I spent a day in a court where ‘no-fault’ evictions reach 10 an hour. Whose fault is this, Rishi Sunak? | Polly Toynbee (2024)

This is where the housing pressure-cooker explodes. This is Manchester’s civil court, like others all across England, where people are made homeless, hundreds every day. Those unable to pay rocketing mortgages have houses repossessed here. Tenants unable to cope with stagnant incomes lose their homes here when budgets no longer cover rising rents. From here, court bailiffs are sent to remove them.

The great scandal is the spiralling number of tenants evicted on “no-fault” section 21 orders: these allow a landlord to turn someone out even if they have always paid their rent on time, however many years they have been there, however well-behaved they have been. The 2019 Conservative manifesto contained a promise to abolish this power, finally introducing the renters’ reform bill. But then abruptly, in October, the government suspended it indefinitely, with no timeframe, only a hazy statement that it would wait for “reforms” to court delays – sometime never, given the state of the courts.

Here’s Jane, in her late 50s, on crutches, with a degenerative spine disease: she’s on personal independence payment, a benefit that is hard to claim. She has lived in her home for nine years; her grandchild was born here, she says. Now the landlord wants her out, on a section 21. She always paid her rent, and got repairs done herself. Many tenants dare not complain for fear of triggering a section 21.

Her housing benefit has been frozen for four years, so it doesn’t pay all her rent, leaving a monthly gap of £140 she pays out of her sickness benefits. But all she wants is to stay near family, with friends, in the street. She’s been on the council waiting list for eight years, bidding every time a one-bedroom flat comes up on council lists, but she knows she has next to no chance. Once she is evicted, the council will offer her a temporary B&B on account of her sickness, but she’s told it will be miles away. No chance of getting another private rental when you look at local prices. Her deposit, when it is returned to her after nine years, won’t be enough for a deposit on a new flat, given record rent rises.

A Shelter solicitor, Kirsty Almond, is there to help whoever turns up – to advise, comfort and sometimes slightly delay eviction by finding errors in the landlord’s paperwork. The judge has virtually no leeway: a landlord can evict on two months’ notice, and Jane’s has expired. She does get an extra six weeks, the maximum allowed for “exceptional hardship”, owing to her health. The landlord demanded court costs; Shelter got them slightly reduced, to £481.75. But that’s it.

The court lists are now so packed in Manchester that Shelter can no longer cover them all. In many of the country’s courts, people are left with no one to advise them (duty solicitors are compulsory only in criminal courts). On Wednesday, yet again, extra lists had been added due to the backlog. Almond says the rate of evictions and the suffering is the worst she’s ever seen in her 15 years in this Shelter job, with incomes no longer covering rent and mortgage rises. The last year has seen nearly 40% more section 21 no-fault evictions in England. Some are because landlords themselves, unable to pay their mortgages, have had property repossessed.

A father turns up. He and his wife and four children are due to be evicted from a small two-bedroom flat. He shows pictures of mould and decay: Almond says they can threaten a counter-suit and hope the landlord backs down, but it’s doubtful. The rent has risen £200 a month, beyond what this tenant can manage on his wages. She has recently seen “a run of nurses and teachers” who can’t pay their rent, surviving on food banks. She talks of all the cases where children are moved and moved again by section 21 orders, several bus rides from their schools, but there’s nothing that can be done.

While I spent the day with Almond and her colleagues, watching the express through-put – reaching an astonishing 10 section 21 evictions an hour – Keir Starmer was telling PMQs that a record number of children, 140,000, would be homeless this Christmas. He spoke of an 11-year-old boy whose letter to Santa requested “a for ever home”, and no new toys, “just my old toys out of storage”. Sunak sneered that this was “typical shameless opportunism”. Perhaps the prime minister should spend some time in a court like this.

On the same day, Michael Gove was relaxing his housebuilding targets, again, under pressure from nimby MPs. Even the rightwing Centre for Policy Studies says 500,000 new homes need to be built a year after a decade of missed targets.

Politicians prefer talking about first-time buyers when the pressing need is for social housing to replace the 2m council homes sold off since the 1980s by Thatcher’s right-to-buy scheme. The government still prevents councils using the full receipts from those sales to build new council homes.

Though nearly 80% of pensioners own their own homes, the number facing Jane’s plight, as private renters constantly vulnerable to eviction, is rising and will increase faster as lucky boomers give way to a younger generation, many of whom will never be able to own. These are the families now bringing up their children in private rented insecurity. Piling on subsidies for first-time buyers only pushes up prices: it’s lifetime secure social housing that will make the difference. Labour’s housing shadow, Matthew Pennycook, says the Tories have presided over the net loss of 14,000 social homes every year since 2010.

Labour promises 1.5m more homes in its first term – affordable homes, social housing and new towns – with planning reforms to stop nimbys blocking building. The Tories are on their 16th housing minister in 13 years, so it’s no surprise that policy has gone nowhere, backing off from planning reform for fear of losing home counties seats.

Shelter says 40,000 more people will be homeless in England this Christmas than last: many will have come through eviction courts such as this one, where some will end up among 26% increase in people now sleeping rough.

As she copes with the rising torrent of eviction cases, Almond says after so many years she is mostly hardened to the daily tragedies, but once in a while a case brings tears to her eyes. It might be children, evicted over and over, in appalling temporary accommodation far from school and relatives. But recently it was an older woman, in her 60s, who had run a local bar for years and lived above it. She had always paid her rent. The court gave her just the statutory two weeks, and she had nowhere to go, no one to help her move her stock, and nowhere to put it. Almond’s inability to help enough is what gets to her, as she is only ever able to delay for a little while something that is cruelly inevitable.

• Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist