Comment: ‘Rental reforms must make it harder for landlords to discriminate against LGBTQ+ tenants’
As the party police never tire of reminding us, Pride is a protest.
I wish they didn’t have a point but, sadly, there is plenty to shout about at Saturday’s parade, as shown by the responses to a survey by Generation Rent and LGBTQ+ homelessness charity AKT.
But these were disproportionately experienced by LGBTQ+ tenants, who were 48 per cent more likely to have lived in unsafe housing and 19 per cent more likely to have struggled to get repairs done.
Shockingly, one in five reported discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation, including available homes suddenly ‘being let’ but then remaining on the market.
Under the Equality Act 2010 it is illegal to be treated differently for reasons including gender or sexual identity, but so much of the discrimination reported is hard to prove or quantify.
Landlords might no longer be allowed explicitly to ban certain groups from renting a room but too many tools (including no-fault evictions and failure to maintain properties) are still available to bigoted landlords.
While changes outlined in the rental reform white paper, published this month, don’t specifically address identity and discrimination, there is reason to hope that the better regulation of landlords and more secure tenancies outlined in it will make it harder to enact prejudice — overtly or not.
