Right to Rent: entrenching discrimination in the private rented sector

What is the Right to Rent policy?

Right to Rent, introduced as part of the Immigration Act of 2014, aims to prevent people from renting homes if they don’t have the legal right to live in the UK. When it was introduced, this policy formed a key part of the Hostile Environment – a government push that sought to make it as difficult as possible for people to stay in the UK if they didn’t have 'leave to remain'. It represented a shift towards a more isolationist, exclusionary anti-immigration politics as the 2010s progressed.

Right to Rent is still in place today. While originally intended to target people that don’t have permission to stay in the UK, the policy has embedded state-sanctioned discrimination, that encourages xenophobia and racism, within the private rented sector.

Right to Rent places a legal requirement on landlords and letting agents to check prospective tenants' immigration status ahead of granting them a tenancy. This effectively transforms them into backstop border officers. Landlords caught out by the scheme can face a fine of up to £20,000 or a prison sentence of up to five years. As a result, many avoid the process altogether, either due to over-caution, or because they don’t want to deal with additional admin.

In 2024, a survey of a representative sample of 2,000 landlords found that:

• 24% of landlords think they can’t rent to people with a non-UK passport

• 56% of respondents who said they were unable to rent to people without a UK passport said it was due to the risk of a civil penalty for failing to comply with the Right to Rent regulations

• 47% of landlords claimed that they found Right to Rent checks too difficult or time-consuming

In 2019, Right to Rent was declared unlawful by the British High Court. However, this decision was appealed by the previous government and overturned in 2020, with the reasoning that the discrimination caused by the policy was deemed 'justifiable'.

What are the impacts of right to rent?

People born outside of the UK disproportionately rely on the private rented sector. Therefore, they are more vulnerable to the state-sanctioned discrimination cultivated by the Right to Rent policy, whether or not they have the legal right to be in the UK.

For many migrants, policies like Right to Rent regularly lead to poverty and cycles of homelessness and rough sleeping. For people who have recently arrived in the country, private renting is often their only option to find a home.

Research by Generation Rent in 2022 found that more than two in five migrant private renters had struggled to find a landlord or letting agent to rent to them. Right to Rent further restricts the number of available and affordable homes for migrants. The policy pushes people born abroad into the sharpest end of the housing emergency.

Research from 2023 into the experiences of Ukrainian refugees illustrates this issue. Interviews were conducted with 259 Ukrainians looking for a home to rent – over 93% had arrived via the refugee schemes launched after Russia's invasion. The research revealed:

• 1 in 8 (12.4%) stated that they had struggled to prove their right to rent in England to a landlord or letting agent

• over two-thirds (67.6%) had struggled to find a landlord or letting agent to rent to them as a migrant or refugee

Impact on Black and Brown renters

The discriminatory nature of Right to Rent means that it impacts many renters who were never intended to be subject to the policy. This includes People of Colour who are British-born or who have the legal right to live in the country. The policy pushes landlords towards declining any prospective tenant without a UK passport. It also encourages lazy and racist assumptions about migration status based on accent, skin colour or even name.

The policy has created difficulties for those who do have the right to rent but are lacking in documentation, for example, members of the Windrush generation. In 2011, over 20,000 people who moved from the Caribbean to the UK before 1971 did not have a British passport or a passport from the country where they were born.

Previous research by the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI) found that:

• 42% of landlords said that the Right to Rent requirements had made them less likely to consider someone who did not have a British passport. 27% of landlords were reluctant to engage with those with 'foreign accents or names'.

• 'It takes twice as long for Black and minority ethnic groups and migrants to find a home to rent compared to a white British person.'

• During a mystery shopping exercise, 85% of prospective tenants did not receive any response when enquiring for a new home when they asked the landlord or letting agent to conduct an online Right to Rent check. This has big impacts for people such as asylum seekers, stateless persons and victims of modern-day slavery. They need landlords to do an online check with the Home Office to confirm they have been granted permission to rent.

Right to Rent legitimises covert forms of discrimination which go far beyond the policy's intended aim. A prospective White tenant's profile is 36% more likely to receive a positive response when applying to rent a home than a Black tenant’s profile. A recent mystery shopping exercise found that people with typically White-sounding names received 25% more responses to their online enquiries about rental properties than those with traditionally South Asian names.

Unsurprisingly, the threat of high fines or prison sentences has created a situation where landlords are extremely reluctant to engage with the Right to Rent process. They may fear getting it wrong or be unwilling to go through the required checks if someone is unable to produce a British passport.

After all, why complicate things for yourself when you could just rent your property to someone else who you assume doesn’t need a check? Many landlords avoid the process altogether, limiting the number of potential properties that certain groups of tenants can have access to.

What needs to happen next?

Everyone, no matter their background, deserves a safe and stable home. Discrimination should have no place in the private rented sector and no type of discrimination should be considered justifiable. All private renters should have equitable access to long-term, secure homes.  At Shelter, we also believe that, regardless of immigration status, everyone should have a legal right to emergency accommodation if they are at risk of sleeping on the streets.

The discriminatory and dysfunctional Right to Rent policy must be scrapped. It normalises and encourages direct discrimination against migrants and People of Colour in the UK. Discriminating against groups should not be seen as a policy success.

The Renters' Rights Bill is a key opportunity to overhaul the private rented sector for everyone. To be successful, the bill must reach those in most need of change – this includes migrants and Communities of Colour, who are at the sharpest end of the housing emergency.

The scheme directly pushes people refused asylum and others without immigration status into homelessness. Being made homeless, these communities are extremely vulnerable to exploitation, abuse, and serious, long-term deterioration of mental and physical health. Creating destitution should never be a valid aim for government policy, irrespective of where you are from.

The further consequences for people who do have the right to rent show why this policy is failing. Right to Rent creates a climate of fear for landlords due to the heavy penalties for getting it wrong. It restricts the number of safe, secure homes available to immigrants and People of Colour, while entrenching and normalising racism and discrimination in the private rented sector.

This is why we are supporting an amendment to the Renters' Rights Bill, tabled by Baroness Lister of Burtersett, that would repeal Right to Rent.

Sign the petition to join our renting campaign and keep up to date with our Right to Rent work.