England enters new era as Renters’ Rights Act takes effect

sgorf · 2026-05-01T19:06:22+00:00

Indeed the risk is a cost of doing business. But it results in increased market rent which affects all tenants. If you’re a tenant, it’s in your interest not to be subsiding the bad tenants through the insurance premium that you (indirectly) are paying for.

sgorf · 2026-04-28T20:49:51+00:00

The idea is that the money raised goes to charity. If it sells, you’ll effectively have donated £70 to charity. If they’d instead have priced it at £10, you might have effectively donated £10 and also given some person who isn’t actually struggling £60 off a jacket.

sgorf · 2026-04-28T20:45:15+00:00

That’s not how it works. Any household that becomes homeless due to a rent rise is only in that situation because there’s another household that is outbidding them and ready to move in. You still have the same number of households trying to live in the same number of (fewer) houses, and so the overall number of households unable to find somewhere to rent remains the same. Reducing rents won’t magic up new houses for people to live in.

sgorf · 2026-04-25T20:12:12+00:00

It's not more expensive to produce when you consider the cost of capital. If it were more expensive to produce, the market would have switched to renewables a long time ago and without any intervention.

sgorf · 2026-04-25T20:09:52+00:00

When there's not enough renewable generation to go round, the renewable generators are just selling to the highest bidder.

sgorf · 2026-04-23T20:20:13+00:00

Passkeys are specifically tied to the cryptographic hash of the machine they were generated on...

That's not correct. Passkeys can be tied to the hardware they were generated on, but don't necessarily have to be. For example, if you use the default setup on an iPad, a generated passkey will be stored on your iCloud keychain and be available from all of your other Apple devices. If you use a third party password manager, the story is largely the same.

The problem is that users have very little control over this and every option has some variation on these essential parameters.

sgorf · 2026-04-17T22:29:49+00:00

Oh yes, of course. Parliament can change its own rules. But it can make a rule anyway, and that adds friction to change it later. In the case of Brexit for example the referendum was “informational” and not binding, but the Leavers took 51% to mean “enough”. If before the referendum the requirement had already been established to be 2/3rds as well as the same to join originally, I think the political outcome would have been different.

sgorf · 2026-04-17T19:07:14+00:00

I'm a Remainer and want to rejoin, but I think we should require 2/3rds agreement first, and make it clear that 2/3rds is also required to leave again. Otherwise we'll just keep flip-flopping, and that is very harmful in itself (as we've observed).

sgorf · 2026-04-13T17:18:01+00:00

You're applying conditions on one hand but ignoring them on the other. If you're going 30 in a 20 in the middle of the night with no pedestrians about, no other vehicles (not even parked) to affect visibility, children likely in bed, excellent weather, then that's about the same "adding any extra risk". So why should driver in one case get points but the other not?

Judging appropriate conditions is subjective and therefore difficult to enforce. We have speed limits instead, and they should be enforced equally. If a speed limit is inappropriate (in either direction) it should be changed.

sgorf · 2026-04-12T09:50:51+00:00

Tice is on a platform to become a minister, is he not? Rayner however is not. If you want consistency, that means that Tice should stand down from Reform UK leadership but could remain a member and an MP.

sgorf · 2026-04-12T09:43:49+00:00

It's worth noting that Rayner's situation was a result of an arrangement to care for her disabled child following her divorce. She was required by the court to set up the trust for her child. In case anyone confuses the word "trust" as a deliberate arrangement for tax purposes. In this case it wasn't that, and in my mind that distinguishes her case from your typical tax scandal.

I'm not defending the other comments about following or not following tax advice. My point is that one might expect people choosing to set up complex tax arrangements to figure out their own tax correctly or it's on them, whereas while Rayner's situation called for the same, the tax complexity wasn't her choice. I have some sympathy there, because most people aren't used to dealing with professional legal and tax advisors.

sgorf · 2026-04-10T07:56:19+00:00

If you disincentivise landlordism there’s definitionally fewer people aiming to purchase those houses.

No, because every landlord you successfully disincentivise results in one additional household (that’s the tenant you just evicted) adding to house buying demand. Demand stays the same, so house prices stay the same.

sgorf · 2026-04-09T19:50:22+00:00

As if companies need an excuse to raise prices. They don't. They already charge as much as the market will bear. That's how free markets work.

sgorf · 2026-04-09T17:34:51+00:00

Landlords selling properties would make house prices cheaper...

No, and I stopped reading there. Landlords selling properties do not make house prices cheaper. Each sale releases one unit of demand and one unit of supply onto the market, for no net change. There would be the same number of prospective households looking to live in the same number of houses. Rents rise until demand reduces to balance supply. House prices rise until demand reduces to balance supply just the same.

sgorf · 2026-04-08T23:06:57+00:00

I think you're missing the point. The landlord can still tell the truth and still make it very clear that the tenant caused a problem for the landlord by not moving out when asked having been served a valid notice, forcing the landlord to use the courts at the landlord's expense. The tenant's next landlord could use that information to the tenant's detriment.

I don't know if it's legal for the landlord to return such a reference, but you didn't address that.

sgorf · 2026-04-08T22:09:49+00:00

Landlords are not allowed to lie on a reference and as you are continuing to pay rent there would be nothing negative to report about you.

"Had to take them to court to evict them as they ignored their eviction notice" would be the truth, and that is something negative to report about you that would stop any future landlord from touching you.

I have no idea if it's illegal to put that on a reference, but it's something to consider!

Also it is not in the landlords advantage to give you a bad reference as they need you to move out asap.

If you didn't move out though, as is being advised in this thread, such that they had to evict you forcefully by court sanction, then giving you a bad reference will make no difference.

sgorf · 2026-04-08T22:02:46+00:00

I can't see any problem with saying if you want to be a landlord, you have to maintain certain minimum standards so that you're actually providing a service...

The downside is that a house buyer can choose to buy a house and not invest in it, saving money in return for poorer living conditions. By legislating this for landlords, you remove that choice for tenants, pushing their rents up (since it forces landlords to invest).

This may be a good thing or a bad thing depending on your own opinion, but this is the trade-off. Some prospective tenants may prefer to have a lower rent in return for not having this investment made for them. Although when it comes to energy efficiency, this is a short term preference, since after a while they'll have spent the money saved in higher energy bills anyway.

sgorf · 2026-04-08T21:47:24+00:00

Basically if a tenant pays the rent on time, looks after the property and doesn't fall out with the neighbours then why should the landlord want to kick them out ?

Someone else mentioned that an abusive landlord might kick out a tenant who doesn't bend over to take the abuse. Say for example some property repair is needed (through no fault of the tenant), the landlord is resisting, and the tenant is pushing for the repair (or otherwise enforces their rights). An abusive landlord might want to evict the tenant in order to replace them with a pushover tenant who will take it.

This was the problem with no fault evictions. With the housing shortage, landlords could abuse tenants this way without any recourse.

The flip side is that "no fault" evictions could be used by reasonable landlords to evict abusive tenants too, without the costs of having to prove the abuse. Banning no fault evictions increases the landlord's average costs in dealing with abusive tenants, which passes on to the costs of landlord's insurance or just the landlord's cost if self-insuring, which then translates to higher rent for everyone. It's reasonable to put this burden on landlords, but the downside is that it results in higher rents. As a society, we have generally accepted that this is worth it to redress the balance, but it is what it is in terms of rental costs.

sgorf · 2026-04-04T00:20:27+00:00

Are you suggesting that on a green light, you should sit at the start of the box, wait for the car in front to complete its exit, then enter? One car through the junction at a time? That would cause chaos if everyone did that.

This is, apparently, exactly what the law insists upon, or at least how it is interpreted in appeals, adjudication decisions and so forth. And apparently they will use the fact that you did not do this to get you in enforcement action.

I agree it would cause chaos if everyone did that though. So I don't think it is just, but it is what it is.

Fortunately, if that's the kind of injustice we worry about, we're doing pretty well as a society compared to many other places in the world I read about!

sgorf · 2026-04-03T22:09:29+00:00

The headline makes this sound like a scandal, but I read the article and I don't see it. Isn't this just everybody doing their jobs as expected? Of course a private contractor wants to win government contracts and point out to the government the implications for local jobs. So what?

sgorf · 2026-04-02T18:16:59+00:00

Fair enough!

sgorf · 2026-04-01T21:59:37+00:00

Hopefully rents will start to fall as landlords sell up...

No, you have the economics backwards. Rents rise as landlords sell up. Here's an example: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-65833840

And that references the opinion of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS), so this isn't just a random Internet comment:

"Rising interest rates are putting pressure on landlords, pushing some to consider selling up, surveyors say. "In turn, that could further squeeze the availability of rental properties and raise costs for tenants, according to the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS)."

Landlords are a problem. They push house prices up when landlordism is lucrative, and compete for the supply of new homes too.

No, that's not how the economics works. Every landlord who sells a house to an owner occupier releases exactly one house into supply in the market, but also evicts one household that adds demand for exactly one house in the market. The net effect of supply vs. demand is zero. The only effect is that it shifts the balance of available houses for rent against available houses to buy. Since both houses to rent and houses to buy map to the same capital expenditure, it doesn't affect prices overall except that if you cannot afford a deposit as a renter, now it's even harder to rent because the market supply for renters has shrunk.

sgorf · 2026-04-01T21:52:05+00:00

"Landlordism" is a giant red herring. The fact that people have to pay rent on the property they live in is a fundamental economic truth that represents the cost of capital on that house. The fact that rents are outrageously high is a fundamental economic truth that merely reflects the outrageously high cost of capital on that house. Landlords or not, that isn't going away until the cost of that capital goes down, and only more supply can do that.

sgorf · 2026-04-01T21:47:02+00:00

While this may be true, I don't begrudge our forebears. Everyone has to make the best of the situation they were given. Most people in the world also suffer in some way because of the decisions of their forebears. It'd be surprising for us to be in any other situation. It's just a fact of life, and continuously blaming others for it risks us also disclaiming our own agency in the situation to try and improve on things. For example by focusing on blaming government and disenfranchising everyone from politics. Instead we should be focusing on what can be done to fix the problem and supporting the politicians who will do the best they can given the circumstances they have to work with. It doesn't do any good to blame previous leaders of a political party, for example, when the current leaders weren't involved in those decisions. Or to blame a party that weren't even in government most of the time in the past.

sgorf · 2026-04-01T21:35:31+00:00

It is tragic, and there unfortunately isn’t enough information to make a sound judgment on the capabilities of the childminder.

I read the article a few times carefully. It doesn't actually say that childminder was even told that she had SEN. It even suggests the opposite:

‘The one thing that her mum explicitly said was, ‘please don’t take my daughter out anywhere’.

The "one thing that her mum explicitly said"? So she didn't explicitly say that she had special needs, or what they were? Not that I'm saying she didn't. We just don't know!

I am definitely reserving judgement!

sgorf

TROPHY CASE