From the BBC:
Ministers are considering a short extension to the five-month ban on landlords evicting tenants in England. From Monday, courts are due to resume cases put on hold owing to the coronavirus crisis, under stricter rules.
Now the government is understood to be considering an extension to the ban. Renters have argued the financial and practical effects of the crisis mean they should not be thrown out.
Lots of people are still out of work through no fault of their own, so there is no reason not to extend the evictions ban.
I accept that a Home-Owner-Ist government needs a certain low level of homelessness pour encourager les autres, but even the Tories realize that if they allow mass evictions that's going to cost them a lot of votes.
UPDATE, they've just extended the evictions ban by four weeks. Why such a short extension?
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A large landlord can self-insure. If you own a thousand homes and one or two hundred tenants can't pay any rent but you can't evict them, well so what, your unearned income has gone down by ten or twenty percent, you're still laughing.
This should be extended to all landlords; they all pay (say) 20% of the rents they receive into the 'Housing Benefit Fund'. If a tenant loses his job and can't pay, the Housing Benefit Fund pays the landlord (say) 70% of the gross rent from that home which he had previously been declaring and paying the Housing Benefit Levy on (or a lower % if it's a bad year and more than 20% of tenants aren't paying rent).
No need for the taxpayer generally to step in. Taxpayer aren't expected to pay landlords' home and contents insurance, why should they pay their "loss of rent" insurance (aka Housing Benefit)?