Housing: creative solutions

  Another year, another grotesque symptom of Britain's broken housing market. While families languish on ever-lengthening social housing waiting lists, consigned to the precariousness of private renting, a different story unfolds for a select few. 2024 saw a record surge in the creation of limited companies designed solely to hoover up buy-to-let properties. Sixty thousand of these entities sprouted up last year, a 23% jump from the previous "record" in 2023. Let's be clear: this isn't about providing homes ; it's about financial engineering, about exploiting a system rigged in favour of the propertied class. This isn't some sudden blip, but a deliberate, decade-long trend, turbo-charged since 2018 when the tax rules were conveniently "rewritten" for landlords. Now, nearly 400,000 buy-to-let companies stalk the land, gobbling up homes and turning them into investment vehicles. We're told 70-75% of new buy-to-let purchases are now funnelled...

  The proposal by the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) and the National Housing Federation (NHF) to impose annual rent increases of CPI +1% for the next decade is not merely a policy suggestion. It is a microcosm of the structural assault embedded in the system, where institutions nominally tasked with supporting those who protect the vulnerable instead align with the interests of capital to further immiserate the poor. This is not an anomaly; it is the logical endpoint of a system designed to privatise gains and socialise costs, while masking exploitation in the language of necessity and progress. Who are the CIH and NHF? Though cloaked as advocates for housing justice, they operate within a framework that accepts as sacrosanct the priorities of state and corporate power. Their demand for above-inflation rent hikes—ostensibly to fund social housing construction—reveals a deeper allegiance to the logic of private profit. The claim that tenants must bear the burden of austerity ...

  It’s time for an informed debate on rent controls.  The laissez-faire, competitive market approach in the privately rented sector has demonstrably failed - as average private rents in Britain have climbed to record highs, renters are suffering and excessively high rents create a drain on the economy. Property website Rightmove has said that in May this year, the typical advertised rent outside London reached a record £1,316 a calendar month. In London it was £2,652 a month – almost three times the £894 asked for in north-east England. Rightmove said the average advertised rent outside London in May was an inflation-busting 7% higher than a year earlier. This leads those in the property industry with a vested interest to argue for an increase in supply. But it’s economically illiterate to believe that simply adding more privately rented housing will bring rents down. We need to look seriously at rent controls. Rent control policies vary widely across European countries, with ...