How would you feel if you went to work, or to the shops, and when you came back the locks had been changed and you found yourself homeless?

Sadly, more than three quarters of our work, as a social enterprise helping private sector tenants, is with people who are imminently threatened with or who have actually been put on the street by landlords. In particularly unpleasant cases, landlords have changed the locks while their tenants are out shopping, on the school run or at work; in some cases, they even throw tenants’ possessions away. This is both cruel and criminal.

We provide specialist advice, advocacy and support for vulnerable private tenants and victims of criminal landlords in four London boroughs – Croydon, Enfield, Hounslow and Waltham Forest. We work to prevent unlawful evictions by providing specialist advice, advocacy and support to vulnerable private rented sector tenants and victims of criminal landlords.

Evictions from a private tenancy are a major part of the 78% rise in homelessness since 2011. So-called no fault evictions allow private landlords to turf tenants out without any reason, and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation attributes 80% of the recent rise in evictions to this process. We must be able to hold landlords to account if we are to lower the numbers of people that end up at local authorities’ doors.

The long awaited Homelessness Reduction Act has come into force, but already stretched local authorities are understandably concerned about the implications of this new duty, which places new legal duties on councils to ensure that anyone who is homeless or at risk of homelessness has access to meaningful help, irrespective of their priority need status.

London councils have stated that even with the £61m additional funding provided nationally over the next three years to help them fulfil this duty, they will be left with a gaping financial black hole to fulfil this obligation.

I am all for obliging councils to invest money in preventing homelessness – but we need to address some of the key reasons increasing numbers of people are becoming homeless in the first place.

Given the cuts to legal aid in recent years and the lack of housing solicitors, most renters have no chance of using the courts for protection, which is where services like ours step in.

Many private landlords don’t understand their obligations; worse still, too many use shady agents who are adept at exploiting both landlord and tenant to line their own pockets. We find a phone call or a letter to an offending landlord can sometimes stop them in their tracks.

Unfortunately, too many of our clients come to our attention only after one of these landlords has taken the law into their own hands. These situations are desperate but we work with tenants to assess whether there is any way to counter these infringements. For example, Section 6 of the Criminal Law Act 1977 allows a “displaced residential occupier” to break back into their home. But being able to prove the grounds for taking this action depends on a number of factors, including having proof of tenancy and proving there is a risk of violence. And renters have to be robust enough to deal with a hostile landlord.

We can’t always get renters back into their homes, but we are getting results. About a third of our clients only need advice, on ensuring landlords have followed the correct legal procedures, for instance.

The housing system is failing. It’s a national crisis that requires local approaches, which is why our Safer Renting initiative is part of the Young Foundation’s Reimagining Rent programme, alongside a number of other innovators across the country striving to make the private rented sector work better for all.

Safer Renting is a project run by London-based social action centre and charity Cambridge House.

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