Who is standing up for renters? In the last year, something weird’s been happening – more and more of my friends, who’ve got stable jobs and decent incomes, are getting priced out of housing.
One said that her landlord had informed her that the rent was going up by 20%.
Another was told his flatshare would have to find an extra £300 a month, or find another place to live.
And I was gobsmacked when a pal posted on social media about being made to pay just to view a rental flat.
When I asked her why she didn’t tell the estate agent where to go, she shrugged: “That’s just how it is now.”
London’s always been a basketcase when it comes to renting, but now absurd costs are a plague across the whole of the UK. According to Zoopla, Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow and Bristol have all seen the average rent of new lets increase over and above the rate of inflation since 2021.
You probably already know that nobody’s wage is going up by this much either – on average, the cost of rent is increasing twice as fast as any growth in pay. If you’re a tenant, this simply adds up to getting poorer in order to keep a roof over your head.
You’d think that, in a cost-of-living crisis, somebody in power would make it a priority to protect renters from unfair and unaffordable price hikes.
But there’s just a wall of silence. Remember when Andrew Bailey, the Governor of the Bank of England, warned British workers against asking for pay rises in case it worsens inflation?
Bailey had no such words of caution for greedy landlords, putting up rents by grotesque amounts to bump up their personal cash flow.
Yet the Government has ruled out rent caps, which could at least get a grip on the runaway profiteering in the private rental sector.
Keir Starmer’s Labour Party isn’t much better. While they’ve announced plans for a renter’s charter that would allow tenants to keep pets and end automatic evictions (though it might as well be in witness protection, how little they actually talk about it), they’ve
next-to-nothing to say about the cost of rent.
Meanwhile Starmer has loudly and repeatedly hammered the Tories on interest rates going up, and its impact on mortgage costs.
When Liz Truss’ disastrous budget made mortgages more expensive, it brought down her government. But when rents are spiralling out of control, that’s just business as usual. The message is clear: homeowners matter, and tenants don’t.
Renters tend to be younger and concentrated in cities rather than electoral battlegrounds, so politically we may as well not exist. But older, home-owning voters are looking at what’s happening to their kids and grandkids, and they’re worried.
I spoke to a 67-year-old this week, who said she fears that life will be worse for her children than it was for her – they’re paying more for less, and there’s no way out of it.
So ignore renters at your peril, Keir Starmer. You might not care about us, but the people whose votes you’re chasing do.
