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3 days ago
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This Christmas, bailiffs have been busy. Evictions in England and Wales rose by 11.2% compared with the same period last year, leaving thousands of families without a home in the coldest months. Now, new research has revealed that private landlords in England are charging such high rents that nearly two-thirds of workers are struggling to pay it.
The study, commissioned by the housing charity Shelter, found that nearly 4.5 million people are falling behind on their rent or having trouble covering its rising cost. It is gloomy news for the government, which has put fixing Britain’s chronic housing-affordability crisis at the heart of its agenda, but under whose watch life for private renters continues to deteriorate.
The deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, has pledged the government will deliver 1.5m new homes over the next five years, with many in Labour hoping more private landlords will compete to drive down prices. However, sobering research from the Tony Blair Institute concludes that “building homes alone will not fix the UK’s housing-affordability problems”, and that even a fourfold increase in housebuilding will not provide the relief renters desperately need.
If Britain’s private rental sector is so broken that the vast majority of tenants are already scrabbling to keep up with payments, simply expanding this rotten system will only drive more people into poverty and poor living conditions; 23% of dwellings in the hands of private landlords do not even meet decent homes standards. Rather than more cowboy landlords renting out crummy flats at unreasonable prices, we need a genuine alternative to compete with the private rental sector outright. We need a huge expansion of social housing.
Limited land, capacity in the development sector and the UK’s legally binding carbon budgets mean that, without radically more sustainable construction practices, there’s a finite number of new homes the country can realistically build each year. Solving the housing crisis, therefore, is a question of priorities: will allowing the market to build as it pleases bring down prices most quickly, or should Britain be more strategic in specifying what kind of new homes we commission in 2025 and beyond?
Imagine a neighbourhood with brutally high rents but space to build some new homes. Which tenure of new rented accommodation would most alleviate the dire cost of living crisis tenants are experiencing: private or social? New privately rented homes will provide shelter for families in need, and ease pressure for housing in the area. But the cost to those households will be high, in line with already onerous local rents. More people will be housed, but average housing costs in the neighbourhood will have barely changed.
Choosing to build social-rent homes, on the other hand, will have a much bigger impact on the neighbourhood. The new flats will still provide accommodation for the same number of families in need, relieving an identical burden of pressure from local housing demand. But this time rents for the new homes will be capped in line with local incomes – social rents are often 50% lower than private rents – driving down the local average.
With lower average rents, communities as a whole have more money left to spend in the local economy, fuelling greater prosperity for all. The housing crisis is primarily a humanitarian disaster, but it is also an economic millstone around the neck of Britain. The more the nation’s salaries are sucked up by high rents, the less there is for anything else. Shelter estimates that building 90,000 new social-housing units would make Britain £50bn better off. In a letter to the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, Shelter’s chief executive, Polly Neate, Ikea boss Peter Jelkeby and other industry leaders urged the government to build nearly a million socially rented homes over the next decade.
The social rental sector is not just more affordable, but superior to privately renting in other ways, too.Secure tenancies, for example, allow residents to put down roots without constantly living in fear of being turfed out. While Labour has plans to clamp down on landlords imposing impossible rent hikes and no-fault eviction notices, for now private renters have a fraction of the long-term stability that social renters enjoy. And while private renters are frequently policed by landlords’ swineging rules dictating what tenants can and can’t do in their homes (even sometimes banning posters affixed to walls), social renters generally benefit from strong rights to decorate and customise their homes.
A further reason to prioritise growing the social rental sector is the dizzying cost of temporary accommodation. Without enough council housing to go round, local authorities in England are forced to spend eye-watering sums leasing emergency accommodation at jacked-up prices for homeless families. Hastings council, for example, spent about half its annual budget on temporary accommodation last year, while London boroughs are spending £4m a day providing emergency shelter.
This month, the mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, called on the government to make the mass building of new council homes its defining purpose. “No other policy, achievable within a parliament,” he declared, “would have greater social and economic benefits.” He is right. Given Britain can only build a limited number of homes each year without a total revolution in green architecture, the absolute priority should be expanding social housing.
For too long we have allowed too much housing, a commodity as vital to wellbeing as water and energy, to be controlled by a predatory private rental market without robust competition or proper regulation. Decent housing should be the cornerstone of a dignified and stable life, but unchecked private landlordism has failed to provide either. After a Christmas of evictions and renters struggling to get by, Labour’s new year’s resolution must be bold. Only a new generation of genuinely affordable social homes can solve Britain’s housing crisis. It is time to get building.
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Phineas Harper is a writer and curator
