It is a Wednesday afternoon at Stratford housing court, and every seat in the waiting room is full. Over the next few hours, a conveyor belt of tenants and lawyers file into the courtroom to discuss their housing disputes – up to 29 cases are dealt with in a single day.
In one case, a tenant is trying to buy more time after receiving a section 21 no-fault eviction earlier in the year, before they were banned. He has had no luck finding emergency housing with his local council.
His landlord wants him out in the next 14 days, but he says he needs more time. He is off work due to chronic ill health, and has three children aged eight, five and one – the two eldest are due back at school next week. He wants the maximum 42 days, but the judge grants 28, meaning he could be facing homelessness by the end of the month.
In another case, the judge postpones a section 21 eviction order made just before the new Renters’ Rights Act came in, as some of the documentation was proven to be out of date. This gives the tenant more time to find a new home.
While tenants try to delay their evictions, landlords make requests for their cases to be moved to the high court in an attempt to speed things up – the current wait for bailiffs in this part of London is seven months.
Lawyers have said a wave of last-minute no-fault evictions, and a growing number of landlords selling their properties, is pushing more renters into homelessness and driving England’s housing courts to breaking point.
Mustafa Sidki, a litigation partner at south-east law firm Thackray Williams, said: “We saw a huge increase in section 21 evictions just before the act came in. Now we’re getting a lot of instruction from landlords wanting to serve section 8 eviction notices [used when a tenant has breached a tenancy agreement] because they’re selling up as they say it’s no longer financially viable.
“The courts are overloaded – there’s just not enough court time or judicial time to deal with it. And tenants are living in absolute stress because they don’t know how long they’ve got. It used to take two to three months to get a hearing; now it can take up to a year.”
Official data released last week showed a 16% increase in section 21 evictions between April and June this year, compared with the same period in 2025, as landlords rushed to remove tenants.
“In every section 21 notice we served, the tenant didn’t move out, they have refused to vacate and are asking the courts to give them more time to find alternative accommodation,” said Sidki, who represents landlords and tenants.
This issue, along with the rising number of landlords selling their properties, had created a “perfect storm” in the court system, he said.
Savills estimated that 254,000 buy‑to‑let homes were listed for sale in the year to March 2026, a 28% increase on 2024. About 93,000 landlords left the market in 2025, with a further 110,000 forecast to leave during 2026, according to property industry analysts. In London, former rental properties accounted for 30% of all new sales, compared with 13% across the rest of the country.
“There was a lot of talk about no-fault evictions ending, but technically they haven’t – we’re getting a lot of section 8 notices where the tenant isn’t at fault, but the landlord has a right to sell,” Sidki said. “Sometimes these are tenants who have lived in the property for a decade, and they can’t find anywhere else to go.”
Lawyers said the lack of affordable homes for renters to move into meant they were increasingly delaying eviction as long as possible. Many local authorities have also told tenants they must resist eviction in order to access emergency housing support.
Neli Borisova, a senior associate at the law firm JMW, said: “Even where the tenants and landlords want an amicable resolution without having to go to court and all of that stress and expense and time, tenants regularly get advised to basically not leave until they’re evicted by the bailiffs, which puts them in a difficult place.
“I think that is going continue to be quite a frustration on the system.”
Nye Jones from Generation Rent said: “The fact so many landlords uprooted tenants’ lives just because they still could, shows how badly we needed greater protections and the end of section 21.
“Ideally local authorities should be providing more support to people who are on the cusp of homelessness than just ‘stay at home until the bailiffs come’. But it’s a sad fact that they want to avoid putting them in temporary accommodation as long as possible.”
