EU Commission grant agreement ID: 290694 TENLAW Tenancy Law and Uousing policy in Europe - Towards a regulatory equilibriume

  • Schmid, Christoph (Researcher)
  • Norberg, Per (Researcher)
  • Juul - Sandberg, Jacob (Researcher)
  • Bååth, Olivia (Researcher)

Project: Research

Project Details

Description

This project had four main objectives:
Objective 1: In a first step, Tenlaw analysed national tenancy laws in all EU Member States and their embeddedness in, and effects on, national housing markets and policies in a comparative approach. This part covered the origins and the development of national tenancy law as well as tenancy law’s embeddedness in housing policy and housing markets. Moreover, also tenancy law and procedure “in action” was integrated into the comparative analysis. Single fields of tenancy regulation constituted the core part of this analysis. These included: The conclusion of tenancy contracts (in particular the choice of the tenant and discrimination issues) and the use of standard terms; duration and termination of contracts (in particular fixed term contracts and the possibilities of, and restrictions on, the landlord giving notice); rent fixing and rent increases (in particular the conditions and procedure for rent increases); obligations of the parties (in particular guarantees of habitability), breach and termination of tenancy contracts including actions for eviction.
Tenlaw’s basic parameter of evaluation was the hypothesis of a socio-economic balance. This has the following background: As the public sector seems to be increasingly unable and unwilling to provide all citizens in need with housing, private rental markets become more and more important to ensure a sufficient supply of dwellings for rent at affordable price. However, the good functioning of private markets depends on renting remaining attractive for landlords and investors. This, in turn, requires that burdens of social regulation imposed on landlords must not be too onerous and prevent them from making adequate gains and returns. Private tenancy regulation, such as rent control and security of tenure (protection of the tenant against notice) in particular, must therefore strike a socio-economic between the need to provide tenants with housing at affordable and sufficiently stable conditions, and the need to impose only acceptable burdens upon landlords and investors, and which do not act as disincentives. Moreover, only such balanced regulation qualifies as economically efficient.
Objective 2 consisted in a comparative analysis of the effects of EU law and policies in other fields on national tenancy law. As stated, this analysis extends to social policy against poverty and social exclusion; consumer law and policy; competition and state aid law; tax law; energy saving rules; private international law including international procedural law; anti-discrimination legislation; harmonisation and unification of general contract law; constitutional law affecting the EU and the European Convention of Human Rights.
Objective 3 included the comparison of national tenancy systems in similar groups of welfare states and at European level. According to the general principles of comparative law, this comparison was carried out in a functional way - i.e. it was not be based on legal concepts (which vary widely with one concept having often several meanings in different systems), but on legal and socio-legal mechanisms serving similar regulatory objectives. In detail, the comparison extended to the following features: first, the tenancy law system and its key components, including security of tenure, rent control and guarantees of habitability; second, the different roles tenancy law may play in national housing policies; in this respect, fundamental differences are caused by the different share of private tenancies at market conditions as compared with social tenancies (with public or publicly subsidised landlords) and owner-occupied buildings; third, tenancy laws were compared as integral parts of national housing policies as regards their connection to different welfare state systems.
Technically, the comparison of national tenancy laws and their relationship to housing policies were undertaken at two levels: first at the level of similar, often neighbouring, welfare state systems – for which reason the project consortium was subdivided into 10 groups with each of them analysing three EU Member States; and at the EU+4 level of the overall consortium. In sum, the comparative analysis tried to render foreign systems understandable to national and European regulators and thus provide a basis for mutual learning and the definition of best practices, as envisaged at European level under the open method of co-ordination (OMC).
Objective 4 was devoted to the question of what the future desirable role for the EU in tenancy law might be – assuming that the continuation of the current status quo of inaction seems to be hardly plausible on account of the responsibility of the EU for the collateral effects of its policies. The following options were discussed: the initiation of an OMC process as in other fields of social policy, in particular in social protection and social inclusion; the design of common principles of “good tenancy regulation”; the extension of the existing social dialogue (Art. 154f. TFEU) to tenancy law; a minimum harmonisation directive under European consumer law (Art. 169 para. 3 TFEU). Conversely, full harmonisation under Art. 114 TFEU (which would presuppose tenancy law to be regarded as necessary for the establishment of the Single Market), which might perhaps be discussed for commercial tenancies, was excluded as an option for residential tenancies. Indeed, tenancy law’s embeddedness in largely diverging national housing policies and economies could not be legitimately accommodated without disintegrative effects by a fully harmonised European instrument. Generally, all options were assessed against the background assumption that a balanced European contribution to an established field of social law such as tenancy law - which would need to abstain from intrusive harmonisation or unification measures, but deal with national divergences constructively – could bear a huge potential of enhancing the legitimacy of the EU in the eyes of its citizens.

Popular science description

A detailed description of tenancy law and housing policy in 27 EU-countries, with comparative analysis based on intra-group comparisons and a final analysis focused on the interplay of EU-law and policy with national housing law and policy .
Short titleTENLAW
StatusFinished
Effective start/end date2012/04/012015/12/31

Collaborative partners

  • University of Bremen (lead)

UKÄ subject classification

  • Social Sciences