I sincerely apologise for providing some actual information and research that people could base their opinions on, rather than just random anecdotes. Helpfully, the 200 page report has an executive summary, and is also broken down into handy chapters so you can easily look for the topics you might be interested in, and the English Housing Survey is likewise broken down into sections.
So far the only anti-landlord measure people have specifically objected to in this thread was JQH's suggestion of right to buy, and he has already conceded that it could be qualified to require that the landlord has a minimum number of properties, for example. I reacted quite enthusiastically because I think there is something inherently ridiculous in one family being able to own the same bit of land for the best part of a millennium, because that is surely not a particularly good way to make best use of land.
Other than that, other responses to criticisms of buy to let have been people giving examples that for the most part, aren't actually buy to let. And even then, many (but not all of them) point out that landlords could be adversely affected by different rules (yes) without considering that the point is that tenants are generally in a pretty precarious position already and it is about redressing the balance. Allo v Psycho's example number 1, of moving from Scotland to England - there is nothing inherently wrong with wanting a bit of security in where you live, but having to sell your house in Scotland only puts you in the same position as all tenants, except tenants (the vast majority of the time) wouldn't actually own any properties, never mind two, and in England they are vulnerable to being booted out at pretty much any time if their landlord decides to do so. So it's not that wanting to keep your house in Scotland is evil, it just assumes that your entitlement to own two properties is greater than tenants' entitlement to have some security of their own. Sure, you could let to people on the understanding that you would want the house back some day, and they may be happy with that at the time, but people's circumstances change and that might not always be the case, and not all landlords would be as honest or scrupulous about their intentions, as dyqik found out to his detriment on three occasions.
For what its worth I think there is a role for private renting in the UK because it fills a huge gap, and there *is* something to be said for having flexibility to move (although private renting isn't the only way to achieve this), but tenants get a raw deal that I don't think is balanced out by the complaining landlords who have to deal with 'nightmare tenants' - yes it happens and there may be occasions where it is really really bad, and I'm sorry about that, but for the most part if you decide to run a business you have to be prepared for financial losses, just as with any other business.
Anyway the next bit of this post is just some ramblings in response to other posts in the thread, not trying to make some overarching point but thought I may as well chuck it in. A lot of it is to do with court/tribunal proceedings and so on but I thought I'd throw it in just to try and illustrate some of the other issues connected with being a tenant.
There's been reference to tenants' lack of security in the UK. I'm not going to compare to other countries in Europe/the world, but since December 2017 Scotland has had Private Residential Tenancies (PRTs), which basically abolish 'no grounds' evictions - although they do introduce a ground for eviction that didn't exist previously, i.e. the landlord wants to sell the property. I rent through a PRT myself and it is much more reassuring although because my landlord is landed gentry and has kids I wouldn't be remotely surprised if he intends to boot us out one day because his kids want to move in, or something along those lines. Before that Scotland had something very similar to Assured Shorthold Tenancies in England, except here they are called Short Assured Tenancies* (because why make things straightforward and use the same names eh). The method of ending those types of tenancies wasn't identical to ASTs but it was very similar in that landlords could end the tenancy for any reason providing the contractual tenancy had ended.
I'm not sure what impact PRTs has had on tenants' overall security and evictions. There may be some commentary somewhere but it's probably quite hard to tell because for half of the time they've been in place there has been a pandemic which changed the game when it came to eviction and so on. There is a report from Shelter Scotland here
https://scotland.shelter.org.uk/profess ... mendations which sampled some tenancy eviction cases and it shows some PRT evictions but I think it's probably too early to identify any clear trends. Obviously Shelter will have their own slant on things but there are some numbers and stuff in there. It will probably always be difficult to be certain though because Tribunal statistics will also only show the evictions that actually go as far as court/tribunal proceedings - it won't take into account the number of tenants who just leave after they are told to by their landlord, which I would guess is probably fairly common in a lot of no-grounds evictions (SATs and ASTs). That's probably where things like the English Housing Survey and equivalents come in handy.
Another thing you'll notice is that court proceedings relating to private tenancies in Scotland happen in a tribunal, not the courts, and this has been the case since around the same time PRTs came in, I think. In England (and Wales I think? correct me if I'm wrong) all proceedings of that nature take place in the county courts, which are not entirely inaccessible but can be pretty stressful environments. The idea of the tribunal in Scotland is to make the process more accessible, and less financially ruinous if you're unsuccessful because unless there has been some pretty bad behaviour from your side of things you are unlikely to be ordered to pay your opponent's legal expenses. This probably favours tenants because as you'll see from the Shelter report, usually landlords are legally represented and tenants are not. I can see in the report that some tenants feel the process isn't fit for purpose. I've done Tribunal hearings (as a representative, not for myself) and personally have found them much more pleasant and easy to deal with than court hearings, but I appreciate that I'm making a comparison and being stuck in the midst of it is probably a different matter. Not to mention that in one case the nature of the directions given by the Tribunal put the landlord on a stronger footing procedurally than the tenant - inadvertently I think, I have to say - fortunately I was able to sort that out but an unrepresented tenant may not have known what to do about it.
There was some talk a few years ago of creating a similar tribunal in England. The down side of the lack of almost-automatic awards of legal expenses to the winning side is that it would be much harder, as a tenant (and a landlord I suppose but they are more likely to be represented anyway), to find legal representation. Legal aid fees are a pittance (and worse in Scotland than England) so lawyers would probably want to know that in at least some cases they may stand a chance of getting their full legal fees back, and also this system completely rules out 'no win no fee' which is all that's left for a lot of court proceedings in England due to legal aid cuts. So although it does reduce the financial risk to tenants in one sense it does also have that knock-on effect of making it more difficult to get legal representation in the first place.
*Not hugely relevant but another difference between English ASTs and Scottish SATs is that, when both were introduced in around 1989, in order to create a
short assured tenancy, i.e. one which creates no grounds/fault evictions, rather than a plain assured tenancy which has much more security as certain grounds have to be made out, the landlord had to serve a notice on the tenant prior to the tenancy commencing saying that it would be an AST/SAT. However in England, in about 1997 I think, they scrapped all that so that pretty much any assured tenancy (with some exceptions) would automatically be an AST unless a notice was served to the contrary - I assume because landlords kept accidentally creating assured tenancies and couldn't get rid of their tenants (as one of my friends who has tenants in Scotland recently realised, oops). They didn't get rid of the requirement to serve a notice in Scotland. I have no idea how many accidentally-non-short-assured tenancies there are or have been in Scotland, and I haven't lived/worked in Scotland long enough to really have any anecdotal experience either, but presumably someone has some idea somewhere.