Landlords Are Enforcing No-Sex Tenancy Clauses Now

This is what happened to Lucy, 23, who, like everyone else in this piece, is using a pseudonym for privacy reasons. After moving into a shared house with three other girls, she started to notice signs in the communal areas banning “music after 11PM”, “house parties” and, crucially, “loud sex”.

Brits are no strangers to outrageous landlords, but even this takes the piss. We’ve watched as landlords have passed off single rooms as entire flats, become influencers who vlog their evictions, and even charged their tenants for having friends over. Just when you thought they couldn’t sink any lower, they’ve come up with a new way to ruin your life: no-sex tenancy clauses.

Lucy says she found it funny at first. “I thought how are they even going to police that?’ But the landlord does inspections himself and he actually mentions it when he visits,” she tells VICE. “We’re all girls and he starts lecturing us about ‘youths of today’ being hyper sexual, and telling us to save ourselves for marriage.”

Obviously, Lucy’s sex life, or that of her flatmates, is “literally none of his business” as she says, but there’s not much she can do about it. “This room was a steal and it's so hard to find a place these days. It’s creepy but it’s just something I’m going to have to put up with.”

Disturbingly, some tenants have found no-sex clauses actually written into their tenancy agreements. Sometimes it’s expressed overtly, at other times disguised as a ban on overnight guests.

Chris, 24, rents an attic room in London and shares a communal space with two other flatmates, siblings, who are also his live-in landlords. “Their parents frequently visit,” he says, “and about four months into living here, their mum overheard me having sex with my girlfriend and complained about it to them.” His flatmates later slipped a note under his bedroom door, asking him to not have sex in the house, or host any overnight guests in general. “I confronted them in our shared kitchen and they kind of went ape shit, telling me it’s ‘wrong’ to have sex because it’s ‘their house’, which I think says everything. Landlords don’t look at tenants or lodgers like they actually deserve to be there.”

Chris looked up his tenancy agreement straight away, assuming he’d be able to argue his way out of it, but it turned out it was in there all along. “They’d actually banned overnight guests,” he says. “They didn’t seem to have a problem with my girlfriend staying over until it was about sex, though.” Chris is now adhering to these bizarre anti-sex rules as he doesn’t have anywhere else to live.

The question is: How can this happen? The laws surrounding no-sex tenancy clauses are basically non-existent in the UK. After all, tenancy laws already struggle to cover basics like protection from unjust evictions or rent increases. According to Qarrar Somji, director of Witan Solicitors (who specialise in resolving residential landlord and tenant disputes), tenants with live-in landlords, like Chris, don’t have a lot of rights. There’s actually nothing stopping live-in landlords from banning overnight guests.

Those with live-out landlords, like Lucy, have tenancy agreements which afford more protections. But, Somji explains, these are “essentially just contracts, meaning landlords and tenants have the right to agree to whatever terms they wish, unless it’s illegal.” It turns out sex-bans are legally sound, somehow. “The law does provide some protection to the tenant, because the landlord needs a court order to evict [them for this],” Somji says, meaning a judge would need to agree with the landlord that a tenant having sex in his own house is a problem.

The problem is, landlords don’t even need to resort to this. As Nick Ballard, head organiser at ACORN, tells VICE: Thanks to no-fault evictions – the ones the UK government has repeatedly promised and failed to ban – “landlords can’t say they’re evicting you for having sex, but they can boot you out regardless”. Without any requirement for a reason, landlords don’t need to admit they’re making a tenant homeless because they’re a top shagger.

This is something brand manager Cai, 33, has feared greatly in the past – he’s had two different landlords try to ban or restrict sex in the property he privately rented. “One landlord made a comment about the ‘queues of men’ always outside the house. It’s safe to say I did not make people queue to fuck me, and the comment felt homophobic,” Cai tells VICE. “They also suggested that having an active sex life puts people and property at risk, so I moved out.”

The interrogation didn’t stop there, though. “They then tried to tell me there were ‘silicone lube marks’ on the floor, which I’ve never spilled on the floor in my life,” says Cai. “I contested, letting them know that silicone lube would actually turn a wooden floor into an ice rink, and they let it go.” In another property, his landlord asked him how many men were staying at the house and for how long, due to the tenancy being for only one person. “I ended up leaving because of the weird fixation on my lifestyle,” he adds.

Ballard says tenants have a legal right to the “quiet enjoyment” of their home, meaning landlords can’t interfere with their tenants’ daily life. Sex isn’t written into that right, specifically – perhaps, because no one ever expected landlords to be so bothered about everyone’s sex habits – but most of us would file sex under “enjoyment”, so it could be a breach. In fact, even the World Health Organization considers sex to be part of our overall quality of life; as important as social activity, sleep quality, and, ironically, our home environment.

But Ballard adds that, ultimately, as long as no-fault evictions exist, landlords will have the power to evict tenants if they don’t approve of their sex lives, regardless.

The control landlords are wielding over the sex lives of their tenants speaks to how little protections renters have in the current market. Rising anti-sex sentiment and a lack of housing protection are both products of a failing capitalist system, and now they’re working hand-in-hand to harangue people. What’s next? Sex applications? Fees per one night stand? Actually, let’s not give them ideas.

We can’t believe we’re actually having to say this, but if you want to bang in your own bed without your landlord getting involved, you should be allowed to. Whether it's with your partner or an orgy with strangers, your sex life is simply none of your landlord's business and we should work towards rent reforms where they can’t kick us out for it. Maybe we need enact a ‘Right to Shag’ bill, along with our ever growing list of rent reform needs?

@bethmayashley