A growing chorus of housing leaders are warning that small private landlords are being deliberately squeezed out of the rental sector, with the controversial Renters (Reform) Bill at the centre of mounting concerns.
Speaking at this week’s Housing 2025 conference, experts warned that the proposed legislation is accelerating a shift toward large-scale institutional ownership of rental homes—at the expense of traditional landlords and tenants alike.
Hakeem Osinaike, strategic director of housing at Southwark Council, pulled no punches: “There is a feeling that the reason why the legislation might be passed is to move the country to institutional landlords.”
He described a disturbing trend in the capital, where 40% of the private rented sector has “disappeared”, with homes being bought up by corporate investors, hedge funds, and build-to-rent developers. Many of these properties are then repurposed as temporary accommodation, offered back to councils at inflated rates—often after evicting existing tenants.
“People who have been living in what they consider their long-term homes, paying their rent, not doing anything wrong, are being asked to leave,” Osinaike said. “Then they’re shifted into bed and breakfasts and hotels, while the same properties are leased back to councils for significantly more money.”
The Renters (Reform) Bill, now making its way through Parliament, includes a ban on Section 21 ‘no-fault’ evictions, a new redress scheme for tenants, expanded council enforcement powers, and revised grounds for eviction. While framed as a tenant protection measure, critics argue that it is having a chilling effect on small landlords—many of whom are opting to exit the market altogether.
At a panel chaired by Inside Housing’s Pete Apps, it was revealed that landlords are leaving the sector in large numbers, particularly at the lower end of the market, where cheaper rents serve key workers and low-income families.
Laura Neilson, chief executive of the Shared Health Foundation, spoke of landlords reclassifying homes into temporary accommodation units simply to extract higher payments from councils. “They’ll evict a family, change the tenure, and move in another at higher rent. We’re seeing that reasonably often,” she said.
This supply crunch is now pushing councils to overspend by hundreds of millions of pounds on temporary accommodation, much of it substandard and ill-suited for families.
“There are no cots,” said Helen Watson of the charity Rentstart, describing shocking conditions. “Children under one are dying in temporary accommodation. This is going to be the next big scandal—on par with the Post Office or infected blood.”
The human toll is severe. Families are displaced far from their communities, children lose school places, and working parents find themselves slipping through the cracks—too ‘well-off’ to top the housing list, yet priced out of the shrinking rental market.
Housing associations, too, are sounding the alarm. Helen Walsham of Bromford Flagship noted that “many of those made homeless won’t qualify as priority need,” leaving them stranded in a system where the safety net is fraying.
The message to landlords is clear: there is a seismic shift underway in the UK’s rental market, and the writing may already be on the wall for small-scale operators.
Without urgent intervention, experts warn the country could find itself in a monopolised rental system, where affordability is sacrificed and vulnerable tenants are shuffled between overpriced, unsuitable homes—owned not by local landlords, but by faceless investment giants.
As the debate over the Renters (Reform) Bill continues, the question remains: is this reform—or a reset designed to edge out the very landlords who’ve long held up the sector?