Nick Bano of the Garden Court Housing Law Team has authored 'Against Landlords: How to Solve the Housing Crisis', published by Verso Books. Order here.
Nick has recently written on this subject for The Guardian and the Big Issue.
When landlords always win and renters pay the price, what can be done?
Housing means prosperity and security for some; poverty, precarity and sickness for others. More people live in private rented accommodation than ever before, and rents rise without apparent reason. Homes are smaller every year, and nearly 20 per cent of tenants live in hazardous conditions. Homelessness is at a new high. Yet the government’s only solution is to promote homeownership.
Against Landlords shows that this crisis is not the product of happenstance or political incompetence. Government policy has intentionally split British citizens into homeowners and renters, two classes set on very different financial paths. In the UK, one out of every twenty-one adults is a landlord, and it is this group, and those who aspire to join it, that are represented by the political class.
In his radical new interpretation of the housing crisis, lawyer Nick Bano explains how this environment set the conditions for the Grenfell Tower fire and how it means a life of anxiety for the nation’s renters. It is a problem that stretches far beyond London and one inherently racist in nature.
Building more housing is not the solution. It is firstly a problem of the law, Bano argues, and reforms must sweep away the landlordism at the heart of the housing crisis and British political life.
Reviews
"A devastating, forensic, careful, considered attack on the bustard landlords and every lie, nastiness and evil that they represent."
- Danny Dorling, author of Shattered Nation
"One of the best and most rigorous explanations of how the current system is rigged in favour of landlords and why that needs to change."
- Vicky Spratt, author of Tenants
"Incisive and righteously indignant. With the experience of a barrister and the sensibility of an activist, Nick Bano helps us imagine an alternative social and economic order: a world without landlordism."
- David Madden, author of In Defense of Housing
Nick Bano (Year of Call: 2013)
Nick Bano specialises in representing homeless people, residential occupiers, and destitute & migrant households in both public law and private law disputes. He has acted in many of the most important housing law cases in recent years. The legal directories consistently recognise his expertise in this field, as well as his inventiveness and commitment to his clients. Nick has a particular specialism in cases where social entitlements overlap with equality and discrimination law. He has been instructed in many of the key cases in this area, including TM v Metropolitan, Forward v Aldwyck and London & Quadrant v Patrick (on the Public Sector Equality Duty in housing possession claims) and Adesotu v Lewisham (on discrimination against homelessness applicants). In possession cases, Nick’s background in criminal defence law makes him an excellent trial advocate. His previous work as a law centre caseworker means that he is excellent at engaging with the tenants he represents, with legal directories noting that “He fights for tenants".
