Why no-fault evictions shouldn’t be banned

A decade ago, left-wingers started using the phrase ‘zero hours contracts’ to refer to what had previously been known as casual labour or piece work. Once this pejorative term become widely used, Ed Miliband, then the leader of the Labour party, promised to ban them. Similarly, the phrase ‘no fault evictions’ was almost unknown to the general public until 2017 when pressure groups like Generation Rent and Shelter began using it and Jeremy Corbyn promised to ban them. The term had been used for years by landlords to distinguish the eviction of someone whose tenancy had expired (a Section 21 notice) from an ‘at fault’ eviction of someone who had broken the terms of their tenancy agreement (a Section 8 notice). The right of landlords to reclaim their property after an agreed period of time had never been controversial, but the words ‘no fault’ implied unfairness towards tenants who were, in the words of the Independent, ’kicked