Shelter responds to housing elements of King’s Speech

Polly Neate, chief executive of Shelter, said: “Today’s King’s Speech will restore hope to England’s 11 million renters, whose lives have been plagued by no fault evictions for decades.

“The new Renters’ Rights Bill has to be a fresh start at reforming broken private renting. Not only does this mean urgently scrapping no fault evictions, but also setting clear limits to in-tenancy rent increases. The government cannot allow landlords to continue to force tenants out of their homes with eyewatering rent hikes.

“If this government truly wants to deliver the biggest increase in social house building in a generation, any new planning legislation must be focussed on delivering 90,000 social rent homes a year. Private developers will not deliver the target 1.5m homes by themselves – councils need the means to build genuinely affordable homes too. Otherwise, their plans will fail, like countless governments before them, and homelessness will remain at a record high.”

ENDS