Francesca Albanese:

I think they certainly help. If we are looking at longer-term tenancies, I suppose it is about having more emphasis on longer-term tenancies being used more regularly. Going back quite a lot of years of working in this space, I know that there are ways you can do that now, but it is not the norm. Most tenancies that are given are six or 12 months with a rolling period or a fixed term.

I would also go back to the points made at the beginning: this is helpful, but there are other areas that we are concerned about, such as ensuring that people getting served notice on the kind of grounds that were under section 21 and which will now go over to section 8 are protected sufficiently. Even though longer-term tenancies can give tenants more protection, from the perspective of Crisis, which works with people at the lower end of the private rented sector market, where there is often a higher turnover of tenancies, we would want to make sure that those protections are still in place so that we do not end up pushing more people into homelessness as an unintended consequence.