MDP wrote the Tenancy Act. It now runs the councils meant to enforce it

The Residential Tenancy Act came into force on 18 November 2021. The Act was enacted during the administration of President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih. It was passed through a parliament with a Maldivian Democratic Party supermajority.

I was a Malé City councillor at the time. The city council was never consulted when the law was being drafted, despite the extraordinary concentration of tenants in the capital and the significant new administrative and enforcement responsibilities it placed on councils, including the remarkably short timeframe for deciding complaints.

The law did not come with a budget, additional staff or other resources. This was not something the council failed to raise. We held several meetings with the housing ministry about the council's lack of capacity to carry out responsibilities being imposed on it by law. The shortage of staff and resources required to discharge those functions was repeatedly raised, but those concerns were ignored.

If the system were functioning as intended, councils should be able to say how many tenancy complaints they have received, how many were decided within the statutory timeframe, what types of violations were reported, how many corrective orders and fines were issued and how often court enforcement became necessary. Five years on, I am not aware of a single council that could answer those questions today.

According to the Household Income and Expenditure Survey 2019, 33,310 of the country's 87,538 households lived in rented accommodation, amounting to 38 per cent of all households. The geographical divide was stark: 74 per cent of households in Malé were tenants, compared with just five per cent in the atolls.

HIES also found that rented households had an average household size of around 5.1 people. Based on this figure, roughly 170,000 people were living in rented accommodation nationwide in 2019, although this is an estimate derived from household figures rather than a directly reported headcount.

The survey estimated the resident Maldivian population at 434,944, of whom 206,182 lived in Malé and 228,762 in the atolls.

For such a large section of the population, the legal relationship between landlords and tenants is not a niche issue. It affects housing security, household finances and the basic conditions under which a substantial proportion of Maldivians live.

Maldivian tenants are primarily caught between extremely high rents and a severe shortage of affordable housing. The consequences are overcrowding, insecure tenure, high upfront costs and limited bargaining power with landlords.

These are not abstract problems to me. Many of the children I studied with who were not from Malé faced them growing up. Some of my friends moved more than a dozen times during their primary school years, shifting from one rented home to another as their families struggled with the insecurity of the rental market.

The 2021 Act provides a number of protections that would materially affect tenants if properly enforced. These are not insignificant protections. A tenant facing an excessive security deposit demand, an arbitrary increase in rent halfway through an agreement, improper termination or an unlawful attempt to repossess a property already has rights under Maldivian law.

The Act is not, however, a comprehensive solution to the country's housing affordability problem.

It does not regulate how high rents can be. While landlords generally cannot arbitrarily increase rent during an existing fixed tenancy, there is no statutory ceiling on rents or percentage cap on increases when a tenancy is renewed. Once an agreement expires, a landlord may propose a substantially higher rent for the next tenancy, while the tenant has no automatic legal right to continue at the previous rate.

Nor does the Act provide tenants with a general right to renewal. Even tenants who have complied with all their contractual obligations may have to leave when a tenancy expires if the landlord does not agree to renew it. This leaves tenants vulnerable at the end of each contractual period, particularly because there is no corresponding limit on how much rent can be increased upon renewal.

Although security deposits are capped and rules exist for their return, the Act does not require deposits to be held by an independent authority or through a protected escrow arrangement. Where there is a dispute over deductions, the tenant may still have to pursue the matter themselves.

The Act is also not an affordability law. Rents are not linked to income, inflation, property values or any other statutory formula, and it does not provide rental subsidies or other mechanisms to ensure affordable housing.

Its anti-discrimination provisions are relatively limited as well. The Act restricts certain discriminatory or abusive tenancy clauses, but does not establish a comprehensive fair-housing regime covering every stage of advertising, tenant selection and refusal to rent.

These are limitations that can and should be debated when considering future amendments. But the shortcomings of the legislation are separate from another, more immediate failure: even the protections parliament has already enacted have not been properly operationalised.

Councils are not merely required to receive copies of tenancy agreements. The relevant local council is the first administrative forum for complaints arising under the tenancy framework.

A tenant or landlord can complain to the council about a tenancy agreement, the rented premises or conduct that breaches the Act or its regulations. A person who becomes aware that a property is being rented contrary to the Act or regulations can also lodge a complaint, meaning the mechanism is not necessarily restricted to the landlord and tenant themselves.

The tenancy complaints committee is constituted by the mayor in a city and by the council president on an island. It must give both sides an opportunity to respond and reach its decision by majority.

Where a council concludes that something needs to be corrected, it can order the relevant party to rectify the matter and it can impose fines where the Act provides for them.

A council decision can be challenged in court within 30 official working days. Where a decision is not challenged but the responsible party refuses to comply, the council can itself go to court to have it enforced.

This is significant because the Act decentralises much of the day-to-day enforcement of tenant protections to councils.

That is particularly important in Malé, where HIES found that 74 percent of households were tenants in 2019. Yet councils were handed these responsibilities without the institutional capacity required to discharge them.

In practice, the Ibrahim Mohamed Solih government showed no serious intention of implementing the enforcement structure it had itself legislated. Responsibilities were assigned to councils without the budget, workforce or resources needed to carry them out.

The result was predictable. Parliament could provide tenants with rights on paper, but the institutions expected to administer those rights lacked the capacity to make them meaningful.

That history cannot simply be blamed on President Mohamed Muizzu or the present government. The MDP has to accept its own responsibility for how the law was introduced and left without the resources required for implementation. That history is also precisely why the party now has an obligation to act.

Following the 4 April local council elections, the MDP now holds 46 of the 52 seats across the country's five city councils. It controls the mayoralties and commanding majorities in all five cities, which together are home to more than half of the Maldivian population. Beyond the cities, the party also won virtually every major population centre. In practical terms, it is now responsible for more than 60 percent of the country's day-to-day local governance.

This was not only a rejection of President Mohamed Muizzu and his government. It was also a governing mandate for the MDP at local level, and with that mandate comes responsibility.

Council presidents, mayors and secretary-generals, regardless of political party, are legally required to discharge responsibilities imposed on councils by law. The failure of previous governments to properly implement those responsibilities does not make them optional.

The MDP now controls enough of the local government system to establish what is actually happening with the Residential Tenancy Act. Its councils should determine whether the required tenancy complaints committees have been established and are functioning, whether complaints are being received and decided within the seven-day timeframe, what enforcement action is being taken and what prevents councils from carrying out their responsibilities.

If the same problems that existed when the law was introduced remain, namely a lack of manpower, budget and institutional resources, MDP-controlled councils should state that clearly. If they lack staff to constitute and support complaints committees, they should say how many are required. If there is no budget to carry out statutory responsibilities, they should identify the shortfall. If a ministry is required to cooperate or provide administrative support and fails to do so, that failure should be put on the public record.

I also believe this should not be left to individual mayors and council presidents. The MDP's housing committee and decentralisation committee should take implementation of the Residential Tenancy Act seriously and work directly with the councils the party now controls. It should establish, council by council, whether tenancy complaints committees exist and are functioning, how many complaints have been received and determined, whether decisions are being enforced, what staffing and budget are available and what additional resources are required.

That work should also inform future reform. Councils dealing directly with landlords, tenants and tenancy disputes are well placed to identify which provisions work, which are difficult to enforce and where protections need to be strengthened. Their experience could inform amendments on issues such as rent affordability, increases upon renewal, security deposits, renewal rights and longer-term security of tenure.

But improving the law and implementing it are two separate questions.

The law is already there. It is time to implement it.

Saif Fathih is a columnist at the Maldives Independent and a former member of the Malé City Council for Galolhu North. With his educational background in communications, international studies and public policy, he previously worked as a journalist, editor and public policy advisor, with roles including senior policy director at the ministry of national planning and editor of Ocean Weekly Magazine. Saif began his career as a radio producer and presenter at Minivan Radio, writer for Minivan Daily, and translator for the British High Commission and the European Union Mission to Sri Lanka and the Maldives. He is also the host of Ithuru Vaahaka, the Maldives Independent podcast.