What an insecure home does to people

Situation

The first phase of the Renters’ Rights Act came into force in England on 1 May 2026. The Act received Royal Assent on 27 October 2025, seven years after Theresa May, then prime minister, promised to end no-fault eviction. It abolishes Section 21, the route by which a landlord could end a tenancy without giving a reason, and replaces fixed-term assured shorthold tenancies with open-ended periodic ones. A landlord can no longer evict in the first twelve months and must give four months’ notice on the grounds of sale, moving in or housing a family member.

The months before the deadline produced a rush. Landlord Action recorded a 60 percent year-on-year rise in eviction instructions for March 2026, with Section 21 instructions up 43 percent across the first quarter. In parallel, Savills counted 254,000 buy-to-let homes listed for sale over the past twelve months, 697 a day, 28 percent above the same period in 2024, with 86 percent of the sold homes leaving the rental sector. Tens of thousands of forced moves were compressed into a few months, ahead of a law meant to make moves like them harder to impose.

The reform is usually argued in financial and legal terms. Who pays, whether the market shrinks, what it does to rents. That argument is real and it runs later in this report. But it skips the prior question. Before the money, a forced move or the standing threat of one does something to the person who has to live through it, and that something is measurable. The official statistics already gesture at it. MHCLG recorded 4,960 households threatened with homelessness as a direct result of a Section 21 notice in the last quarter of 2025, down 15.8 percent year on year. When Keir Starmer justified the reform he did not talk about money. He said: “For too long, families have lived with the constant fear of eviction.” That is a claim about a state of mind. The honest test of the reform is therefore a health test as much as a market one, and that is the test the debate has mostly left out.

Findings

The threat, not only the loss

Across this evidence, the damage starts before anyone moves. Daniel Fowler and colleagues counted eviction- and foreclosure-related suicides in sixteen US states over 2005 to 2010 and found 929 of them, with the annual number doubling across the period (Fowler et al., 2015, American Journal of Public Health). 79 percent of those suicides happened before the actual loss of the home, and more than a third clustered within two weeks of an acute housing event. People were breaking under the approach of homelessness, not under homelessness itself.

That is a count of deaths, not a controlled experiment, and it lands in the middle of a financial crisis, so the broader economy is tangled into it. The cleaner test came later, by accident of policy. Kathryn Leifheit and colleagues used the patchwork of US eviction moratoria during the pandemic as a natural experiment (Leifheit et al., 2021, JAMA Network Open). States that imposed strong moratoria, ones that blocked the notice and the court filing rather than only the final bailiff step, saw moderate-to-severe psychological distress among low-income renters fall by 12.6 percent relative to the rest. Weak moratoria, which stopped only the eviction itself, did nothing measurable. The threat was the exposure. Take the threat away early enough and the distress comes down with it. A second study using a different survey and a renters-versus-owners comparison found the same direction at about the same size.

This is the closest the field gets to causal proof, and it points the same way as Starmer’s sentence. The harm a no-fault regime produces is not only the move. It is the years of living one unexplained notice away from the move.

What it does to the adults who carry it

Matthew Desmond and Rachel Tolbert Kimbro followed evicted mothers in the Fragile Families study and matched them against similar mothers who were not evicted (Desmond and Kimbro, 2015, Social Forces). The evicted mothers carried more material hardship, higher rates of depression and worse health, and the gap was still open at least two years later. Eviction did not just mark a hard year. It bent the line of the years after it.

Gabriel Hoke and Courtney Boen pushed on the causal question with longitudinal data from the Add Health cohort (Hoke and Boen, 2021, Social Science and Medicine). Tracking the same people over time, so that fixed differences between them drop out, they still found more depressive symptoms after an eviction, with about a fifth of the effect running through heightened social stress. The size of the effect shrank once they adjusted fully, which is honest and worth keeping in view, but the direction held under the harder test. Sandra Vásquez-Vera and colleagues pulled the literature together in a review of 47 studies and reported that 55 percent found a mental-health effect of eviction or its threat, most often depression, anxiety and distress (Vásquez-Vera et al., 2017, Social Science and Medicine). The review also says plainly that most of the underlying studies are cross-sectional, so the correlation is firmer than the causation.

What it does to children

The clearest administrative evidence is about children, because schools record what happens to them. Peter Hepburn, Matthew Desmond and colleagues linked eviction court records to school enrolment data across Houston and found that 12.3 percent of children whose parents received an eviction filing changed school mid-year, almost three times the rate of comparable children (Hepburn et al., 2025, Sociology of Education). Fewer than half of the threatened children stayed at the same school from one year to the next. They lost about two more school days in the year of the filing, picked up extra suspensions afterwards, and tended to land in schools with worse results and higher churn. The disruption did not stop at the move, it ran on into the child’s school year.

The strongest single study on childhood moves comes from Denmark, where the national registers let researchers follow everyone. Roger Webb, Carsten Pedersen and Pearl Mok tracked all 1.47 million Danes born between 1971 and 1997 and counted their moves through childhood (Webb, Pedersen and Mok, 2016, American Journal of Preventive Medicine). Frequent moves, and above all several moves in a single year during early adolescence, went with sharply raised later risks of attempted suicide, violent offending, substance misuse, psychiatric illness and premature death. The point that makes this study hard to dismiss is that the raised risk held across every income band, not just among the poor. That is the best available argument that the churn itself does damage, and not only the poverty that often drives it.

The mirror test

If insecurity harms, then security should help, and the place to check is the studies that improved housing on purpose and watched what happened. Philippa Howden-Chapman ran a cluster-randomised trial in New Zealand that insulated some homes and left others as they were (Howden-Chapman et al., 2007, BMJ). The insulated households roughly halved their odds of reporting fair-or-poor health, took fewer days off school and work, and visited the doctor less. It is a trial of housing quality rather than tenure, but it is a real randomised trial, and the effects are large and consistent.

The Moving to Opportunity experiment did the same for neighbourhood. Jens Ludwig and colleagues reported that families randomly given vouchers to move to lower-poverty areas showed higher subjective wellbeing a decade later, by about a tenth of a standard deviation, with a clear dose-response (Ludwig et al., 2012, Science). The effect on clinical mental health was weaker, significant only at the margin, which the report keeps in view. In a separate analysis the same experiment cut extreme obesity and diabetes markers, so the body responded even where the diagnosis of mental illness did not move much (Ludwig et al., 2011, New England Journal of Medicine). Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren and Lawrence Katz then showed that children who made the move young grew up to earn about 31 percent more as adults, while teenagers who were moved gained nothing and sometimes lost (Chetty, Hendren and Katz, 2016, American Economic Review). Those are economic outcomes, not health ones, but they carry the same lesson the rest of the evidence carries. A stable, better environment in early childhood pays, and a disruptive move in adolescence does not.

Position

Put the strands together. The standing threat of a no-fault eviction is a measured source of harm, the threat as much as the event, and the cleanest causal evidence we have says that removing it lowers distress. On that reading the Renters’ Rights Act is not mainly a tenant-rights gesture. It is a health intervention, and it should be judged as one.

But a health intervention only helps the people it reaches, and the market decides who that is. The reform abolishes the no-fault route while leaving the sale route open, and a SpareRoom survey attributes 43 percent of evictions since Royal Assent to a landlord selling. The people pushed out by a sale, and the people priced out of the next tenancy, inherit exactly the insecurity the reform was built to remove. The 697 sales a day are the scale of that group. So the Act does not abolish the human cost of insecurity, it moves it to a different household. The household that keeps its home collects the health dividend. The people who still have to move or search do not, and the reform has made that group smaller in some places and, by tightening supply, larger in others.

Research Context

The correlation at the centre of this report is not seriously disputed. Across disciplines, countries and decades, losing a home or living under the threat of it goes with worse mental health, and improving housing goes with better health. Epidemiology, developmental psychology, environmental health and the economics of neighbourhood all point the same way, from independent data.

The causation is the contested part, and the reason is always the same. The people who get evicted are poorer, sicker and more stressed before the eviction, so some of the harm that looks like a consequence of the move is really a property of what forced it. The evidence that survives this objection is the evidence that breaks the link between the two. Leifheit’s moratoria are an external shock, not a feature of the tenant, and they move distress. Webb’s Danish risk holds across income bands, so it is not only poverty talking. Howden-Chapman and Moving to Opportunity are randomised, so selection cannot be the whole story. Those four studies carry the causal claim. The rest adds correlational support.

The honest counter sits in the same literature. Sarah Burgard and colleagues looked specifically at eviction in a Michigan panel and found that, after adjustment, eviction on its own carried no significant health association, even though homelessness and rent arrears did (Burgard, Seefeldt and Zelner, 2012, Social Science and Medicine). A 2026 systematic review graded the overall certainty of the housing-insecurity and mental-health field as low to very low, precisely because so much of it is observational (Talmatzky et al., 2026, PLoS One). And there is a mechanism gap. The pathway from a notice through chronic stress and lost sleep to physical illness is biologically plausible and widely assumed, but it has not been measured directly in evicted people, so this report treats it as a plausible route and not a proven one. Kim McKee and colleagues have at least described the lived version of that pathway, the way insecurity and cost keep low-income renters from putting down roots (McKee et al., 2020, Housing Studies), and the UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence has set out the same case in its work on tenure insecurity.

The market-economics research belongs here too, but as the mechanism that sets the exposed group rather than as health evidence. Rebecca Diamond, Tim McQuade and Franklin Qian showed that rent control in San Francisco cut rental supply by 15 percent and pushed citywide rents up 5.1 percent, while raising the chance that sitting tenants stayed (Diamond, McQuade and Qian, 2019, American Economic Review). Scotland ran the nearer experiment. Its 2022 rent cap applied only inside a tenancy, and Zoopla recorded new-let rents rising 12.7 percent in the nine months that followed, as landlords lifted rents between tenancies instead. Richard Donnell of Zoopla described the mechanism in plain terms. Those studies do not say anything about health. They say who ends up moving and searching, and that is the population on which the health evidence then acts. One caution belongs on the record. The Resolution Foundation report this analysis draws on for rent trends (Pacitti, 2024) concluded that the landlord-exodus narrative was not well supported by the data at the time, which is a useful brake on reading the Savills sell-off as destiny.

What is missing is the obvious study. No one has yet measured the human outcomes of the Renters’ Rights Act in England, because the Act is weeks old. The data to do it sits with CaCHE, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the housing centres, and the cross-map of that data against the next year of evictions, moves and rents is the report this one is pointing at, not the report it is.

Consequences

For investors and operators in residential property. The human-outcome evidence changes what tenure stability is worth. A long secure tenancy is not only a question of yield or void risk or reputation. It is the variable that the wellbeing and health studies actually move, which means build-to-rent and longer leases carry a measurable human dividend that the classic short-let buy-to-let does not. That is a fact about the asset, not a recommendation about it, and regulation usually catches up with that kind of fact some years after the data does.

For policy and for landlords. The reform’s health benefit is real but conditional. It reaches a household only if that household keeps its home. The sale ground and the pricing of new lets are the two leaks, and if they simply move the insecurity from the protected sitting tenant to the renter who has to find somewhere else, the reform will have improved the average while leaving a sharper harm at the edge. The Scottish sequence is the warning. Protect the tenant inside the tenancy, do nothing about the new let, and the cost reappears on the doorstep of whoever moves next.

For anyone weighing whether the Act worked. The market numbers and the health numbers have to be read together. A falling count of Section 21 homelessness threats looks like success on its own. Set against a rising count of sale-driven moves and a tightening supply, it may only mean the harm changed address. The next twelve months of English data will show which of the two it is, and that, not the rent index on its own, is the measure worth watching.