Category: Renting
-
Keep the Council Tax Reduction
In 2017 Bristol City Council announced plans to scrap the Council Tax Reduction benefit and so force the 25,000 poorest households in Bristol to pay council tax. Faced with a drastically reduced budget due to brutal Conservative cuts, Labour Mayor Marvin Rees proposed to make up the difference with a policy that would have seen
-
Sex for Rent exposed on national news
One of the most exploitative but least visible aspects of Britain’s brutal housing crisis is the disgusting situation of landlords using their properties as a means to extract sex from desperate tenants who can’t afford the rent that landlords keep high. Shelter is a fundamental human need and right and the economic coercion makes this
-
Getting out the Renters’ Vote 2017
Private renters are much less likely to have their voices heard in elections than homeowners and other tenants. The high levels of insecurity, with tenants often facing eviction multiple times a year means that renters fall off the electoral register, especially with recent changes to the system or simply don’t bother to register because they
-
Santander Rent Rise Clause win
In 2017 we took our first coordinated national action alongside our Scottish sister organisation Living Rent in protest at a hidden clause in Santander’s buy-to-let mortgage terms that required landlords to raise rents to the maximum level every year. Faced with renters mobilising to target their branches in 8 cities across the UK Santander backed
-
Landlord Licensing campaigns in Bristol & Newcastle
A third of privately rented homes would fail the Decent Homes Standard and for years ACORN has used direct action to prevent revenge evictions and get repairs made to slum housing. Licensing of landlords provides some legal protection from eviction and extends council powers to inspect properties. In 2016 we successfully mobilised a thousand tenants
-
Bristol Ethical Lettings Charter
Within a few months of launching and beginning to organiser private tenants ACORN Bristol got the message loud and clear that we needed structural change as well as the direct action around evictions and living conditions that we were quickly becoming known for. The problem was, at that point we were a small community group
-
Bristol Big Housing Conversations
Responding to the demands of Bristol renters organised by ACORN and the overall housing crisis facing the city, we were invited by Mayor Marvin Rees to partner with the Council in the delivery of these historic renters forums and help shape local housing policy. Across several events and for the first time ever, hundreds of
-
Bristol Council House Sell Off
Heading into the Bristol Mayoral election in 2016, ACORN members organised demonstrations against the proposed sell off of council housing when 16,000 people were on the waiting list. While we were too late to stop the auction we successfully negotiated with then-Mayor George Ferguson that all money from the sale would go to new social
-
Bristol Needs A Mayor for Homes
Heading into the 2016 Mayoral election, a response to the housing crisis was top of the agenda. This was in large part to the campaigning efforts of ACORN members for the previous two years in which we used direct action to stop revenge evictions, win repairs and deposit repayments, halted the auctioning off of council