Mentions of the landlord tend to be met with a grimace on the Kent streets where he is evicting 700 households

If you want to live in Grice Close, a peaceful cul-de-sac built on a former Battle of Britain airfield, you have no choice but to pay rent to one family.

The wife and daughter of Fergus Wilson, a 70-year-old buy-to-let tycoon, are the registered owners of all 15 houses in the road near Folkestone where mentions of Wilson’s name tend to be met with a grimace.

Wilson is planning to evict tenants from these and all of his family’s remaining 700 Kent properties and is preparing to send the residents of Grice Close notices to vacate so they can sell up his £7m-a-year property business and “take life easy”.

Since Wilson started building an empire of over 900 houses in Kent in the 1990s, he has been a poster boy for some of the worst types of landlord behaviour. In 2017 he told a letting agent he wanted “no coloured people because of the curry smell”, while his wife Judith Wilson was last year fined for failing to supply hot water to a disabled tenant.

A first tranche of 90 section 21 notices giving tenants no more than two months to vacate were delivered to some of his houses in nearby Ashford earlier this month, and hundreds more will follow. The Wilsons, former maths teachers, bought up new-build houses in the 1990s on an industrial scale, including 27 houses in one quiet Ashford cul-de-sac.

The decision has sent tremors through families, some with babies, now facing less than two months to get out. It has also exposed the fragility of the UK’s growing reliance on private landlords to provide mass housing, and the vulnerability of millions of private renters in England to some of the most precarious rental contracts in western Europe. In the 30 years that Wilson and his family built up their empire, the number of people renting privately in England more than doubled from just under 2 million to almost 5 million.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fergus Wilson is selling his Kent properties to ‘take life easy’. Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

“I’ve got a chap at the moment who thinks I should be giving him a three-year tenancy but I’m afraid he found out that he got his section 21 [notice of eviction process],” Wilson told the Guardian. “He’s a very upset man because he wanted to stay for the next 20 years. I had to point out that I am 70 and that as much as I would like to be around in 20 years time perhaps I won’t be.”

Ellen Gavigan, 52, was one of those on Grice Close who grimaced at the mention of Fergus Wilson’s name.

The nurse and mother of five who lives with her husband and two youngest daughters pays £850 a month for a three-bedroom house. “We’ve only been a year and we didn’t plan for this happening,” she said. “This is about the third time this has happened to us [while renting]. The landlords decide they are selling and we are out on our ear.”

“It’s daunting,” she said. “I don’t want to keep moving. It’s stressful. You start putting your roots down, in the garden for example, and you are gone. It just shouldn’t be allowed someone can own a whole close because then he has got a total monopoly.”

One answer, suggested earlier this month by a cross-party commission including former Labour leader Ed Miliband and former Tory chairwoman Sayeeda Warsi, was to build 3.1m council houses over the next 20 years.

Asked if she would like to live in a council house, Ellen said she would never qualify for one. What about if they start building them? “They are not going to,” she said.

“It’s the social injustice across the board that landlords have this utter power,” said Chris Blamires, a lecturer at Canterbury Christ Church University who lives across the street. “This is what Harold Wilson’s government was trying to solve. We’ve gone backwards. They are going to be making thousands of people homeless. Most likely I will have to go back to lodging with my brother”.

Louise, 37, a mother of a two-and-a-half-year-old boy on Grice Close, said: “I have no idea what to do. It is panic stations.” She pays £850 a month and can’t afford more on a part-time income.

“He’s got all the power,” she said. “It’s wrong. It’s always hanging over you. He lords it over everyone.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ellen Gavigan: ‘You start putting your roots down, in the garden for example, and you are gone.’ Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

Through the 1990s and into the 2000s the Wilsons hoovered up new-build houses by the dozen as they were thrown up around the M20 and the new channel tunnel rail link, which brought Ashford within 40 minutes of central London. Ever rising prices, a shortage of homes in the booming south-east and rising rents allowed them to buy in bulk and off-plan. They bought 24 from Wimpey on one estate, 22 from Abbey Homes and 70 from Persimmon. Their strategy was to buy two- to four-bedroom houses, not flats, which Wilson says attract “social problems”. They sought salaried tenants, not those on housing benefits. According to their own figures, which the Guardian has not been able to verify, the couple earn rents of around £600,000 a month on a portfolio only a third of which they estimate is mortgaged.

Most renters in England are on assured shorthold tenancies which mean that after the first six months they can be evicted within two months for any reason or none. In Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway and Scotland renters cannot be evicted without a reason. Over 80 million tenants across Europe, including in Spain, France, Ireland and Italy, have stronger protection than they would get in England while only 7 million have it worse, according to housing charity Shelter.

Last year, the ministry of housing consulted on introducing a three-year protection and the housing secretary, James Brokenshire, said: “It is deeply unfair when renters are forced to uproot their lives or find new schools for their children at short notice due to the terms of their rental contract.” Landlords voiced opposition in a consultation and the government has not yet introduced the protection.



