NATIONAL HOUSING CHARITY Threshold answered on average one call every 20 minutes from private renters facing eviction in the first nine months of the year. 

The charity’s impact report for the third quarter of the year detasils how an average of 472 private renters a month, who were facing eviction, sought assistance from Threshold between January and September. 

Between July and September, Threshold supported a total of 8,835 households and prevented 1,121 households from entering homelessness, including 1,758 adults and 1,185 children. 

Advisors answered over 12,000 calls and responded to over 2,500 webchats on behalf of private renters regarding tenancy issues. 

In this period, 1,384 private renters sought Threshold’s help when they received a notice of termination from their landlord, with 60% of notices issued because the landlord intended to sell the properties. Threshold advisors identified that 46% of notices were invalid. 

“In the first nine months of the year, over 50% of queries received by Threshold concerned security of tenure and tenancy termination. This level of queries surpassed the number received on the same issue for the entirety of 2021 and was over double the number received in 2020,” Threshold CEO John-Mark McCafferty said.

“We are continuing to see a large exodus of landlords from the private rental sector, resulting in fewer properties available to rent and fewer housing alternatives for households who are facing eviction,” McCafferty said.

“Given the increasingly dire situation, it was necessary for the Government to introduce a ban on evictions to allow for short- and medium-term solutions to be implemented to combat the growing rental crisis.”

An eviction ban is currently in place until 1 April 2023. 

Under the legislation, all notices to quit that are issued over the period of the emergency ban will be deferred until at least the end of March 2023.

While notices to quit can still be issued to tenants while the ban is in effect, they will not be able to be evicted until after the ban ends.

However, when these evictions actually take place will be dependant on a number of factors, including the date on which the notice was served and the length of the tenancy.

This also means that notices to quit issued before the ban takes place will not go ahead until at least 1 April.

The Department has specified that there will not be a “cliff-edge” on 1 April however, with evictions after that date set to come in on a phased basis based between 1 April and 18 June, based on the date when the notice was issued and the length of the tenancy.

McCafferty said that it is “absolutely vital that the Government uses the time of this eviction ban to develop and implement measures to not only slow the rate of evictions being served on private renters, but also to increase the availability of affordable and secure homes”. 

With reporting by Christina Finn