\n<\/p>\n
I<\/span>t 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 \u2013 up to 29 cases are dealt with in a single day.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n In another case, the judge postpones a section 21 eviction order made just before the new Renters\u2019 Rights Act came in, as some of the documentation was proven to be out of date.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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 the current wait for bailiffs in this part of London is seven months.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s housing courts to breaking point.<\/p>\n Mustafa Sidki, a litigation partner at south-east law firm Thackray Williams, said: \u201cWe saw a huge increase in section 21 evictions just before the act came in. Now we\u2019re 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\u2019re selling up as they say it\u2019s no longer financially viable.<\/p>\n \u201cThe courts are overloaded \u2013 there\u2019s just not enough court time or judicial time to deal with it. And tenants are living in absolute stress because they don\u2019t know how long they\u2019ve got. It used to take two to three months to get a hearing; now it can take up to a year.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cIn every section 21 notice we served, the tenant didn\u2019t move out, they have refused to vacate and are asking the courts to give them more time to find alternative accommodation,\u201d said Sidki, who represents landlords and tenants.<\/p>\n This issue, along with the rising number of landlords selling their properties, had created a \u201cperfect storm\u201d in the court system, he said.<\/p>\n Savills estimated that 254,000 buy\u2011to\u2011let 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThere was a lot of talk about no-fault evictions ending, but technically they haven\u2019t \u2013 we\u2019re getting a lot of section 8 notices where the tenant isn\u2019t at fault, but the landlord has a right to sell,\u201d Sidki said. \u201cSometimes these are tenants who have lived in the property for a decade, and they can\u2019t find anywhere else to go.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Neli Borisova, a senior associate at the law firm JMW, said: \u201cEven 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\u2019re evicted by the bailiffs, which puts them in a difficult place.<\/p>\n \u201cI think that is going continue to be quite a frustration on the system.\u201d<\/p>\n Nye Jones from Generation Rent said: \u201cThe fact so many landlords uprooted tenants\u2019 lives just because they still could, shows how badly we needed greater protections and the end of section 21.<\/p>\n \u201cIdeally local authorities should be providing more support to people who are on the cusp of homelessness than just \u2018stay at home until the bailiffs come\u2019. But it\u2019s a sad fact that they want to avoid putting them in temporary accommodation as long as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 \u2013 up to 29 cases are dealt with in a single day. In one case, a<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":52146,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[820,1515,569,2456,14819,1264,14818,6558,3440],"class_list":{"0":"post-52145","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-crime-justice","8":"tag-battle","9":"tag-breaking","10":"tag-courts","11":"tag-englands","12":"tag-evictions","13":"tag-housing","14":"tag-nofault","15":"tag-point","16":"tag-renters"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=52145"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52145\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/52146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=52145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=52145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=52145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}