This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

The government faces a possible challenge to its “hostile environment” policy after a campaign group won the right to launch a high court case against the Home Office’s scheme obliging landlords to check the immigration of would-be tenants.

The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI), a long-time critic of the hardline policy – now renamed the “compliant environment” – sought permission from the high court to challenge the “right to rent” scheme.

Satbir Singh, the chief executive of the JCWI, said he was delighted the court had granted the application on Wednesday. “Like many other aspects of the hostile environment, the right to rent creates real risks of discrimination,” he said.

“The chief inspector of borders, the Residential Landlords Association and JCWI have all provided the government with evidence of the need for a review.”

The JCWI is seeking to crowdfund the challenge, though it has so far raised about £1,800 of the £15,000 target.

David Smith, the policy director for the Residential Landlords Association, said the right to rent scheme had put landlords “in the impossible position of acting as untrained border police trying to ascertain who does and who does not have the right to be in the country”.

He added: “This has created difficulties for many legitimate tenants as landlords are forced to play safe and only rent to those with a UK passport.”

Since 2014 landlords have been required to carry out “reasonable enquiries” as to whether prospective tenants are in the UK legitimately. A subsequent law created an offence of knowingly leasing a property to a disqualified person, with a maximum jail term of five years.

One of the many problems faced by people caught up in the Windrush scandal has been the inability to find anywhere to live when they cannot prove their immigration status.

On Tuesday, a cross-party group of 20 MPs wrote to the home secretary, Sajid Javid, urging a review of the scheme.

The group, comprising MPs from Labour, the Liberal Democrats, Scottish National party, Plaid Cymru and the Greens, cited a report from March on the right to rent scheme by the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration (ICIBI), David Bolt, which found there was no evidence right to rent was improving immigration enforcement.

The letter noted that the ICIBI “was particularly concerned with the lack of any monitoring or evaluation mechanisms that would allow the government to ascertain whether the scheme was having its intended effect, or whether it is creating unintended consequences”.

It said the government had refused to implement one of his recommendations – an improved landlords’ consultative panel – and had seemed unwilling to properly monitor the effect of the scheme.

A Home Office spokeswoman said it did not comment on ongoing legal cases.