After 12 years of renting, Ruby had never met most of her landlords in person. But one cold night in March 2023, at a friend’s house party in Dalston, east London, she found herself chatting to a man who, it turned out, owned the flat she previously lived in.
When the man mentioned the street she used to live on, Ruby asked which number. As he mouthed the exact address, she blurted out: “It’s me! Ruby. Your former tenant!” The landlord seemed bemused and asked, “I was a pretty good landlord, no?” Ruby later recalled feeling a “familiar feeling of hierarchy” and gave a feeble response, despite having spent years advocating for renters’ rights.
The encounter prompted Ruby to reflect on the imbalance between landlords and tenants. She noted that private tenants spend on average 36% of their income on rent and face the worst housing conditions of any type of tenure. While no-fault evictions are set to be abolished in England next month, having been effectively outlawed in Scotland in 2017, she pointed out that landlords still have other routes to remove tenants.
Ruby herself has been evicted twice under section 21 notices – once when a landlord needed to sell and once when a landlord wanted to raise the rent by £850 a month. The fear of losing her home prematurely has lingered, she said.
Meeting her former landlord in person gave Ruby the confidence to stand up for herself in what she called an “objectively unfair game”. Since then, she has successfully held her ground when subsequent landlords attempted to raise her rent and has helped other renters negotiate.
