Bristol could soon see its rents capped, if new proposals end up coming to fruition. Mayor Marvin Rees says he wants to pilot rent controls in Bristol and is inviting residents to give their views on the proposal in an online summit next month.
Rent controls are currently prohibited in the UK after the Thatcher government repealed the last of their kind in 1988. New controls would therefore require central government to grant Rees and Bristol City Council special powers, either permanently or on a pilot basis.
Mr Rees said: “I made a manifesto commitment to campaign for the power to introduce rent controls to make Bristol an affordable living city, and we are calling on the government to give us the power to regulate rents. Piloting rent control in Bristol will allow us to take a step towards tackling our local renting crisis and will help us develop learnings and that can inform wider positive change for the rest of the city."
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But what would rent controls look like in practice, and how would they work? Can it even be done, or is this a pipe dream? Here's everything you need to know.
How much does it cost to rent in Bristol?
There are over 134,000 people currently renting privately in Bristol - one in three people living here are private renters. Currently, on the property website Rightmove, there are only 40 rental properties of any kind listed for rent under £600 a month in the whole of Bristol - most for just under £600 and almost all are house-shares.
There are 141 properties of any kind listed for rent under £900 a month - most are house shares, bedsits or one-room flats. And there are 819 properties of any kind listed for more than £1,000 a month.
Rent isn't standing still, either: it is increasing. Average rents in the south west went up by 3.1 per cent in the year ending December 2021, according to the Office for National Statistics. In England as a whole, rents prices rose by 1.8 per cent - so the south west's rent is increasing faster than most other regions.
The ONS says the actual amounts paid in rent, including averages, cannot be published due to "data access constraints". However, we can look at prices paid in sales and buys as an indicator.
There, we do have data, and we know the average price paid by a first-time buyer in Bristol is £296,792. This is up 7.8 per cent on a year prior.
The rate of property growth far outstrips that of wage growth. Average pay went up by 3.7 per cent in the year ending December 2021; however, once inflation is taken into account, average pay actually decreased by 0.8 per cent.
Can rents be capped?
Not at present, at least in private rents. Social housing is regulated, and rents can only increase by the consumer price index (CPI), a measure of inflation.
Private rent controls, however, effectively ended with the housing act 1988 introduced by Mrs Thatcher's Conservative government. Today private landlords can increase rent whenever they like, as long as the tenancy is not in a fixed-term period.
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Landlords must give notice (one month, in most cases), and the tenant can challenge the increase at a tribunal if they wish. But since landlords can evict tenants through so-called "no fault evictions", there is nothing stopping a landlord kicking a tenant out if they don't agree to the increase.
The current Conservative government said in 2019 that it would outlaw no-fault evictions, but it has not yet done so. It says it will publish its proposals in a white paper this year, having been delayed from 2021.
Do you want to see changes to rents in Bristol? tell us in the comments section.
Are rent caps in place anywhere else? Do they work?
The 1977 housing act was the last time rent controls were legislated for in Britain; they placed limits on how much a landlord could increase rents by, and how often they could do so. Since those aspects of the housing act were repealed, there have been few controls on rent in England and Wales.
Modern rent controls can be divided into first, second, and third generation rent controls. In broad strokes, these mean the following:
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- First generation: these are also known as "hard" rent controls. They entail a local authority limiting the amounts landlords can charge, in the same way, for example, the government limits how much universities can charge for tuition fees. These often make housing more affordable, but can disincentivise landlords from investing in the upkeep of their properties, since they will not be able to make more money through doing so.
- Second generation: these allow landlords to increase rents, but only by a set amount, for example linked to inflation. This applies both within and between tenancies.
- Third generation: these allow landlords to increase rents by a regulated amount (for example, linked to inflation) within tenancies. Between tenancies, landlords can raise prices by as much as they like (or by a much more generous amount than within a tenancy).
First generation rent controls have barely been used in western economies since the 1960s. Various forms of second and third generation controls are in use today in countries such as France, Ireland, the Netherlands, Canada, and Germany.
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