Social Housing (Emergency Protection of Tenancy Rights)

I beg to move,

That leave be given to bring in a Bill to give social housing tenants the right to continuity of secure tenancy in circumstances when they have to move because of a threat to the personal safety of the tenant or someone in their household; to place associated responsibilities on local authorities and social housing providers; and for connected purposes.

If a member of our household were threatened with violence, and the police advised us that we had to move straightaway in order to stay safe, any one of us would find that terrifying and bewildering. We might reasonably expect to receive support; we would not expect to lose our home altogether and find ourselves in the homelessness system. However, that is what happened to my constituent Georgia when gang members came to her home and threatened her teenage son.

Georgia is a housing association tenant who had lived in her home for nine years. She and her children were very happy in their home, which she had recently decorated. Then her neighbours told her that one afternoon while she was at work, they had heard loud banging on her door. Georgia eventually coaxed out of her son the information that he had witnessed something that some local gang members had not wanted him to see, and they had come to her home looking for him.

Georgia contacted the police, who told her that she had to move, immediately, for her family’s safety. She got in touch with her housing association, who told her that it was the council’s responsibility to provide emergency housing. The council placed Georgia and her children in temporary accommodation. The temporary accommodation was in another borough, was of poor quality and was very expensive. Georgia’s children did not have enough space, the flat was damp and dirty, it was hard for her children to do their homework, and Georgia started to suffer from panic attacks which affected her work.

By the time Georgia’s friend got in touch with me because she was worried about Georgia’s health and the wellbeing of her children, they had been in the temporary accommodation for six months. Worse than that, her housing association had started the process of ending her tenancy because she was no longer living in her flat. The consequence of this, in the context of the UK’s housing crisis, would have been Georgia and her children being added to the statistics of homeless households, in temporary accommodation and on the housing waiting list.

No one should become homeless because their child is threatened. In one London borough, 47 housing association tenants have required homelessness assistance from the council as a result of violence since 2019. Across the country, that means that thousands of families have to leave their homes each year, with their secure tenancies potentially at risk, on top of having to rebuild their lives in a new area.

Homelessness is fundamentally destabilising, involving the loss of a sanctuary and of a place in one’s community. It is deeply traumatising to have to make an emergency move because of a threat of violence and start again somewhere else. Our housing system should do everything possible to help families in such circumstances make the transition to a new permanent home as soon as possible, to limit the harm caused by the threat. My Bill would do that. It would require social housing landlords, whether councils or housing associations, to protect the tenancy rights of their tenants who have to move owing to a threat of violence. It would also confer a new duty on social housing landlords to co-operate with each other in circumstances in which a tenant, for safety reasons, has to move to an area where his or her current landlord does not own any property. There are some good examples of co-operation already, such as the pan-London housing reciprocal, and I commend that work, but for as long as this remains voluntary, some tenants will fall through the gaps.