Comment: ‘Will the long-awaited Renters Reform Bill finally fix our rental crisis?’

Private renters with minority ethnic backgrounds are 38 per cent more likely to have faced an unaffordable rent increase and 36 per cent more likely to have been threatened with eviction than white British or Irish renters.

Not a nugget from the Evening Standard c1958 but a statistic from campaign group Generation Rent. Its report found that despite the Equality Act 2010 making discrimination against prospective tenants on grounds such as disability, race and sex illegal, twice as many minority survey respondents as white ones had been threatened with court action by a landlord.

That’s the thing about London’s red-hot rental market: it makes discrimination by stealth all too easy. If you’ve got dozens of applicants feverishly outbidding each other, what’s to stop you choosing tenants on whatever spurious grounds you like?

Who can make a rock solid accusation of discrimination when bidding wars and no-fault evictions are par for the course? So a huge number of private renters currently looking for a home at the moment are discovering.

This is just one reason why the Renters Reform Bill is so desperately needed and why tenants, campaigners and landlords are all ready this week to pick over the promised document when it eventually comes before Parliament.

There’ll be plenty who are hoping Michael Gove has rolled back some of his more concrete proposals, but I very much hope he hasn’t.

The rental health of the city depends on it.