How to deal with 'right to rent' checks and discrimination

In April this year Law for Life published a new guide: A survival guide to starting a tenancy and right to rent checks. The guide is aimed at people who are most likely to experience discrimination and difficulty in the process of starting a tenancy and right to rent checks, and is intended to help people understand the system, deal with problems and recognise when they are being discriminated against. 

Many people, particularly when they have expertise in a topic, assume that producing a guide on that topic for the public is a fairly straightforward task. In fact, translating complex information into an easy to understand and ‘human’ guide which meets people’s real needs, is surprisingly complex, but something we take pride in doing well at Law for Life. Often, as in this case, we identify the need for a guide through our community education work.

Background

In late 2020 Law for Life was delivering a programme on housing rights for refugees. During that programme we learned that there were particular problems for refugees with the government’s ‘right to rent’ scheme in England.

To help us understand more about what refugees were experiencing with the scheme we ran a survey in January 2021. We received 24 responses, of which 17 were from private renters and seven were from advocates working at organisations helping people access accommodation in the privately rented sector. 62% of respondents stated that they or their clients were British, 34%  had a refugee status and four per cent were EU nationals.

Although the survey sample was small, the survey showed:

  • Clear evidence that the right to rent scheme disproportionately affected certain groups: people who speak limited English, people who do not have a British passport, people on benefits, people on low income, and students.

  • Some groups of people, such as refugees, were likely to be more affected by the scheme because they fell into more than one category that is disproportionately affected.

  • Evidence that the scheme was discriminatory towards certain groups.

We used what we learned to produce public legal education (PLE) materials (an information guide and a training course) on right to rent for people supporting refugees and others with housing. These materials were created in partnership with Allen & Overy’s Pro-Bono Team in 2020.  

Brexit

Groups advocating on behalf of EU nationals in the UK were concerned that EU nationals in England, who previously had an unlimited right to rent, which they could prove by showing their passport or national identity card, would have a much harder time proving their status once the Brexit implementation period came to an end on the 1st January 2021.

At Law for Life we decided to update and expand our right to rent PLE materials to produce a new guide aimed directly at individuals, including EU nationals and others who might experience discrimination or difficulty with right to rent checks. We carried out another survey aimed at this broader audience to help us make sure that the guide covered all the things people needed to know.

Survey respondents told us that:

  • Many people do not get as far as the right to rent checks because they struggle to find a landlord who will rent to tenants on benefits or without a deposit, or because they experience discrimination.
  • Landlords do not always fully understand the rules themselves.
  • There is confusion about what documents people with different immigration status need to prove their right to rent, including the situation with EU pre- and settled status.

How we responded to our survey findings

Armed with this evidence we applied our Better information principles to identify our purpose in writing the guide, the audience and the topics we would cover. For example, because of what we learned about the wider issues of starting a tenancy, as well as with right to rent checks, we decided to broaden the new guide out with the aim of improving the likelihood of users of the guide of being able to successfully start a tenancy.

We identified our key target audience for the guide:

  • Refugees
  • EU nationals and other migrants
  • People on benefits
  • Other people who are likely to experience discrimination, for example, people who belong to ethnic minority groups, disabled people, people with ‘foreign’ sounding names.
  • Students

And we set out what we wanted people to know and be able to do as a result of using the guide:

  • Understand what to do when starting a tenancy
  • Understand when they are being discriminated against
  • Understand what they need to show in a right to rent check
  • Understand the process of a right to rent check
  • To decide if they want to take action if they are being treated unfairly
  • To understand what action they could take if they are being treated unfairly

Once we had identified the audience and their needs we began the writing process, ensuring we used plain, simple language, and explained concepts, systems and institutions, to make the guide as helpful as possible. 

A survival guide to starting a tenancy and right to rent checks is now available alongside our other housing rights guides that cover some of the most common issues that private renters or people experiencing homelessness have to deal with. It is also used in our housing rights community training, delivered for refugees or BAME communities. And we are currently producing a short video, covering most of the issues included in the guide, in Arabic language. The video will be available in September 2022.

A survival guide to starting a tenancy and right to rent checks was created with thanks to funding from the Litigants in Person Support Service and with support from Allen & Overy.  We are grateful to Sam Lister and John Perry of the Chartered Institute of Housing who provided advice and feedback on drafts of the guide.

July 2022