As landlords charge up to 66% price increases, young people are being left with no home. This emotive documentary follows the victims of the UK’s broken rental market
In some ways, you don’t need to know anything more about the current state of the rental property market than the fact that “no fault” evictions exist, whereby a private landlord can boot out a tenant without reason under section 21 of the Housing Act 1988. They can do it within the strict terms of the law or, if untroubled by conscience (but who can imagine a landlord in such a state?), issue them in the hope of unsettling the tenant so much that they leave without checking their rights and/or thinking it’s worth the fight. But even without one being issued, the mere fact that they exist clouds a renter’s peace of mind. It is a prime marker of how weighted in one party’s favour our law – and our culture – is over the other.
So to BBC Three’s four-part series Evicted, following a number of twentysomething workers in various cities after they, through no fault of their own – it’s right there in the name! – are served eviction notices and have two months to find alternative accommodation. They represent different slices of generation rent but what they all have in common is that they are employed, paying their rent on time, have little chance of avoiding losing their current home and virtually no hope of ever owning their own place.
Evicted aired on BBC Three and is available on BBC iPlayer.
