THE professional body representing estate agents has welcomed Government proposals to make it easier to evict tenants who misbehave.

Nathan Emerson, CEO of Propertymark, told GB News: “I think it’s very fair to say the Prime Minister’s drawn a line in the sand on anti-social behaviour and I think that should certainly be recognised, because it is obviously something which affects every single one of us.

“Certainly, from a community aspect, and I think that’s the heart of where this goes to the changes that are being proposed are to actually enable anti-social behaviour to be more recognised.

“And for landlords it is to be able to enforce an eviction with a slightly different method than is there at this moment in time.”

In a discussion with Esther McVey and Philip Davies, he said: “At the moment, the thresholds that people have to be able to go to demonstrate anti-social behaviour is very, very difficult.

“It’s the neighbours that are suffering, it’s the people in the community that are suffering, and they won’t always necessarily want to come forward to do that.

“Landlords obviously aren’t directly feeling that effect, because they’re not living in that property so then they are wanting to do something about it, but they need the support of neighbours. They need the support of the police and, and so it’s great that we’re addressing it.”

He added: “But what we’ve got to understand is what is the threshold that enables this to be triggered and also it will mean more cases go into court.

“And so again, we need to ensure that when we’re tackling the issue, we’re also putting the provision in from a court point of view, because if you’re serving notice on a tenant, it could take 6-9 months to actually get to court to get a resolution to have them removed.”

Asked if it was unrealistic to get bad tenants out in two weeks, he said: “Absolutely not, I think it’s great that they’re aiming for that, what I’m trying to work out is how we can actually make the changes that will enable this to happen and the current proposals still follow a court system.

“I think we do need to ensure that it’s not the people in the community that lose out, it’s not the landlords that lose out if tenants are causing issues with bad behaviour and drugs and all of the things that we have in society.

“There needs to be a mechanism there to get them and I champion what the Prime Minister has done. I think it’s absolutely superb.”