Renters are being let down by racist landlords

A new study has exposed blatant racism in the UK home rental sector – and thrown the government’s claims of “failed multiculturalism” into the spotlight.

Home secretary Suella Braverman argued, in September, that multiculturalism wasn’t working in Britain because “the incomer” had chosen not to integrate. “It has failed because it allowed people to come to our society and live parallel lives in it,” she said. “They could be in the society but not of the society. And, in extreme cases, they could pursue lives aimed at undermining the stability and threatening the security of society.”

She was talking about parts of cities where the people are almost exclusively from immigrant backgrounds. But now Generation Rent, the advocacy group for private renters, have found that black people are 36 per cent less likely to receive a positive response when applying to rent on SpareRoom. So, it’s a little unfair to blame people from minority groups for not moving into white areas when, comparatively speaking, the system won’t let them.

How did they expose this injustice? Well, Generation Rent used artificial intelligence to create two almost identical profiles – one called Lizzie, with a white woman’s face – and one called Zuri, with a black woman’s face. After sending applications for 200 properties, Zuri received 17 per cent fewer responses than Lizzie and was 36 per cent less likely to receive a positive response.

One property owner even responded to Lizzie with: “Hi Lizzie, can you tell me a bit about how long you would be looking for the room, do you work local etc. Many thanks.” However, the same property told Zuri: “Hello, sorry it’s just been let.”

Shocking as this is, this problem goes beyond landlord discrimination. Hiring discrimination makes it 60-90 per cent harder for ethnic minority people to even earn the money needed to rent homes in nicer areas. This has been confirmed in the government’s 2021 race report, as well as research by Oxford University, using the same method of identical job applications – where the only difference was the ethnicity of the applicant.

Knowing all this, is the government doing anything to tackle discrimination in the UK? Or have they constantly attacked efforts to make things better, calling them too “woke”?

I’ll let you make your mind up: but remember, the government’s own race report denied even the existence of institutional racism.

Of course, the government could make it so that job applications no longer show your name, the town you grew up in – or your school – to tackle racial, regional and class discrimination. So, have they? Or do they just blame the victims of discrimination for failing to integrate?

This seems to be a pattern. Last week, Suella Braverman announced plans to punish charities for giving tents to homeless people, because for many of them, she said, it was just a “lifestyle choice”. Yet, her government recently dropped its election promise to build 300,000 homes a year, leaving UK housebuilding in 2023 at the lowest levels since Covid. Their mini-Budget last year undermined the mortgage market, and their Brexit is making everything more expensive according to the Bank of England. But if people end up homeless after that, it’s a “lifestyle choice”?

Perhaps this is to be expected from a home secretary who has been branded “unhinged”, “offensive” and “out of control”; who has been accused of trying to sow divisions between communities and has even carved a gulf between the police and parliament; the same home secretary who tried to become prime minister by saying that there were too many people “choosing to rely on benefits”.

People do this for a reason. Bigotry doesn’t make you feel as guilty if you convince yourself the victims are just choosing to be difficult. That’s why you’ve heard certain right-wing politicians argue things like “being gay is a choice”, “poor people are just lazy”, or “minorities won’t integrate”.

The problem with blaming Gen Z and millennials for their poor living conditions – when injustices like the one Generation Rent have now exposed are rife in Britain today – is that you start to sound like that bully at school who grabs your arm, hits you with it, then tells you to stop hitting yourself.