You’ve just moved into a new home: congratulations!

You’ve paid a huge deposit, and discovered a host of hidden fees. Your new home is cold and damp. You know next-to-nothing about your landlord: is he competent? Does he have a criminal record?

Then, after six months you hear from the letting agents: The rent is going up. If you don’t want to pay more, you can leave … and repeat the process all over again.

Bad luck – you’re a private tenant in England.

You might think that the growing underclass of private tenants across England would be demanding decent renting standards as a priority political issue. But so far they have not. This is partly because private renters have low expectations about their housing, but also because they are much less likely to register to vote. After all, why should you bother when you can’t be sure you’ll be in the same house in a few months’ time?

All this could change in May: for the first time in almost a century private tenants make up a substantial voting group. They now number around four million nationally and up to 40 per cent in some key marginal constituencies. And renting is now a real political issue thanks to charity campaigning and an avalanche of research. This has generated action at a local level from councils including Newham, Oxford and Camden, and growing recognition of the potential of renters as a bloc vote.

There is now a major opportunity for national politicians to reach out to this disenfranchised group of potential voters by setting out policies that offer genuine hope of change.

How can politicians make renters’ lives better – and garner millions of votes in the process? There are at least three headline policies which would tell private renters that politicians are ready to address the unfairness of their position:

1. All tenancies should be for a default minimum of three years with the option of earlier endings where there are genuine reasons. This would set the expectation of a stable tenure at the outset and help tenants plan and put down roots.

2. An end to the heinous ‘no fault’ Section 21 eviction. Too often landlords use this to relet to households willing to pay a hiked-up rent, or to punish ‘problem’ tenants who ask for their hot water to be fixed or damp dealt with. Any premature ending of a tenancy through eviction should require a genuine –evidenced – reason.

3. We need to know who and where our landlords are, with a national register of landlords. No other business can operate without being registered. Why should private landlords be the exception, when they are responsible for the health and safety of their tenants? And how can any regulation be enforced if neither local or national government can find the landlords it applies to?

These three policies won’t solve all tenants’ problems. But they would raise tenants’ expectations that they deserve better. And, hearing a message of hope, they might just pick up a polling card and vote for a change.

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Sarah Mitchell is chair of the Camden Federation of Private Tenants. She tweets @s_j_mitchell

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Photo: fabbiovenni