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Social housing landlords will be able to evict domestic abuse perpetrators under a new bill, which will also increase the tenancy required before residents qualify for the right-to-buy scheme from three to 10 years in England.
The government said the bill, which will be debated in the House of Lords on Monday, would fix “the long-term decline in social housing” and offer new protections for social tenants who were subjected to domestic abuse.
Its progress in parliament was welcomed by domestic abuse campaigners, such as the Domestic Abuse Housing Alliance, who said it represented “an important and long overdue step forward”. The bill is returning to parliament for its second reading, after being announced in King Charles’s speech on 13 May.
Last year, about 15,000 families in England were forced to find a new social home because of domestic abuse, according to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government.
The bill is intended to ensure that landlords and courts can evict perpetrators of domestic abuse from social housing without the victim having to leave their home first.
At present, social housing landlords can evict a perpetrator only after their victim has moved out, and in joint tenancies, the only option for the victim is to end the tenancy entirely, possibly becoming homeless.
If the bill passes its second reading and is given royal assent, social housing landlords will be able to remove abusers from their properties and courts will be able to transfer a joint tenancy to the victim’s sole name or require the landlord to provide suitable alternative accommodation where appropriate.
The bill also closes a legal loophole that allows domestic abusers to make their victims homeless, by ending a social housing joint tenancy early during their own eviction proceedings.
The right to buy a social home after just three years as a tenant of a public sector landlord, a policy of Margaret Thatcher’s government, is also being overhauled. Under the new rules, social housing tenants will have to wait 10 years, instead of three, before they can buy their home from a council or housing association.
Newly built social homes would be protected for 35 years and “hard-to-replace rural homes” would be exempt if the bill passes into legislation, the government said.
Councils will also gain a stronger right of first refusal to buy back properties, to help public sector landlords recover homes already lost under right to buy.
The government also said the bill would strip out “outdated and unimplemented requirements” from the 2016 Housing and Planning Act to offer social housing providers “the certainty they need to build for the long term”. This includes rules that required councils to sell high-value homes, offer fixed-term tenancies and charge higher rents to higher-income tenants.
Writing for the Guardian, Keir Starmer said: “Families were left in limbo on waiting lists for years … and incredibly, domestic abuse survivors found themselves forced out of their homes because landlords lacked the powers to make their abuser the one who must leave.”
“None of this is right or fair: and it’s been brought about by underfunding, systemic failure and a lack of building, particularly when it comes to social housing, where too much of the stock was sold off at huge discounts without ever being replaced.
“That’s why when this government came into power, we pledged the biggest increase in social and affordable homes for a generation … We want everyone, no matter their background or circumstance, to have a secure place of their own.”
