can take possession in the summer and start a new tenancy.

The ombuds is positive. But by the time a case reaches what will be an overwhelmed service almost instantly, they’ll probably have moved out.

Not paying more than a month’s rent upfront sounds good. But given paying for a whole term or semester is how lots of international students get around having a domestic guarantor, we may well see straight up discrimination against international students instead.

Students often sign tenancy agreements months in advance but may need to change plans before the tenancy starts. The Bill allows students to cancel with two months’ notice, but only after the tenancy begins – leaving them “trapped” in pre-tenancy periods.

Under the new rolling tenancies, anyone in a joint tenancy can end the agreement unilaterally on two months’ notice, potentially leaving others without housing. Scotland’s Housing Bill has a fix for that – no such fix has emerged in England.

Meanwhile, landlords will still be able to make deductions from deposits for repairs or cleaning, often without spending the money on these purposes for the next tenant. Landlords will still be able to impose low energy caps in all-inclusive rents, penalising students for exceeding limits without incentives to improve property energy efficiency.

And given that students pick up the right to leave on two months’ notice – when the best Unipol is proposing for the private PBSA code is that students will be able to exit only if they’re ill for sixty days, drop out or die (and even those aren’t a done deal) – we’ll likely see even more pressure on the off-street housing market.

There has, at no stage, been anything resembling meaningful work done on the implications of the Bill on the student market. As ever, tenants are MHCLG’s problem, students are DfE’s problem, and so student tenants become nobody’s problem. See also almost every other public policy problem.

But whatever the causes, it now looks like we’re locked into a slow-moving car crash that will require some pretty rapid fixes from universities. Despite feeling further from it than ever, we’ve never needed a proper student housing strategy more.