How the housing crisis is hitting tenants hardest

Good morning. On average there are 20 people requesting to view each rental property that comes on the market in Britain, more than triple what it was in 2019. In some parts of the north-west, that number inches closer to 30 per property. Moving house has always been stressful, but it has become an all-consuming battle for many people as rents rise and demand outstrips supply.

A chronic housing shortage is the primary reason, however campaigners and tenants have said they cannot wait for the government to build more homes. Rough sleeping increased by 34% in London between 2021 and 2022, while the number of people consistently struggling to pay their rent has increased by 45% since last April to more than 2.5 million, according to the housing charity Shelter.

The UK is an unusual example of what happens when there is very little regulation and protection for renters. In Denmark, renters can stay in their homes indefinitely; in France, landlords cannot issue evictions in the winter months; landlords in Germany cannot charge 10% more than the average rent for similar properties in the area; and social rents set the norm for private rents in Sweden.

For today’s newsletter I spoke to Beth Stratford, a co-founder of the London Renters Union, about the state of the rental crisis in England. That’s right after the headlines.

Five big stories

In depth: ‘The most important thing to stress is that political choices created the housing crisis’

Critics of the Renters (Reform) bill have suggested that any regulation will cause a mass exodus of landlords, and therefore exacerbate the rental crisis. In reality, there is little evidence to suggest this is happening or will happen any time soon. This narrative from landlord lobby groups is likely to continue to escalate as campaigners agitate for better, more secure regulation and rental controls.

But what are renters experiencing at the moment? With the help of Beth Stratford, today’s newsletter breaks down the numbers behind the rental crisis and why urgent reform is needed.

300,000 renters were forced out of their homes last year due to unaffordable rent hikes

According to a survey conducted by Citizens Advice, in the year leading up to June, private rents across England increased by 4.5%, marking the highest annual rise in a decade. In 2022, private rents in London increased by 15.2%.

These are just the averages. For members of the London Renters Union, the average reported increase was 20.5%. With every passing quarter, records continue to be broken – at the start of this year, for the first time, average asking rents in London hit a record of £2,501 a month. Mortgage payers spend 22% of their income on housing compared with 33% among private renters (42% in London).

4.3 million houses are missing from the national market

The backlog has been building since the 1950s as successive governments failed to meet their own targets. Not only are there not enough homes being built, the private rental sector is particularly oversaturated because people who wanted to buy are unable because of high interest rates, and those who would otherwise turn to social housing are unable because of enormous waiting lists. This demand has created a bottleneck that some landlords are taking advantage of. “The only people who can really afford to buy houses at the moment are second homeowners with a lot of cash. If this happen, we’ll get an even greater transfer of homes into second home ownership, which will be used for short-term lets, Airbnbs, or could sit empty,” Stratford says. The number of homes available for rent remains between 20% and 40% below pre-pandemic levels in most regions.

“The most important thing to stress is political choices created the housing crisis. It may not have been intentional but it’s the result,” Statford says. “If you make the country reliant on the behaviour of private investors for the supply of this basic human need, then you’re going to make yourself very vulnerable.”

15 consecutive monthsof rises have seen rental inflation consistently in the double digits

Property website Zoopla anticipates rental growth to decline towards 8% by the end of the year, but this is of little comfort to renters who cannot afford the existing increases. “Once rent goes up, it does not come down easily because there is very little incentive for landlords to bring prices down once they have managed to get their tenants to pay more,” Stratford says.

116% rise in no-fault evictions in the last year

Landlords have started almost 61,000 no fault eviction court proceedings in the years since the government’s pledge to ban section 21 evictions. The pledge has become a central part of the Renters (Reform) bill, which the LRU has heavily campaigned for. Stratford describes it as a “huge step forward”, however she is mindful to point out that loopholes create backdoors for landlords to continue to unfairly evict tenants. Under the new legislation, “landlords can still hike the rents more or less as much as they want,” Stratford says – the tribunal system does little to protect renters who may not have the means or capacity to challenge their landlord in court. (Judges might also be basing their decisions about whether a rent rise is fair or not according to the market, as opposed to whether rises are affordable.)

Landlords will also still be allowed to evict people when they want to sell their property or they want to use it to house a member of their own household – that accounts for the majority of evictions. The LRU argues that the very least landlords could do is provide some level of guaranteed housing for a set number of years, affording tenants a semblance of security.

The government’s focus on homeowners and mortgages has meant that tenants have often been left out of the political conversation. However, there does seem to be growing interest from politicians to at least be seen to be fixing this growing issue. “When they published their Renters (Reform) bill, they wanted a quote from the LRU on it, which we didn’t give them, but the fact that they wanted us to write a quote for their press release indicated that the government now see that they have to at least seem to be taking renters interests into account,” Stratford says. “We will just have to keep pushing and trying to build on that leverage.”

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An interesting read from Vulture (£) on the renewed popularity of the Meghan Markle legal drama Suits, and what it tells us about the state of streaming. Hannah