The fight for housing security, a basic human right of which many in the UK have been robbed, has become a fight over the shape of civil society more generally, with fault lines appearing across the political spectrum. As the right seeks to wage a culture war over anything from the Last Night of the Proms, to the ethics of snitching on your neighbours, the left are at the vanguard of the tenants’ rights movement, directly resisting evictions and shifting the tenor of public debate around housing more generally.
The ban on evictions introduced in March at the height of the first wave of COVID-19 was a vital piece of legislation that not only protected thousands of people from homelessness, but made the concept of a “lockdown” actually workable, alongside the tragically temporary end of rough sleeping. As remarked by The Guardian, it was a cruelly poetic twist of fate that the end of the eviction ban should fall on the day in which the grim double act of Prof Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance addressed the UK warning of 50,000 new cases per day by mid-October.
As many as 55,000 people in the UK are estimated to have been served with an eviction notice since the start of the pandemic
