Two South London renters describe being shown flats, asked for extra paperwork and then turned away, as research suggests ethnic minority and migrant applicants face additional barriers in England’s private rental market even when they meet every financial requirement.
Names marked with an asterisk have been changed at the interviewees’ request, to protect ongoing tenancy applications.
For Malvika*, an Indian renter living in Croydon, finding a home was never simply a question of meeting the rent, providing references or saving enough for a deposit.
Her search involved 16 separate enquiries and repeated viewings over four weeks. At several points she was asked for documentation she considered unusually extensive and, in her view, intrusive. More than once, she says, landlords only agreed to show her a property if she brought a white friend along.
“Regina and Caitlyn had to pretend they were taking the apartment with me, for a landlord to even consider me sometimes,” she said.
“I would be waiting in anticipation only to be told afterwards that the room had already been let. I’ve lived in London for two years and I’m yet to find a letting agency or landlord willing to smooth out the process for me without that stigmatised mindset.”
Her experience raises a wider question: can access to a rented home be shaped by an applicant’s name, nationality, accent or perceived immigration status, regardless of what’s in their paperwork?
Different names, different responses
The clearest evidence comes from audit studies, in which researchers send near-identical enquiries to landlords or letting agents while varying only the name or apparent ethnic background attached to a fictional applicant, a method designed to isolate discrimination from every other factor.
A 2025 study by researchers at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Land Economy sent 2,160 rental enquiries to 540 London listings, using applicant profiles signalling White British, Indian, Nigerian, Chinese and Polish backgrounds. It found consistent gaps in response rates between White British applicants and every minority group tested. Crucially, adding strong employment information narrowed but did not close the gap, the researchers concluded the discrimination they found was largely “taste-based” rather than a rational response to perceived financial risk.
That finding challenges a common assumption: that discrimination disappears once an applicant proves they’re financially stable. It suggests some applicants are judged not only on income or references, but on who they appear to be before a landlord reads a single reference.
Similar patterns emerged a decade earlier in a study of London’s informal shared-housing market by economists Magnus Carlsson and Stefan Eriksson, published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. Sending more than 5,000 enquiries with names signalling British, Eastern European, Indian, African or Arabic/Muslim backgrounds, they found ethnic discrimination was widespread across the capital, and that its severity varied depending on an applicant’s occupation and the ethnic makeup of the neighbourhood itself.
Neither study proves that any single refusal was motivated by racism. Together, though, they show that applicants who look identical on paper can be treated very differently depending on the identity signalled by their name.
‘I had the documents’
In Lewisham, Iffeat*, a Nigerian renter, said her search made her reconsider leaving the UK altogether, despite providing extensive documentation and passing reference checks.
“I was asked to come in for a viewing, and then asked for documentation, which I provided. I paid the deposit and the first month’s rent, only to be told a day later that the room had gone to someone else with a stronger credit score. That was never mentioned to me beforehand. I’ve been house-hunting for three months now, and at this point, booking a flight home to Nigeria feels more financially and emotionally sensible.”
Her account doesn’t, by itself, prove any individual landlord or agent broke the law. But it illustrates a distinction that matters: having a legal right to rent is not the same as being able to secure a tenancy without extra obstacles other applicants don’t face.
The role of Right to Rent
Since 2016, the Right to Rent scheme has required landlords and letting agents across England to check the immigration status of adult prospective tenants before granting a tenancy. Landlords who knowingly let to someone without the right to rent can face civil penalties, and in serious cases, criminal prosecution.
Researchers and campaign groups have described the policy as shifting part of immigration enforcement onto private landlords, turning an ordinary housing transaction into an informal border check. The concern is that landlords, wary of the risk, may simply avoid any applicant whose documents look unfamiliar, or whose name or accent doesn’t sound British, rather than assess each case individually.
That concern has some evidential backing. A 2017 survey of more than 900 landlords by the Residential Landlords Association (now the National Residential Landlords Association) found 44% said they were less likely to rent to someone without a British passport. A separate survey of 108 landlords by the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI), published the same year, put the figure at 42%, rising to 48% when landlords were explicitly asked to weigh the risk of criminal sanctions.
The scheme’s legality has been tested in court. In March 2019, the High Court ruled in R (Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants) v Secretary of State for the Home Department that Right to Rent breached human rights law by causing racial discrimination. The government appealed, and in May 2020 the Court of Appeal overturned that ruling. Notably, the appeal judges did not dispute that the scheme causes some landlords to discriminate, they found instead that this discrimination was a proportionate and lawful cost of pursuing a legitimate immigration policy. JCWI was subsequently refused permission to appeal to the Supreme Court.
The evidence remains contested. A Home Office evaluation of the scheme’s second phase, carried out independently by BVA BDRC and the London School of Economics and published in February 2023, found some examples of discriminatory attitudes among landlords and letting agents, but concluded there was no statistically significant evidence that the scheme itself had caused systematic racial discrimination.
[South London News approached the National Residential Landlords Association and Propertymark for comment on the discrimination findings cited in this piece. This section to be updated with any response received.]
A wider housing inequality
The dispute over Right to Rent sits inside a broader pattern. Government housing data has repeatedly shown that minority ethnic households in England are more likely than white British households to experience housing disadvantage, including overcrowding and insecure tenancies.
For renters, repeated rejection has a cost even when a tenancy eventually comes through: paying more rent in advance, settling for a smaller or lower-quality home, or relying on informal arrangements that come with fewer legal protections.
For Malvika and Iffeat, the issue was never really about whether they had the right paperwork.
It was whether they were given the same chance to use it
