By Stephen Cook, housing consultant.

The housing profession can sometimes over complicate what it does, or what it thinks it should be doing. As a cynical old housing manager, I used to challenge these illusions of grandeur by reminding colleagues that we basically had two jobs to do: collect the rent and do the repairs.

As a young housing professional learning my trade I was taught the law. The Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 (Section 11) set out the landlord’s repair obligations; the Protection from Eviction Act 1977 gave tenants the right to the ‘quiet enjoyment’ of their home; and the Housing Act 1988 provided the grounds for possession if a landlord wanted to end a tenancy.

Over the last 30 or 40 years these laws have been updated to take account of changes, but they have essentially remained the same, requiring landlords to do repairs and allowing them to end a tenancy if the rent is not paid. Well, that was until the 25 March 2020 when the Coronavirus Act received royal assent and, consequently, the landlord/tenant relationship changed overnight, albeit only for a limited but as yet undefined period of time.

Section 81 of the new act refers explicitly to housing possession cases and now requires landlords to give tenants a minimum of three months’ notice if they intend to apply to court to end the tenancy.

This is instead of the 28 days normally required and will remain in force until the 30th September when it will next be reviewed. Perhaps of more significance was the decision on the 27th March that all possession cases will be suspended until at least the end of June. This appears to mean that during the next 90 days no evictions will be granted by the courts for any reason.

Whilst obviously protecting tenants who are unable to pay the rent due to not working or not being paid during the Coronavirus lockdown, it does raise the interesting point that tenants guilty of causing a serious nuisance to their neighbours might also be safe from action by their landlord.

On the repairs front landlords have now been advised, as part of the general social distancing/isolation provisions of the 2020 Act, to only attend homes to undertake ‘emergency’ repairs. For the foreseeable future tenants will not be able to report day-to-day repairs, and landlords will have to devise systems to hold any requests they do receive and prioritise them for completion once normality has been resumed – whenever that might be.

At the time of writing, however, it seems that landlords will still be expected to carry out ‘emergency’ repairs (although who defines ‘emergency’ is not clear) and routine health and safety works (such as gas servicing and fire alarm testing) within the current legal timeframes.

The government has already extended all MOT certificates for cars by six months but has not yet altered the requirement for annual safety inspections to be completed within 12 months of the previous one. Enough room for confusion and some disagreement with the Regulator in due course, no doubt.

And so, for the first time in my housing career, the law is now preventing landlords from carrying out repairs and from taking legal action for any breaches of tenancy. We are, it seems, no longer doing repairs or collecting rents!

Unprecedented times indeed, but whilst these changes are only intended to be temporary, we should be wary of other more permanent changes to the landlord/tenant relationship that might happen as a result of the Coronavirus crisis.

It has taken a couple of weeks but most housing organisations now have their staff working from home in a coordinated way, and many people at home unable to go out or work have found themselves turning to social media and video apps such as Skype, Zoom, or Houseparty to keep in touch with friends and family. As impressive as it is that both businesses and individuals have so quickly embraced the virtual world, the reality is that we can probably never go back to the way we were.

Organisations will not in the future be able to justify sending large numbers of staff to a central location for a one-hour meeting now we know that Zoom is an adequate replacement.

And, similarly, the local housing office that residents fought so valiantly to keep open, and that during the ‘lockdown’ has been mothballed, is unlikely to reopen as the alternative to face-to-face interaction becomes more and more normalised.

Digital by default has become digital by necessity, and real-life experience is showing that more people than imagined can actually make use of the technology. As a consequence, when this is all over ‘business as usual’ will undoubtedly mean more services being accessed remotely and online.

This will be true for the housing world too, which is great if you are able to contact your landlord via the internet or video app – but it may serve to further marginalise those individuals in our communities that require, and indeed rely on, face-to-face contact.

In the rush to build upon the success of their digital strategies, and make massive savings to recover a range of losses caused by the Coronavirus, residents’ groups must make sure that their social landlords are not allowed to wash their hands completely of people still needing the personal touch: a little more time and a reassuring smile rather than an automated confirmation.