Imagine being a mother of five and finding yourself evicted from your home without reason, with two months to find a new place, a new deposit and to settle into a new home.

Ellen Gavigan doesn’t have to imagine . She will be evicted in March – the third time since she began renting – because her landlord, buy-to-rent mogul Fergus Wilson, plans to sell the entire cul-de-sac of houses, putting all the tenants on the street. Wilson, who with his wife owns 700 properties in Kent, gets £600,000 a month from rental income alone but is selling up because he wants to retire.

Whatever you might think about the morality of Wilson’s behaviour, what is shocking is that it is completely legal. Gavigan is just one of an increasing number of renters in Britain evicted from their homes through section 21 of the Housing Act 1988. In 2014, 80% of private-sector evictions in London, the south-east and the east of England were carried out using section 21.

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Section 21 allows landlords to evict tenants even if they haven’t broken their contract, without any right of appeal. It doesn’t matter how long someone has lived there, whether they have children or if they have anywhere else to go. They can be evicted for requesting basic provisions. Such so-called revenge evictions are illegal. But because landlords aren’t required to give a reason for evicting someone under section 21, this rule is regularly flouted. That is made abundantly clear by the stories of people evicted for simply asking for hot water, as well as the data – a 2018 study by Citizens Advice showed 50% of clients who made a formal complaint about their housing were evicted.

Section 21 evictions are an increasingly common feature of renting in the UK. The law may once have been fit for purpose in a housing market that was centred around buying, but more than a third of local authorities now have private renter populations of between 20% and 39%, and many people expect never to own a home.

The UK government has increasingly looked to private landlords to cope with a growing housing crisis, but our laws have not evolved to reflect this. In recent years eviction has been the biggest cause of homelessness. The English Housing Survey reports that such evictions are mostly a result of landlords wanting to sell up or use the property for a different purpose.

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It doesn’t have to be this way. While Brits battle it out for basic rights, tenants across Europe get a much fairer deal. A 2018 report by Shelter found that Britain has some of the worst renting protections among neighbouring European countries. In Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands, tenants can only be evicted on legal grounds – such as for not paying their rent – and many countries ensure tenants can negotiate leases of up to 10 years. A number of European countries also provide protection from rent increases – notably in Germany where rents are matched to local market levels, but many other countries operate some form of rent control, including Austria, Poland and Ireland.

By 2021, it is expected that a quarter of Britain’s population will be private-sector renters. We have had a succession of housing ministers who have overtly looked to the private market to fix the housing crisis in Britain, or paid lip service to the merits of building council homes without actually building any. But in the meantime, our legal rights in a renting market that some of us will be forever consigned to have been neglected. If not now, when?

• Poppy Noor is a Guardian journalist