By Jules Birch.

Four weeks into the coronavirus lockdown and already the impossible seems possible. A government that had promised to end rough sleeping by the end of the parliament instructed local authorities to do it in a weekend. Local housing allowance had no sooner emerged from the four-year benefits freeze than it was being restored to the 30th percentile level at a cost of £1bn.

Possession proceedings against tenants are on hold with the courts closed down and notice periods extended from two to three months in England and Wales.

Yet for tenants and landlords alike, these are temporary fixes in the first phase of a crisis that could still generate a wave of rent arrears, evictions, and homelessness unless permanent solutions can be found.

At the same time, the crisis has shone a revealing light on our unequal housing system. A large, comfortably housed group of us has had every incentive to buy as big a home as possible thanks to generous tax treatment, low interest rates, and government-supported house price rises. They have the spare bathrooms the government wants us to self-isolate in, and millions of spare bedrooms to work from home in.

A poorly housed minority has no inside space to self-isolate and no garden for the kids to play in, and spare rooms mean the bedroom tax. Beyond rough sleeping, thousands of families are still in temporary accommodation, with some stuck in a single bed and breakfast room.

These inequalities should matter even in normal times but have not counted enough up to now. In this crisis, they matter fundamentally as the quicker a virus can spread to the overcrowded and badly housed and homeless, the quicker it can spread to NHS workers and the rest of us.

In the immediate aftermath of the lockdown, many councils and housing associations were quick to pledge no evictions for coronavirus rent arrears, which is surely the bare minimum required of a social landlord.

Some are going much further and stepping up for their local communities, but there are also examples of tone-deaf responses from others. For example, while many of the biggest commercial operators of student accommodation are waiving rent for the summer term, two large housing associations are among those insisting that students must pay the rent for rooms they cannot occupy.

There are some outstanding examples of individual private landlords going out of their way to help but some are behaving appallingly, with the ultimate example being a landlord threatening to evict NHS workers from their home if a cure for the virus could not be found in
the next few weeks.

For all the tens of billions of pounds poured into government support schemes for employees and the self-employed, increases in Universal Credit, and extensions of statutory sick pay, many workers are not covered, and the safety net is still full of holes. Most glaringly perhaps, the government refuses to end the five-week wait for the first payment under its flagship benefits scheme.

Even with unprecedented government support in place, we have already seen 1.4 million new claims for benefits (seven times the normal level) and 1.2 million mortgage borrowers applying for a holiday on their payments (one in nine of them).

However, analysis by the Resolution Foundation shows that homeowners with a mortgage were relatively well off going into the crisis: a quarter of them have more than £10,000 in savings, and payments missed during the holiday can be made up over the rest of their loan
term.

By contrast, just 7% of renters have savings of over £10,000 and do not have the option to spread missed payments over the next 20 years. That LHA increase will not help private renters who lose their job but are paying an average or high rent. Social renters are disproportionately more likely to be in jobs that cannot be done from home. And those increases in benefits will mean nothing to a rising number of households who will be subject to the benefit cap.

All this strongly suggests that more help will be needed, starting with England and Wales matching Scotland’s six-month notice period for tenants, and Help to Rent to match the rumoured extension of Help to Buy.

But with millions of tenants financially exposed, substantial forbearance will also be needed from landlords in general to prevent the possible becoming a wave of evictions and homelessness. For social landlords in particular, hard choices are looming between their bottom line and their social purpose.