The decades-long 'Housing Emergency'

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Book Review: Tenants - The People on the Frontline of Britain's Housing Emergency

Vicky Spratt (Profile Books, 2022)

"The urgent story of this country's biggest crisis, told through the lives of those it most affects"

There is a lot to like about this book, not least because it tells stories that need to be told. Hearing the voices of tenants is important because they are marginalised (if not subtly ridiculed) in multiple ways in mainstream discourse. As Vicky Spratt points out (p.246) there are significant overlaps and intersections with other forms of disadvantage and people of certain ethnicities, genders, and sexualities are disproportionately likely to be renters. Most of all though, tenants tend to be people of a particular class: that is the working class. These are the voices that tend not to be taken very seriously, for very long, in the UK, voiced by the kinds of people that 'reality' documentaries like to villainise.

Part of a dilapidated building.
Photo by Blogging Guide on Unsplash

Like the author, part of my earlier years was spent living in a council house. It was great. I worked in social housing for about 25 years, becoming a housing advice worker in the late 1980's: just as the 1988 Housing Act was coming into force. This pernicious piece of legislation did away with fair rents, undermined security of tenure, and deliberately created a built-in precarity to renting. The logic, we were told, was to encourage more provision of rented housing by removing the disincentives that discouraged landlords from entering the market. A fraud if ever there was one.

The position of tenants since then has worsened quite steadily, and perhaps even deliberately, and many key features of the private rented sector haven't changed significantly. The author is very careful about laying out the facts as she understands them, albeit repeating herself rather a lot, and contradicting herself at times too.

Giving tenants a voice and making their stories known is a fine achievement which Vicky Spratt deserves credit for. As an advice worker I heard these sorts of stories day after day, and eventually lost heart because there was so little positive that we could do. The dice were, still are, loaded.

It is a shame though that the author so belabours the point. I get that she wants to back up every assertion but I thought that this book would have worked much better with the focus more firmly on the ethnography; on the voices of the tenants.

The book reads like a series of The Guardian articles strung together (perhaps it is?) while reaching for academic credibility by incorporating extensive (I would say too many) references to reports, legislation, and primary and secondary sources of an impressive range. Go check my bibliography! But this factual content is cited in a really lame way that is becoming regrettably common. I assume that the publisher made this decision. All footnotes are confined to a separate section, sorted by page, without any subscripted _{like this} numbers in the main text to help you to check a source (or even if there is a source). So you have to flick between the references and the page to see if content is cited and, if it is, what the source was.

Because this is laborious I suspect that many errors are covered up and may not be corrected if there is ever a second edition. I'm curious also: did the author write a book that would have been suitable for a specialist audience but fail to find a publisher? I'm speculating, and this is unfair on a young writer who wants to get her arguments out there, but to be taken seriously how about you make sure your facts and your opinions are easily distinguishable, and that they can be backed up?

I'm not always convinced that they can. Let's take the claim on p.114 that "almost a quarter (24 percent) of the homeless population in the UK are LGBTQ+-identifying". What: even the street drinkers staying at Simon or one of the old spikes? (I worked in one of these myself.) Because I knew that this was not even vaguely plausible I ploughed through the notes, found the reference, checked the online version of the report and... the very first sentence of the Foreword to the Report cited does make this claim. But… it is clearly in reference to their target clients: LGBTQ+ young people. Of whom 24% are homeless. A little different, in fact worlds away, from "almost a quarter" of the homeless population.

Unfortunately, this gives the impression that

• the author wishes to mislead, or


• seeks to tick the EDI box for no good reason, and/or


• flicked through a PDF, found a juicy quote on the very first page and chucked that in to buttress the References list.

Being charitable, maybe she had the facts down properly but then rewrote that part of the text for some innocent reason, forgetting to double-check the source. It's sloppy, regardless, and who knows how many more such misrepresentations there are?

The text is frequently repetitive, wanders off on secondary digressions because of the earnest wish to back up every claim, and is generally not well-written. The author asserts, for example, that tenants could enforce their rights if only they would "deign to complain" (p.136) Unscrupulous landlords are "charging … through the nose" (p.173).

On p.175 she says

People are illegally evicted all the time. And yet we don't know exactly how often, because no official data is collected.

OK: I get that she doesn't really mean evictions are happening non-stop, it's just an idiom. The colloquialism sits uncomfortably with the info-splurges and the attempts at academic rigour hat surround it. The authorial voice flicks between these style of address far too often.

Having worked in the voluntary sector for decades, mostly in housing, I was idealistic. Underpaid. Spent half the year worrying about if the service would have our funding renewed. Gathering statistics to prove how worthwhile we were. Sighing with relief when we got a grant, again, but only for another year. Rinse then repeat… Quite a lot of the very worthy organisations cited by Vicky Spratt (Crisis, Shelter, ACORN, many others) are in very probably the same position.

To some extent, these third-sector organisations have a vested interest in arguing that tenants are victims. If only the power imbalances were levelled out (or levelled up as the Idiot Johnson had it) things would be so much fairer. Well… yes… but the problem is that there's an overarching System and if nothing is done to fundamentally dismantle that System then all we can do is tinker. Take some parts out, polish them, and replace them. Or install a shiny new bit.

Now I'm going to take a closer look at Chapter 9 The Shadow Private Renting Sector. The theme is the exploitation of people who may not be in the UK legally, and who end up in overcrowded Houses in Multiple Occupation (HMOs). Sometimes a trustee tenant runs the operation, concealing the identity of the real landlord. Several people may share a room, as is the case for two of the three young Hungarian cousins interviewed by the author in Bradford.

They each pay £80 per week for a shared room but consider themselves fortunate because there are few opportunities in Hungary. Of course the author has to mention nasty old Viktor Orban, you know, that transphobic Russophile: because the author wants to trust that the unlawful immigrants are being truthful about their reasons for leaving Hungary (not simple opportunism). But she subtly ridicules them for considering their ostensible landlord "a good guy". They say this because he overlooks certain niceties of the legal system that might impede the flow of cash. He permitted one of them to pay his deposit piecemeal over several weeks. Sounds reasonable enough, in fact.

They know that if the cash flow dries up a swift and unsentimental eviction would follow; but that's okay because "If you want something, you've got to pay" (p.176).

Spratt virtuously tells them that actually it's not that simple, they have rights! Yet she concedes that these rights are routinely ignored and quotes her local contact as saying that the same names keep showing up when rogue landlords are being investigated. Sometimes people who have already been prosecuted. Despite this glaring problem, Spratt asks why won't these poor exploited people go to 'the authorities'.

The tenants, like most tenants, grasp that there is no point: laws aren't made for the likes of them. The author's translator Tomas points out, "they're afraid of what might happen if we involve the police" (p.179) - which Spratt does not challenge. (A few pages before this she laments how ignorant police are of housing law. If only some training could be arranged!)

Yup: English cops are merely poorly trained, rather than automatically aggressive towards people who they can suss straight away are not socially powerful. (Not like in Viktor Orban's Hungary. I expect.) It seems not to occur to Vicky that relatively few English cops these days are helping pensioners across the road and bantering cheerfully wit' da youth. Why, she asks on p.115, did the police not check an evictee's tenancy agreement? I can't speculate why but one possibility is that the unfortunate tenant wasn't in fact a tenant but a lodger, her landlady lived in the same house. At best there was an implied license agreement: pay your rent and you can stay. But stay on my right side because if you are a lodger and your landlady takes against you it's time to pack and leave. No matter how well-trained the local coppers are.

Forgive my cynicism but to summarise: you have rights, but these rights are not worth enforcing.

Spratt salts and peppers the chapter with references to Modern Slavery and bad people who are unhappy about immigration, taking to task the Nigel Farages of this world. Their argument is that uncontrolled immigration is causing housing pressure. She protests that actually the unlawful immigrants only end up in illegal HMOs (as her Hungarian interlocutors demonstrate) so how can that disadvantage people stuck on housing waiting lists?

Thought experiment: there's an HMO divided up into eight bedsits. Young people could occupy these when their parents' overcrowded council house becomes too much. Eight households who are not homeless equals eight fewer households on the local waiting list for social housing. (Except of course single homeless people tend to have no legal right to be rehoused, but bear with me.)

The landlord realises he can make more cash by accommodating East Europeans two or three to a room. Now there are eight fewer bedsits for local people. But pointing this out is blaming immigrants and beneath contempt.

Spratt cites the Immigration Act 1974 (at p.174) which requires

all landlords in England to check a new tenant's right to be in the UK. A 2017 report by the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI) found that 42 per cent of landlords were, as a result, less likely to rent to anyone without a British passport. That leaves an unknown number who - like the Bradford men's landlord - are prepared to turn a blind eye to their tenants' immigration status.

... if only the landlord was more conscientious the HMO would stay as eight bedsits while those naughty Hungarians would be kipping in a squat instead. It's just moving problems around, yet that is what she suggests so many legislative interventions have done.

And she's right. But she applies the same logic herself in order to signal virtue: immigrants are not bad, they're victims.

All books nowadays have to mention the evils of coronavirus and who could dispute that crowded conditions may help to spread illness? Established fact since the sanitary discourses of the nineteenth century, not so? The same line of reasoning, as Spratt points out, led to early housing campaigners achieving welfare provision for housing the poor. She then shoots herself in the foot (after a short digression about the meaning of noblesse oblige) by pointing out that "two-thirds of homeowners aged sixty-five and older have at least two spare bedrooms…" (p.172) seemingly blind to the fact that these were the people disproportionately becoming seriously ill and dying with (of?) coronavirus, not the people in the HMOs.

The pattern that recurs is that Spratt introduces some tenants, a campaigner or advice worker, saunters off for a multi-page digression, then we're back with the interviewee on first name basis but we've forgotten who Helen, or Tony, etc, were by now. Unless I suppose you devour the book in one sitting.

To me that's a giveaway sign that the interceding material was cut-and-paste into the middle of the ethnographic stuff. But why? It certainly can't be for thematic cohesion because the author goes all over the place in her need to cover every possible evil.

Towards the end of the book, Spratt comes up with some ideas, and one of these is the abolition of no-fault evictions. This is one of the keystones of the Renters Reform Bill currently (October 2023) before the UK Parliament. Let's see how that's going: https://news.sky.com/story/ban-on-no-fault-evictions-may-face-long-delays-amid-fears-of-tory-rebellion-12990907

Another good idea - one that is being followed by some local authorities - is to adopt a Housing First approach. Instead of insisting that a homeless junkie cleans up his act, or that a single mother starts looking after her children properly, before you offer them a public sector tenancy, how about they are housed securely first and then supported in addressing the problems that they face? Problems that inevitably feel overwhelming when you are crammed into a damp B&B room in Weston-super-Mare.

As I said at the outset, there is plenty of good material in this book, and I feel a little callous focusing heavily on its faults. What would be good would be a second edition: updated, more carefully structured, with a consistent authorial voice, maybe some illustrations and other mechanisms for breaking up the massive chunks of text. Proper footnotes/endnotes! It would need to be competently edited natch.

It could be a killer book.