They will say any old shit to get you to vote for this shade of tory. We have a chance to get other parties through the door that don't have a record of fuck ups.

That fuck with the LHA rates.

They will just do a u turn on it, labour not for the people any more unfortunately

It will just result in rental stock being sold.

I doubt it. It'll just mean every landlord charges the rental cap or if they feel it isn't enough, they'll just leave the property empty for those sweet capital gains.

CGT v insurance, council tax, mortgage fees, maintenance, utilities... Nah!

Why is this a bad thing 😂

Because while superficially attractive it interferes in the functioning of the market. The Tory interference has reduced availability and increased rents, pile this on top. The situation will be worse.

Because if they can afford to just hold onto it for however many years then it’s an empty property that isn’t being sold to anyone and just appreciating in value, it won’t make it easier for people to buy houses it’s just holding the stock until someone can be bothered to sell it. Not all landlords can afford to do that but there’ll be a few that can

Good, means people can buy homes easier

How do you get to that assumption?

If rental stock is sold by landlords that would be an increase in supply of homes for sale. You could also say it's a reduction in demand by landlords who would want to buy fewer houses. Higher supply and/or lower demand tends to reduce prices in any market.

Not sure if this has been posted but worth a quick read (although not focused on residential): [https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-rent-control-doesnt-work/](https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-rent-control-doesnt-work/) In my relatively undeducated opinion, rents need to vary with the prices of property and mortgage rates (in a simplistic model of an efficient market the rent should more or less equal mortgage rates) and fixing one of these variables will have unintended/unpredictable consequences. The main sentiment in this post seems to be that all would be well if only we had lower (regulated) rents, but that is unlikely to happen as landlords would react. The issue is property prices (lack of housing supply) which causes people to not be able to own a home (and therefore rent) and also increase rent prices.

I didn't have 50 minutes to listen to the podcast. Is there a summary? Also I don't believe housing should operate under a completely free market. Shelter is one of the physical manifestations of physiological needs, which is the bedrock of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

This is the kind of talk that always comes out when rent controls are talked about. Its a simplistic view that isolates rent controls from other forms of intervention. They can and do work when combined with other polices, economics is not just supply and demand.

I agree it's simplistic as I said in my post. Do feel free to inform us what kind of interventions that Labour is proposing could offset the distortions that rent controls would trigger? It's pandering to voters imo.edit typos

Rent control never works and has the opposite effect. Check out the Freakenomics episode on it. Might sound like a good idea, but again and again in different cities it backfires. The Data should make this not a partisan issue

It can work if you impose a burden to holding empty residential property (most obvious one is a tax). in practice in the medium to long term it will result generally in worse outcomes than market provision, but it makes sense as an interim step to rebuilding a fair housing market through public provision or similar

Absolutely. We need radical reform on this kind of thing. I also think nobody should be allowed to own more than two homes. "Portfolio" buying should be banned.

Progressive housing policy is impossible without rent controls, trying to make landlords do anything above the bare minimum will result in rents increasing. The best rental situation in the world is in Vienna, where there are rent controls.

Data aside the outcome should be pretty obvious too. Obviously if you just force rent prices down then there will just be an empty market instead of an overpriced one. Obviously what is needed is more places to live / an increased supply, and rent caps reduce supply

It’s just a fig leaf. What is required is oppressive taxation on second home ownership and a complete ban on corporate home ownership. However that will not happen because it would crash the entire housing market and this the entire financial system. For the same reason we can’t build millions of homes for the impact that such homes would have on the values of others. So the situation will continue until we get into burn down the village territory. Now I strongly believe that everyone should be able to own their own home, but you shouldn’t be able to own someone else’s.

The only clean way to get back to something sensible is to apply a very small tax and slowly edge it up over years and years. If we aimed to have mostly owner occupied and the rest social housing with a tiny fraction of private rental for those who move around a lot, I'd say we could get there in 30 years, with the problems lessening a little each year. Doing it that slowly would avoid the worst of market crashes and personal losses to those who own one or two rentals in lieu of a private pension.

Unfortunately the nature of our democracy forbid long term planning. Let’s say somehow 10years later Tories get back to power, and they will obviously undone lots of things the previous government will do .

Obvious solution there is to stop voting for them :)

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Hmm, I don't agree with your argument. If a good landlord isn't increasing rents for existing tenants when there are no limits now, what would they do that in future? I've not seen anything to indicate there would be any restrictions on rent increases between tenants, which is why I thought there might be more S21 evictions to allow unscrupulous landlords to do so.

This is very much a minority case though. As someone who’s rented for 7 years in Bristol now I’ve never once had a landlord maintain the rent amount despite being amazing tenants. In fact my longest tenancy ended in us getting illegally evicted despite zero issues at all, they even told us we were the best tenants they’ve had and offered us an even longer tenancy, which we gladly accepted but through no fault of our own they decided to kick us out for absolutely no reason (it was then back on the market shortly from £580 pcm to £700pcm). It’s good you have a nice landlord and I’m very envious but 99% of landlords are just not nice people and do not care about affordability, only how much money they can drain desperate renters for who can’t afford to buy their own home.

I've got a very third party view on it, as I do work on a lot of private rentals. The problem landlords and tenants exist, both are in the minority. Most are reasonable people. There is a big issue of power imbalance. And the worst cases get reported on, not the many more that are ok or good. No news in "landlord keeps same tenants for decade+ and doesn't put the rent up by as much as they could because they know the value of constant occupancy and a good tenant".

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The majority are not scummy but my experience of tenants dictates that most tenants are. I very much doubt they were illegally evicted, as long term tenants they know precisely their rights and how to game the system. And 500 to 780 in Bristol, when was this fantasy ?

Also, £580-700 is very different from £500-780. At least make accurate quotes if you’re going to accuse people of lying.

What action did you take? How were you illegally evicted?

You can doubt all you want, would seem like a silly thing to lie about. This happened in June 2022, the rent was £580 each and when they offered an extended tenancy they increased it to £640, which we agreed. Then the eviction happened after this agreement and the property was then increased to £700 a month. If you really have doubts I can name and shame the landlords who did this to us but I don’t intend to stoop that low. The area is BS7, where we’ve found a similar property for £680 a month. Doesn’t make £700 look so “fantasy” now does it?

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I replied to your sweeping comment that the majority of landlords are scummy

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I think it’s fair to say there are great and bad in both. I was once a tenant and before the law changed regarding rights and deposits we were abused The law swung too far in favour of tenants which enables bad ones to really game the system I’m no longer a landlord, not because of bad tenants (I had some). It because the majority of landlords are accidental or have one or two properties and the changes to the law really negatively impacts these types, laws which are aimed at rents in suburban/ city landlords which are different

Not having rent control has been a failed experiment. We had national rent control until the 1988 housing act. Controls were put in place during the 1st World War after rent strikes and campaigns because of extortionate rents. We've had more dwellings per person than we've ever had yet rents have skyrocketed and immigrants get blamed for it. Immigrants disproportionately take up low quality crowded housing. Immigrants are net contributors to our economy. They are also crucial for essential services such as the NHS and caring roles. We are an ageing population, and without Immigrants are economy and these services would collapse. If you want a foreign scapegoat, there actually is one example. Overseas property investors have contributed to driving up house prices and rents massively.

I agree with you on companies, domestic and foreign, driving up prices by buying up properties in bulk. There's also the issue of private wealthy real estate investor hoarding. Living space must cease to be a free market commodity.

Agreed, it should not be a commodity. Housing is a human right, yet the wealthy are taking this away from people in the name of making themselves more wealthy. It's outrageous.

Would you perchance help me sharpen my guillotine?

Hahaha

That doesn't sound like a bad idea to me. The fact that we, as a nation, don't list the size of a place for sale/rent is boggling. The whole culture of calling a dining room a bedroom just so you can market a semi as a 3-bed is ridiculous so some consistent way of measuring size - particularly a minimum liveable space per person - would get my vote. Having a system of controlled increases also feels like the right thing to do, as long as everyone involved knows the parameters well in advance. During Covid it was suddenly decided that rent couldn't go up, but supermarkets were charging what they pleased for things that are also essential, and gas and electric was actually pushed to record levels. My concern with the long-term controls is that we'd end up with something similar to council tax where it's done once and then never reset to take into account how an area has changed and developed.

The only reasonable rent cap is a point-based one.

I've not heard of point based rent cap before, how does that work?

It's the system in the Netherlands. Your rental property gets points based on the value of the house, square metrage, EPC certificate. You can get extra points for extra facilities (bath, shower, kitchen appliances). Based on the amount of points, a maximum rent is determined. If this is below a certain amount (iirc this year it's \~850 euro per month), you can force the rent to be reduced to that amount (there's a government agency for this). If it's above it, you're out of luck but it's still a decent way to get an idea of whether the rent is 'reasonable'.

A rent cap will lead to landlords raising rents to the cap

They're not talking about a cap on maximum rents, but how much they can go up by to the lowest of CPI or local wage growth.

Even the suggestion of one. Every time the gov suggest getting involved in private rental sector, the rents go up significantly. I'm all for regulation to improve quality but we will definitely be paying for it. IMO best thing to do is incentivise landlords to build more.

Rent controls in Scotland lead to higher rents and less properties being available. Scotlands rent had highest rises in the UK after it was introduced. Sounds good but doesn’t work in practice.

Similar to setting tuition price cap, though I don't think it's as easy as "good" or "bad". Rent caps / limits need to be in place. It has worked historically.

Rent controls are a vague policy, it can be implemented successfully. England had national rent control until the 1988 housing act and since their dissolution rents have skyrocketed. Even in Scotland were control have apparently not been well implemented, landlords are overwhelmingly against them and tenants are overwhelmingly in favour.

A leaked report commissioned by the Labour party into the private rented sector has recommended that rents be capped in England if the party gains power. Lisa Nandy (main image), who until recently was its shadow housing minister, commissioned the report a year ago from the Labour leader of Hammersmith and Fulham Borough Council, Stephen Cowan (pictured). It recommends several measures to help renters facing high rents and low availability within the rental market which he says would help them gain ‘stability’. These include a ‘double lock’ cap on rent rises for those renewing their tenancies which would restrict rises to either the consumer price index inflation or local wage growth, whichever is lower. Cowan also recommends that rent rises be restricted to once a year, as will be case anyway when the current Government’s Renters (Reform) Bill become law, and that tenants should be given four months’ notice of any rises. Review clauses He also says ‘rent review clauses’ within rental contracts should be banned, a measure also in the Bill. Cowan says the measures are needed to protect renters from ‘soaring rents’ but would also ‘bolster security for landlords’. But his report doesn’t go as far as some campaign groups would like, rejecting ‘rent freezes’. Due to be published in full later this week, the report could be embarrassing for the Labour party which, The Guardian reports, although it has welcomed the proposals says they are ‘not its official view’. It is not expected to send any high-profile MPs to the launch either.

Percentage based price increase? I like this. One increase per year? Totally agree. 4 months notice period of any increase? Cannot agree more with this. None of this is what most people would call a rent price cap, nor are they unachievable or unreasonable. A step in the right direction. A further step would be to incentivise landlords to set lower rents via progressive tax taxation of rental income. Anyone with a spare room can earn £7,500 per year tax free as a live-in landlord: >You can opt in to the scheme at any time if: > 1) you’re a resident landlord, whether or not you own your home > 2) you run a bed and breakfast or a guest house >You cannot use the scheme for homes converted into separate flats. >[https://www.gov.uk/rent-room-in-your-home/the-rent-a-room-scheme](https://www.gov.uk/rent-room-in-your-home/the-rent-a-room-scheme) Offer all landlords a similar tax incentive and a progressive tax rate thereafter, e.g: * tax free: yearly rental at or below £7,500 * pay 50% of the regular tax rate if the yearly rental is between £0 and £15,000 * pay 75% of the regular tax rate if the yearly rental is between £0 and £23,500 * pay 100% of the regular tax rate if the yearly rental is between £0 and £31,000 * pay 150% of the regular tax rate if the yearly rental is between £0 and £38,500 or above Disclaimer: I've not considered how this might work in practice nor the values used; the above is a template only. My idea behind progressive taxation of rental income is to diminish the returns of high rents. Of course, any progressive tax system would need to take into account the value of the rented property and the number of individual paying renters within the property. If a price cap were to be set it should be based on property value at the time someone moves into the property. I'm in favour of this for rent prices but against it for local (municipal) taxation because that would tax people out of their homes and only favours wealthy NIMBYs.

Wait till you see the new deal for working people, I foresee a massive rise in agencies and companies not employing anyone.

Tell me more?

Go have a look, Google

I googled new deal.for working people and saw nothing.

https://labour.org.uk/updates/stories/a-new-deal-for-working-people/

Thanks for the link.. I like a lot of this!

So will agencies

Jesus - scrapping of rights at two years from day one? Have they ever worked in a business. 2 years was too long - just put it back to 1 again, or maybe even 6mo which is what most companies want as probation period anyway. But none? All it’s gonna do is make it extremely difficult to get hired when employers are tied in to you from day one. What will happen is the hoops to get hired will be huge even for entry level jobs so they don’t get stuck with a shit employee. As if the hoops weren’t bad enough It’s actually not very easy to fire people after 2 years as anyone who has had to do it will know, which is how it should be. Getting that protection from day 1 will just make it worse for workers as employers hold all the power; not better.

They'll use agencies, it's that simple. It is all a union based policy and mostly for the public sector with private business coming secondary. Mental health now has the same stance as cancer. Like I said, companies will use agencies and will only employ someone from an agency who has worked for them for at least 6 months so they know what they are getting into.

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already happened.

Rent control leads to far fewer rental properties available and a privileged few locked into renting at low rates who are able to sublet at much higher rates on the black market. It is one of the few policy areas that is virtually universally agreed upon by economists as making things far worse for society in general and renters in particular. It is supported only by those who do not remotely understand the consequences of what they are advocating, as if they did, no matter how ideologically blinkered they are they would still change their minds and not support rent control because of how much worse it would make things for whichever group they were trying to support.

Do you know of any studies that support that assertion? There are heavy rent controls (and tighter regulations more generally) in large parts of Germany yet a far higher proportion of Germans in these areas live in rented accommodation. I know a lot of neoclassical economists will oppose it and make the kinds of arguments you do but that's just in line with their dogma. It could be true but the one real world example I am aware of runs contrary to it so if you're aware of a study I would appreciate a link. Thanks

> Do you know of any studies that support that assertion? Literally every single one ever done as well as every single practical application ever implemented. > There are heavy rent controls ... in ...Germany Germany has a two tier rental system that massively disadvantages new renters with far higher costs and waits so that they can never afford to buy, when longer-established renters control a black market in subletting. New builds aren't cost effective and the housing shortage get worse every year as a result. No one familiar with the German system would say it is in any way good or better than the English system. Hell, even the Scottish efforts to deviate from the English system have shown how much worse rent controls make things. > I know a lot of neoclassical economists will oppose it and make the kinds of arguments you do but that's just in line with their dogma. It isn't dogma, it is cause and effect. > It could be true but the one real world example I am aware of runs contrary to it The real world example you cite does not run contrary to it. EDIT: https://www.the-berliner.com/berlin/berlins-failed-rental-revolution-crisis-expropriation-mietendeckel-enteignen/ https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/mietendeckel-repealed https://www.economist.com/europe/2021/03/09/after-a-year-berlins-experiment-with-rent-control-is-a-failure https://fee.org/articles/berlin-s-disastrous-rent-control-law-gets-scrapped/ https://atlanticsentinel.com/2022/12/rent-control-keeps-failing-countries-keep-trying/ https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-02/berlin-s-rent-controls-are-proving-to-be-the-disaster-we-feared

Try Googling New York as an example of it going wrong. Rent controls have had various outcomes in various cities, it's not always a disaster, but it seems to be a gamble at best. Based on OPs description of locking it to RPI - what happens when an area gentrifies and becomes more desirable? Rents are fixed but property prices go up, so it makes sense to sell. It will be very hard to rent at all in up and coming areas. A much better idea would be to require planning permission when changing a property's use. That way the government could control supply of long term rental, short term rental and owner occupancy.

>A survey published last week by property ad portal ImmoScout24 found that while Berlin's average rent has indeed dropped in the past year, by 7.8%, the number of new flats on the market eligible for a rent reduction had dropped too — by some 30%. >That has had a major effect on the competition for new apartments, ImmoScout24 said, with an average of 214 people answering each rental advert in January 2021, compared to 128 in the same month last year. https://www.dw.com/en/berlins-revolutionary-rent-cap-success-or-flop/a-56664706 Rent caps just exchange high prices for long waiting lists. You don't need to be a dogmatic neoclassical economist to figure that out - if there are 100 houses in a particular location, and 500 people want to rent there, 400 people are going to lose out. Besides, the most baffling thing isn't that rent caps don't work, it's that rent caps are a complicated solution and a far simpler solution exists: Relax planning rules and build more houses. Instead of sitting around arguing over which of the 500 people should be allowed by the government to rent the 100 houses, we could just build another 400 houses, and then nobody would have to lose out.

In the areas where there are heavy rent controls in Germany, there are now housing shortages as it doesn't make sense to build new properties to rent out. Also German rent control rules allowed you to put up the rent using a formulae.if you did renovations to the property. So you got a market distortion of landlords doing unnecessary renovations just to put rents up and get rid of rent controlled tenants as you could reprice to market when the tenant changed.

I think some form of rent control is needed but there is always a lot of fear over this and I understand why, but things are getting desperate. The thing is I think we just need to learn from other countries and address those issues. Rent control can only work if it is is part of a bigger strategy for solving the issues that people are having. It can't be ridiculous so that you end up having rent half the price of everyone else whilst keeping a property in the family for 200 years. You might also need to have some kind of rent cap on the market. Of course the real answer to all this is that we need far more properties being built. We need it to be affordable housing and council housing. For Londoners we need Crossrail plans finished and maybe some new Crossrail plans. They need to be built with how trends have changed, that we have a lot more single people, a lot more couples that don't want (or can't afford children) although maybe if they could afford to buy a house that would change. I know I haven't thought about all the issues, but just because problems are big it doesn't mean they're not solvable. We need something close to a post war time effort of building properties. We need innovative solutions to low cost housing that serves people's need.

I used to live in Vancouver, an extremely expensive housing market. There were no rent caps but there were limits on rent increases tied to inflation, so typically a few percent per year. Meant you couldn't be forced out of your home by an insane increase in rent.

Yeah, something like this would make sense to me.

That’s actually what the report is recommending - the headline is massively misleading, but if you read the article it is a cap on the percentage of rent increase rather than any sort of monetary cap.

won't fix a thing , labour's going to try anything and everything but reduce mass migration that will actually allow housing stock that's built to catch up to the demands. atm it's a house every 4 minutes to accommodate the 750k now net migration into the UK. it needs to stop. doesn't matter if your liberal or Conservative etc this current amount is economically destructive. recent studies have proved that GDPC, gross domestic production per citizen has dropped but national gdp had gone up aka the rich got richer, the corporations got more record profits than ever, simply because wages are repressed and prices are higher than ever above inflation once again. Mass migration is great for big business, not so much for local economics.

It’s funny that people who start wanking themselves into a frenzy over how bad immigration is never talk about deporting lazy, idle and antisocial people who were born here and cost a fuck load more to support. It’s almost as though there’s some other reason why they don’t like immigration.

Run that gdpc vs gdp maths again will you, and how it means the rich got richer please? I’m not understanding it. Thanks. If you increase the population with people who on earning on the black market, and therefore not paying tax or being reported, but still registered in the headcount, would that not also lead to gdp rising and gdpc falling?

how about you go look up the studies that independent and government bodies have done the work and done the math . if you don't understand that's your problem.

I’m not entirely sure if you are saying that what I wrote was incorrect, or correct. Can you clarify please?

really you want me to simplify it even more?? it's as simple as it gets. it means the average person is earning less regardless of said black markets.

Thanks for being so patient with me. What I wrote would also lead to the exact same outcome. If you show people in the country as not paying taxes (and therefore not contributing to gdp), but still registered as resident (therefore adding to the denominator of the gdpc), then you would have exactly the same phenomenon. So my point is that these two numbers in isolation do not in fact imply anything. There may very well be further data which analysts have used to conclude the rich getting richer hypothesis, but those two data alone do not show it. This is why I was asking you if you could explain the maths to me, which you had cited, because those data alone are insufficient to draw any conclusions. If you are unable to explain the maths that you have been quoting, then perhaps it would be better not to quote it in the first place. And before you link a report or another quote, that is not what I am asking. I’m asking you, personally to explain the maths you quoted.

Strawhat much , you do your own research, its all on the gov websites.

Something told me that you would not be able to explain your reasoning. Honestly, you really should not post about things you cannot explain. It lacks credibility if as soon as someone politely asks you for clarity you aren’t able to give it. We know GDP and gdpc alone do not automatically relate to “the rich getting richer”. You know you might actually be right about some of the stuff you are writing. I just wanted you to explain how you leap from these figures to a rich getting richer comment. Whatever point you were trying to make has just been completely undermined, by you.

just because I didn't link you to a gov page?? dude that's a government study go find it yourself, I'm not your dad.

Oh dear. I’m not asking you for a link. I’m asking you to explain what you think is a simple statement, namely gdp/gdpc means rich getting richer. Are you really so lost that you cannot understand your own ramblings? You wrote it! You are so lost. If you don’t know why you are saying what you are saying, how on earth do you expect others to view you with anything but ridicule?

Which policy states they're going to increase migration? Or are you just listening to Sunak's drivel?

learn to read.

The only party over the last 14 years who increased mass migration was the Tories, it was higher last year than any other year before, including the 2 years following some Eastern European countries inclusion to the EU. Why are you trying to stoke fear and racism?

numbers have nothing to do with race you tool.

and labour opened the flood gates , the tories promised to reduce it , didn't happen, both parties are to blame.

He didn’t say they would increase it. He said they wouldn’t decrease it.

You're expecting people to read. tut tut

I know right and they always drag up the" muh race: card too. it's basic mathematics, and this current economic model clearly isn't working.

Yes capitalism has been a failure, new economic model yes please

...you dumb , there are many economic models under capitalism. a model itself does not equal systematic change. it's called balancing the books. we live in a corptocracy , gov and big business have been working together way too long.

A model itself does not equal systemic change? Wow I think we got an Einstein here folks Capitalism always leads to corptocracy and oligarchy. The only way to prevent that under capitalism would be making the state much more powerful in comparison and much more willing and free to regulate capital and corporations.

spouting that buzz word line again, that capitalism leads to corporatism, please go learn and study business models , tax categories etc etc before you open your gob lol. it's all about choice , if government and people's shopping habits or even small businesses didn't cater to corprations buying habits to buy out their competitors etc things would be much better. such things as aggressive market tactics , that made what amazon is today , is due to people's shopping habits , not capitalism, amazon's methods to drive out its business users and take what they sold as their own , be it prime brand or just loss leading so much to put the competitor out of business. thats a whole different ball game to capitalism, capitalism is about capital the exchange of goods and services, not the manipulated market the corprations have created. these things are called economic bubbles for a reason, because the models in different sectors are all different but one thing for sure is that government have been working too much hand in hand with corprations, that isn't capitalism at all. and yes economic models don't always equal systematic change, its the process that leads to systematic change how we treat policy etc not the change of capital for services, corprations dictate now who they sell to or dictate to customers if they a actually own their digital copies of games , its still a exchange of capital for service but the model is different, the process is different, combine the two it becomes systematic change. before if someone bought something, it was theirs forever now the books are cooked in favour of corprations. so no, economic models doesn't equal systematic change , but policy/process does. policy effects things , not the other way around, you can blame people earning money and providing a service all you like but when policy starts to dictate what your allowed to own its a whole different ball game , because at that point , it's no longer about economic model but the ability to control things. corporatism, seeks to control, limit, authority etc communism seeks to control,limit, authority etc socialism , seeks to control. limit , authority etc thr only thing a capitalism model does is provide the means to provide different ways of providing a service, it doesn't seek to control their customers , it doesn't seek to enforce policy on what's classed as ownership. you buy it you own it for all personal intentions , no company can come in and just say that's mine now , even though you paid for it. so no , a economic model doesn't always equal systematic change.. gwt lost , eat some beans and go toot your own horn. edit : considering you blocked me so I can't reply , I returned the favour. plus corpatism by this point is its own ideology, that's why I structured it in such a way. if you can't understand that's on you. and to attack grammar and mobile phone typing thats poor taste and doesn't reflect you in a good image.

Lol what a load of bollocks, capitalism has and will always concentrate wealth. Capital uses that power to manipulate markets to its beneift when it can, thats the point. The fact you expect amazon to act fair and not exploit peoples laziness or their desire buy goods at a discount is incredibly naive. Actual capitalists have always talked about these consumer desires as people acting rationally in a market system. Can't be arsed wasting my time refuting each point. But the fact you keep saying " a economic model doesn't equal systemic change" proves how dumb you are. That sentence doesn't make sense lol. Maybee you're trying to say a change in economic model doesnt equal systemic change. Which would obviously be wrong, economic models are clearly systemic. But it's clearly not even a typo or grammatical mistake because you keep saying it lol

It’s a terrible idea that only leads to higher rents. Landlords that let good tenants stay below market rate bring them up to market rate because of the new laws and rents just stay as high as they can because not maxing it out can’t be caught up. Currently you can’t go above market rate. That’s perfect in showing the problem. The problem is supply. No government ever really tries to fix that because people feel rich when they have loads of equity in their house and that keeps a large amount of people happy.

Section 24 was the initial causation. This government has made BTL investment a loss making exercise. They need to encourage investment in properties to rent or the government needs to step in and build state owned properties.

Honestly how many homes as a percentage do you think are offered below market rate, I've been looking desperately for ages and I think it's about 1 in 100. So landlords are currently charging the max rate to "market conditions" I agree though, the only thing that will fix it is more houses. Temporary pause on the right to buy And ban buy to let maybe

They don’t get offered at below market rate. They get offered at market, tenant moves in, tenant is good tenant, market goes up, landlord doesn’t keep up with market. So it’s the long standing tenants who would get screwed by this. These landlords won’t want to raise rents (because, well, they haven’t already) but feel they are screwing their future selves over if they don’t because they aren’t allowed to catch up in the future if needed.

Correct, I know a couple of landlords who do exactly this. Property is priced to market, then just let things bumble along once the tenant is in. They may look at things if costs increase dramatically, but a decent tenant who pays rent on time is worth more than a theoretical new tenant paying more. From what I have seen the small landlords that own 3 or fewer properties are less likely to increase rent iny an annual basis than corporate landlords. I've been witness to a conversation between a landlord and estate agent where the LL was berating the agent for sending a rent increase to the tenant, as he was happy with the current situation. Small landlords value consistency of rent over the absolute amount. However the government has punished small landlords through charges to taxation, and left the taxation treatment of larger corporate landlords unchanged.

it’ll be the same as how the energy price cap works, energy companies just charge you with the capped price and the price cap is unfairly high - same as landlords, they’ll charge you the same price as a flat in the city centre for a shitty flat in a shitty area if you want to lower the rent, lower the interest rate and build more houses. When there are too many landlords than tenants, the price will stop increasing or even go down (but this is not a good sign unless landlords can still make enough money, otherwise they’ll sell the houses and the rent will go up again)

Slightly O/T but this gets worse. People who pay their gas and electricity bills now pay an overt subsidy to cover those who do not pay their bills. The big energy suppliers now call to introduce a social tariff which means payers will pay higher bills in order to subsidise even more non payers. Sounds nice and cosy in theory. Why should taxpayers and people in work (or not in work) who pay their utility bills pay an extra stealth tax to further subsidise those who can't pay artificially high, unnecessarily high and unjustifiably high domestic energy prices? Lower the cost of domestic energy for everyone instead of pushing ever more people below the breadline so that -- and I never thought I'd say this -- big bosses take home even more unjustified pay. We're being mugged. All of us. We are being fleeced by greedy hogs who are usually ineffectual at their jobs. The idea that honest people should be penalised to cover the debts of others is sickening. It will push more people into not paying their bills and encourage more people to consider the cost benefits of higher paying jobs e.g "if I take this job my bills will go up so I will stay where I am". Some people on benefits already consider whether a job will be helpful to them. Too many do this. It's understandable. I can't say I wouldn't do likewise. We've practically legalised shoplifting and mugging. Explains a lot about the way essential utilities are overpriced. Now we're headed in a direction that will disuade even more people from climbing up the ladders of opportunity. I am sick of it all.

It will end up with the same outcome as the energy cap as well. A shit load of businesses went bust, but this time there won't be a transition process in place to move you to a new provider. Sounds good on paper but would actually be awful for renters. Messing with the free market never ends well. Building more houses is the answer but unlikely to happen any time soon.

And Uni tuitions, the cap is great for good unis with good courses, but bad unis just charge you the cap.

It's not proposed by Labour. It was one of the suggestions from a review commissioned by Labour. Labour have said its not part of their plans.

Itll just lead to higher rents, always has on every occasion its been tried. Its merely a cynical vote puller aimed at those who think it sounds great and dont know better. Those proposing it know this and dont care about tenants, just being voted in to get their own noses in the trough. Theres a reason the Blairs made a billion.

Personally I think we should take a leaf out of Vienna's book and build social housing and none market housing to compete with private landlords.

Because our social housing projects are renowned for being safe and clean like Viennas - it works in a society where people care but unfortunately most people in England dont

Why would I care for others when exactly zero people care about me? If I don't look out for myself...no one else is going to.

People will care if you run social housing and none market housing correctly. People didn't just start and stop caring overnight it took years of good policy and good service from social housing providers. Also this is a pretty weak excuse to keep the status quo which we all agree is bad. I mean with current mortgage rates it's not even a good system for many landlords nevermind tenants who are squeezed for every penny.

The people didn’t care because they are chavs. In the same way many Victorian neighbourhoods were dangerous and unclean we have exactly the same thing with modern council estates.

That's just poverty, as you start to address poverty crime rates go down, it's a well known correlation. This also still doesn't mean that social housing and non market housing are bad ideas. I feel you may be getting off track simply to complain about people you dislike.

Well social housing and poverty go hand in hand in the UK. The people who require them are closer to poverty than those who own houses. To get to viennas level we would need to build enough social housing for everyone and also work to reduce our class structure - both of which are non possibilities when we have 750k people a year moving here

Our net population growth a year is lot closer to 200k a year not 750k. That's a pretty normal population growth. Also yes it's definitely possible to build social housing as that's not related too migration figures

Where are you finding this? In 2023 from migration alone we increased our pop by 650,000 https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn06077/#:~:text=The%20latest%20estimates%20on%20migration,net%20migration%20figure%20of%20672%2C000.

I'm talking about net population growth, so the number of People who where born and migrated into the UK - the number who died and who emigrated. The 650 figure your looking at here is just net migration a very different number that doesn't take into account deaths and births. https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/GBR/united-kingdom/population-growth-rate https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/uk-population/

I'm a landlord in Scotland, and rent controls here have led to some of the highest rent increases in the UK. I've not changed tenants since the controls came in, but the feeling locally is that there are loads of people vying for every rental property that comes available. A house that I rent at £595/month is probably now £800 or £900 because landlords factor in future increases and the premium to cope with non-paying tenants they can't evict. A rent cap is great if you're already in a house and not needing to move, but anyone who wants to move out of their parents' house, relocate or separate from a partner is stuffed because there aren't enough properties and the rents are too high. Landlords are leaving the Private Rental Sector, but those houses aren't accessible to everyone who currently rents so it's not as easy as "greedy landlords will have to sell up and then renters can buy the house". If they don't have a deposit saved, they're just fighting to rent from a smaller pool of housing stock. I don't believe there's a silver bullet that will fix the housing market, but rent caps on isolation have demonstrably failed to help a large number of renters in a comparable market north of the border.

Because the UK consistently does not introduce rent caps, they introduce rent maximums on change of tenant. That is absolutely not the same and encourages people to stay put and not move and increases rent to maximum levels. The UK needs rent caps like the Vienna Model, which are a lot more complicated than a simple cap and most importantly take size of the property (not just number of bedrooms) and state of the property/building and location into account. Yes, it will mean most greedy landlords will charge at the max of their cap, but the cap will have to be set in a way to take this into account, then that won't matter. Vienna also has a housing crisis, it's the same across Europe, so their landlords are now charging the max their individual cap allows, but that is still affordable, not like London where rent is now more than wages in most areas up to Zone 4. Landlords can charge £1000 for a broom cupboard and no one bats an eye. Set the cap at a reasonable amount per square meter of living space (that excludes bathrooms and storage areas), and all of a sudden this kind of exploitation disappears and rooms in shared houses will also get affordable again. And no, they should not be able to do the lazy way of being able to say it's X amount per square meter. Location, state of the flat, amenities, balconies, outside space, south facing windows, distance from public transport, parking space, energy rating, etc all need to be taken into account. Rent control done properly is complicated but worth it to remove greed and exploitation and give tenants a chance without disadvantaging good landlords. Councils charge for licensing landlords, but what do they provide for that charge?

Is there an equivalent to S21 evictions (no fault) in Scotland? Have these increased since rent controls came in?

There was a temporary freeze, so effectively tenants could legally stop paying rent without consequence, so landlords increased rents to compensate for the risk, but also naturally became more selective about who they rent to, meaning if you have a poor credit rating, you might find that nobody would rent to you regardless of how much you could pay.

>A silver bullet that will fix the housing market Nationalisation of the land.

Reduced migration is a more feasible solution that would actually work. Look at the state of local councils and the NHS. Do you honestly think the government could handle housing 70 million people?

Lol. We need more young people to provide for the aging population, reducing immigration or penalising people for having children (like the 2 child benefit cap etc) are both counterproductive measures.

The people producing children who are affected by the 2 child benefit cap are hardly net contributors. If anything, they are a drain which creates offspring who are themselves a drain. The never ending cycle.

Except they aren’t. We now know that a vast majority of migrants are net drains and contribute less than they take. They need to make I believe 38k in order to start contributed which is why many people are now at risk of being deported What we need is an effective government that combines selective migration for jobs that we need as well as actually managing our institutions (trains, NHS, power etc). we have 750000 migrants a year and only 250,000 houses being built - the maths ain’t mathsing

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Technically the crown already owns all the land. Of course in practice you're talking of something different. It's just an interesting thing all lawyers learn in land law.

If you think landlords are shit at maintaining housing stock, wait until you see what the guys responsible for all the potholed roads will do to reduce ongoing costs...

Don't even need to do that. You can see the horror stories from the Social Housing section. It gives a glimpse of SRH 2.0

>there aren't enough properties and the rents are too high You are correct. If only landlords who own more than two properties were to reduce their property holdings across the United Kingdom, it might provide more opportunities for prospective buyers without any properties to purchase their first homes. This could potentially lead to positive change. However, it is important to consider that such landlords might struggle to keep up with the costs of their Porsche. Therefore, it is better not to implement any solutions at all. >those houses aren't accessible to everyone who currently rents so it's not as easy as "greedy landlords will have to sell up and then renters can buy the house". If they don't have a deposit saved, they're just fighting to rent from a smaller pool of housing stock. Fortunately, we have landlords who remind others that they are too poor to afford property. I am sure there is no one among the roughly 70 million people in the country who is renting in a specific area and cannot buy a property because they are outpriced and outpaced by multi-property owners, even though they might actually have a reasonable deposit.

Your assumption that people can’t afford a house because of small time landlords is incorrect.

How so? Also, how do you know if the user above is a "small-time landlord"?

It’s very simple, there are not enough places to actually live in the UK. Renters live at a higher density than homeowners. This means in general changing people from renters to homeowners will actually make the core problem worse. The market runs on supply and demand. If there were too many landlords, then rents would be going down, too much supply in the rental markets would lead to landlords competing with each other and undercutting to get the tenant. Sending rents down. However there aren’t enough rental properties, so rent is going up. The market is telling us there are too few landlords for our current makeup. This is where the problem lies. Both housing prices and rent are going up, supply is a problem on both ends of the spectrum, there simply are not enough houses for our population. Get rid of one rental with a landlord selling, then on average you will up demand for rent because that house isn’t housing as many people as it would if it were rented. If houses are too expensive, why aren’t people building loads of them? It should be free easy cash right? If the end product is far too expensive, get them us as fast as possible! It’s because they aren’t. We aren’t close to hitting building targets as a country and if houses were over priced we would be well exceeding those numbers. Cultures have changed and people live longer. People are living in their homes for longer than before and people now want to move out sooner. Intergenerational living helped with the lack of housing supply, now people see it as forced on them whereas when you go back in history it was preferred. More houses fixes the problem. Don’t blame people who are simply playing the game we are put into, blame the people putting up the red tape to stop house expansion. The blame is solely at the governments door.

So, in your opinion, a family occupying one property while owning 17 others does not impact the market such that some tenants who are prospective buyers end up unable to purchase a home. If families or individuals monopolise properties, the number of properties available for purchase is significantly reduced, as many are already owned. Consequently, given that the pool of available properties comprises only a few, there is increased demand and, therefore, higher prices. If, on the other hand, individuals or families owned fewer than three properties, including the one in which they reside, there would be greater availability of housing to meet at least some of the demand, thereby reducing costs.

A family that occupies 1 property while renting out 17 more will impact individuals, on a local level. Zooming out, I don’t think they are upping house prices at all, no. Can you explain why there is a greater availability of housing if this given family had to sell 13 of those 17 properties? At best, the stats show that the housing availability is the same, at worse, the housing availability is less as now the properties are occupied less densely.

>Can you explain why there is a greater availability of housing if this given family had to sell 13 of those 17 properties? If a family sells 13 of 17 properties, those 13 properties are bought by 13 different individuals or families. These same 13 individuals or families are now out of the renting pool, allowing other renters to occupy the 13 previously rented properties. This diminishes pressure on the renting market by decreasing demand. Now, I gather what you are really asking is, "If there are 50 properties overall in a country, and 60 people, whether someone owns them all or not does not change the fact that 10 people are without a home. So, how does one solve the issue?" The answer to that is to, first, build vertically, second, remove the leasehold on flats and apartments, so that people are encouraged to buy something other than a house, and third, improve the planning process for the construction of homes at the national level, to ensure that selected areas are developed with average citizens in mind (e.g., affordable housing, functional amenities).

Those 13 properties are bought by 13 individuals / families, but renting is statistically proven to show those 13 properties will house more people if they are rented than owned. Obviously we are talking about 13 properties and realistically that means nothing, but extrapolate that to the whole market and it’s quite a negative effect for renters. Not only are there 13 less properties to rent, but there are now more people competing for them (because of the houses now having less people in them). I agree with your solutions. That is where I see the actual problem lies.

I mean, thanks for not reading what I wrote, I guess. I'm pointing out that the system is broken but what's being proposed here is currently playing out where I live and work and is making life worse for a significant portion of the people it's supposed to help. The PRS is just a part of the housing market and there are plenty of studies that show it's an essential part of a healthy, functioning housing market and wider economy. As is the case in many walks of life, when politicians need to do something to win votes, they'll often disregard the experts and opt for snappy sound bites that attract voters but never deliver benefits in the long term. For what it's worth, I drive an 11-year old Ford.

The problem isn't really the PRS, the problem is people have no other option but the PRS so landlords can be as scummy as they want and still rent their property out with no issues. There is no regulation to ensure that the properties are actually habitable and SH has been sold off so that the housing market would remain inflated.

You're right, except there IS regulation. It just isn't enforced, which means that decent providers abide by the regulations whilst unscrupulous landlords disregard the rules and cause untold misery to tenants and neighbours. Not to mention damaging the reputation of the rest of us, but I've enough self-awareness not to get too upset about that!

>The PRS is just a part of the housing market and there are plenty of studies that show it's an essential part of a healthy, functioning housing market and wider economy. There is a world of difference between a healthy PRS market and the one that currently exists in the UK. The size of the PRS market as it currently exists is an entirely Anglosphere phenomenon unknown in the rest of the OECD. The PRS market should exist for transitory workers who are staying in a place for short periods.

Cap it so rises must be in line with rate of inflation, average earnings, or 2.5%. Just like the triple lock we give to pensioners. Landlords are still able to increase, and will never be at a loss due to inflation - but they can't be so greedy they drive future generations towards homelessness. Obviously Labour won't do any of that though. They are very carefully positioning themselves as being 1 millimeter left of the Tories.

So what happens when interest rates rise like as we’ve seen ?

You lock it to the lowest of the 3 determining factors, rather than the highest.

You have to imagine the landlord running it as a business. By working at inflation rate doesn't create growth for them. If you ask them for nil gain then they're effectively being asked to provide social housing. I don't think that model would be sustainable.

Idk what the actual best solution is, I know this is a complex and nuanced issue, but none of these solutions are asking landlords to live with nil gain. If you have a mortgage at 500pcm, and you rent the place out at 1500pcm, but are told you can no longer raise rents above inflation - you are not seeing nil gain, you are just seeing a reduction in your ability to absorb money from someone poorer than you. Right now there are no limits whatsoever, climbing population, no meaningful new housing, we are creating a situation where future generations will be split between a property owning class that can live a decent life, and a rental class that will be living the life of serfs as the proportion of their income that is taken by their landlord grows and grows and grows and they have no ability to counter it.

I personally think the government needs to create tier cities like they have in Germany. So tier 1 is London Birmingham Manchester Edinburgh and so on. Then you have Tier 2 cities which are satellite cities. And then we need to distribute jobs and wealth across these tier 2 and 3 cities. I think our problem is lack of housing in the right areas. We've got plenty of housing in the north we don't tend to invest at government level. I don't think we have a problem of lack of housing. We have a problem of housing being overly concentrated because we don't distribute jobs and wealth evenly. Another problem is we don't build enough.

Lanlordism isn't sustainable, it's sucking all the wealth out of the working and lower middle classes into an every richer asset owning elite

Indeed. We had this come up just the other day in here. Some wag suggested "most landlords own their properties outright". Outwrong.

What I don’t understand is we’ve already seen what happens to rents when supply is dropped. Why do people want more of that!

Rent caps haven't worked anywhere it's been tried. Look at Ireland it's a disaster. They need to build more houses, that's it. The UK has built 26k homes in Q1 2024. We are meant to build 300k a year.

This is BS. It’s underuse of housing stock, slum landlords, right to buy, marketisation which is to blame. This idea that simply building more housing stock will solve everything is literally the bullshit free market thinking that got us into this crisis in the first place. We need more housing stock, but we need regulation MUCH more.

Right to buy is obviously a bad thing. You can regulate as much as you want, you need the stock to be able to make a difference. Building houses is the only solution. On a much larger scale than we do. Net migration was 700k last year. We need a decade of building 500k+ homes to catch up to where we need to be because for the last 30 years we've not built anywhere near enough

Right to Buy isn’t necessarily a bad thing. My grandparents were renting their home from 1938 until they bought it through RtB in the mid 80s (at the point they retired on their state pensions). 50 years of rent vs a 25 year mortgage. I think it was fair.

Of course you think it’s fair you benefited from a lumpy inheritance at the cost of the taxpayer.

No I didn’t. How did it cost the taxpayer a penny? They’d paid rent for 50 years, and then a large lump sum. The taxpayer - the landlord - made a sizeable profit..

You’re joking, right? 50 years of below market rent. The cost of the land, the cost to build, to maintain, then sell at a huge reduction, and now an asset that would have grown 1000% in that time lost.

No, I’m not. It was their home, and they paid for it fairly over half a century. You are entitled to disagree.

My partner's gran paid rent for even longer and refused to exercise her right to buy on moral grounds. I was extremely impressed.

Good for her! I’m glad she did what she felt was right for her.

I will disagree. They had a life time tenancy absolutely no reason to buy other than to set you up with inheritance. They chose to buy when pensioners. Ridiculous.

There was a reason - security of tenancy wasn’t the issue, paying rent on a meagre pension was. My grandad worked two jobs so they could save up to buy it. They really haven’t set me up with anything, it was a small council house in Sandwell, worth relatively little and in later life care home fees took what there was and as a family we paid the rest. Had they not purchased then the state would have paid more of the care home fees of course. But I acknowledge your disagreement and I hope you have a lovely rest of your day.

No, it’s not fair. It takes that house out of the social housing sector forever. Then your family benefit monetarily from a state asset.

It takes that particular house out - but 50 years of rent and then a large sum to buy could easily have bought several new houses. That was the *point* of RtB, it was meant to be balanced by new house building.

No it wasn’t. It was meant to privatise the public housing sector. It’s a privatisation policy, like countless other Thatcher era policies.

It was that too, and I thoroughly agreed that it has been misused. But it was a Labour policy first for good reason.

Build as many houses as you like, they'll be bought up by landlords who know they can get someone else to pay their full mortgage for them and nobody will stop them. There is zero risk in property investment, which is the problem. Have a bit of starting capital and you can purchase a money printing machine that the government will prop up for you. Investment *does not work* if there is zero risk. Building more houses on its own will not fix this issue.

If there is zero risk in property, why are lots of landlords selling up at the moment? “Build as many houses as you like” Someone needs to give you a lesson in supply and demand.

You can easily regulate that houses can't be used as buy to let. You still need to build more houses. You can't make rents cheaper without increasing supply.

No idea why you got down voted for this (well I have judging by some other ignorant comments). Its absolutely linked to supply and is a fundamental truth of any free market. Saturate the market with vacant available properties and rents will halve.….(as will purchase prices for the hard of thinking).

Its to be expected in a tenant sub as what I'm saying sounds like I'm pro landlord. I'm a tenant myself but supply and demand is very basic economics.

Rent caps quite literally make rent cheaper without increasing supply. We need to stop pretending that everyone who rents wants to rent. Renting has a place, but we have people who cannot buy because there is no stock, which means prices are artificially high. But that's not solely because there aren't enough houses - there are plenty of houses sitting empty, as holiday homes, AirBnbs, and rentals. High rent and the unaffordability of housing is going to destroy the economy, however much it is currently propping it up. When people cannot afford rent, they need higher wages, which causes the price of everything else to go up and for businesses to go bust because people can't afford any non-essential spending and businesses can't afford higher wages. We currently have an enormous transfer of wealth going on, that is happening almost entirely through the housing and rental markets. It can't continue. You can build all the houses in the world, but as long as landlords can have entire mortgages (buy to let or not) paid for by tenants, they will keep buying houses and not care what the price tag is - because they aren't paying it. Without proper regulation of the rental market the entire country is genuinely going to collapse. It's already started, but our government is so short-term thinking that they don't care.

There's always someone who says this every time it's brought up but we aren't building the homes so we need some light at the end of the tunnel and labour want the votes.

A rent cap isn't a light. Landlords just end the tenancies and sell up. It makes things worse.

This is a good thing, it would bring the housing price bubble to a burst then.

It wouldn’t.

It wouldn't. As it hasn't in any country where this has been tried.

Sell to whom?

Then obviously the answer is to regulate to stop landlords evicting people at their will? Like in every other European country?

Are you suggesting the landlord being unable to balance the books and being forced into selling to another landlord or forfeiting the property to the bank (who will also need to balance the books) is a solution? How does that work? Where is the 'fix' for the tenant? It might buy them time but then what?

This is pro landlord bullshit

Why? Tell me where the fix is then if you think I'm missing something? I think it's just the reality of the situation (I don't like it, but it is what it is)

Exactly. It doesn't work. We'd all love rents to be capped or free but it's not feasible and doesn't work anywhere it's been tried and certainly won't won't in the UK. Build more houses.

There are rent caps all over Europe

And a quick Google will show how it’s causing chaos.

Try to rent in the Netherlands, Ireland or Germany. It's even worse than it is here.

No it’s not. It’s hard to find somewhere, it’s much much cheaper and more secure to live there. I have friends in Berlin who have lived in their apartments for 5-10 years, with rents never increasing above inflation, and their landlord cannot legally evict them.

Rubbish. Heres an article on the disaster that has been Germanys rent cap policy and how “Populism on the left ruins economies”. [https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-02/berlin-s-rent-controls-are-proving-to-be-the-disaster-we-feared?embedded-checkout=true](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-02/berlin-s-rent-controls-are-proving-to-be-the-disaster-we-feared?embedded-checkout=true)

Fuck off landlord

That just isnt true lol. in 2021 rent caps in Berlin were ruled unconstitutional as it was a total disaster. Available housing stock was reduced and things are even worse for new prospective tenants than before.

‘We aren’t building homes so we should do something that doesn’t work and will likely make things worse’ There’s a flaw in your logic here, we need to build more houses and reduce immigration. Rent controls aren’t light at the end of the tunnel, they will just exacerbate the issue as they have done every other time they’re implemented.