‘My family is being evicted at Christmas, I had to tell my children we couldn’t afford presents this year’
“We were really hoping this would be somewhere we could be really long-term,” Kristina says. “A place where we can recover and heal from what happened to us. But instead we start over.”
The single mother of two received her second Chapter 21 eviction notice in less than two years. He and his sons now have to say goodbye to another home by the end of February.
From May, landlords will be banned from using the controversial power under Labour’s new Tenants’ Rights Bill. Until then, they can enforce these ‘no-fault’ notices to evict a tenant without cause with two months’ notice.
“Buying presents as a single-parent family before Christmas and saying to your children, ‘I’m really sorry but there won’t be any gifts this year’… it’s very scary,” says Kristina, 51, from Muswell Hill, north London.
The creative freelancer lived at his previous property for 15 years before the Section 21 notice was issued. Her struggle to find housing left her and her children, now ages 18 and 11, homeless for seven months.
While the eldest sat his GCSE exams, they were staying in temporary accommodation at Travelodge before finding their current home.
Mother-of-two Christina, from Watford, Hertfordshire, was also issued a Section 21 notice in September. The 46-year-old woman, her partner and their children were given until the end of November to leave the house where they have lived for nine years.
About a week before the deadline, Christina was able to negotiate an extension until the end of February. He said: “I contacted the agencies we had dealt with and literally begged, saying ‘we have nowhere to go’ and six weeks later Christmas came.”
Even with the extra time, Christina is having trouble finding a new place to live in her area. Even though he and his wife work full time, the family finds they can barely cover rent costs in the area.
“We went to see properties a few times and were defeated within half an hour,” he says, “you have to make a decision in about ten minutes.”
“We’re hitting our head against a brick wall” realizing they’d probably have to pay £500 more for a similar property in the same area, putting them at least £2,000 a month, he says.
Ben Twomey, chief executive of Generation Rent, said: “Homes are the foundations of our lives. But evictions are shattering those foundations, pushing people into poverty and homelessness. These stories show that the end of Section 21 cannot come soon enough.”
“Landlords will still be able to price us out of our homes by increasing the rent beyond what we can afford. The government must put the brakes on rising rents to make sure every tenant is protected in their home.”
Mr Twomey is one of many housing campaigners calling for more government action to tackle rising rents in the UK, arguing the Tenants’ Rights Act does not go far enough.
The average rent across the country reached a record high of £2,736 in London and £1,385 in the rest of the UK in the third quarter of 2025, according to Rightmove data.
Labor has said it opposes rent controls, where the government limits how much landlords can raise their prices. However, this action by the tenant would give tenants greater power to object to “excessive above-market rents” and challenge what is often referred to as ‘back door eviction’.
Paul Shanks of the Tenants Reform Coalition says the Section 21 ban will come into force: “It is sadly too late to protect tenants like Kristina or the hundreds of thousands of other tenants who are being evicted while we wait for successive governments to fix our broken rental system.”
“However welcome, the new law will not address the biggest problem for many tenants in England: the exorbitant cost of rent,” he added.
“The government must do more to make renting truly affordable and put money back into tenants’ pockets. As a first step, introducing a cap to prevent rent increases from exceeding inflation or wages will help tenants stay in their homes by preventing landlords from using unfair rent increases as a backdoor eviction.”
An MHCLG spokesman said: “The Government is committed to supporting tenants. Our landmark Tenants’ Rights Bill, section 21, will definitively ban no-fault evictions and ensure no-one is unfairly evicted again.
“We are taking action to help tenants by capping advance payments at one month’s rent, ending unfair bidding wars and giving tenants stronger powers to resist excessive rent increases.”
