Last week, a news story broke about the sheer impossibility of everyday living for millions of people all over the UK. According to the Office for National Statistics, the average monthly rent paid by private tenants rose by 9% in the year to February, which is the largest annual increase since records began nine years ago. The average monthly rent in England is now £1,276 and £944 in Scotland. If you are unfortunate enough to be renting from a landlord in London, your monthly outgoings may well appear hopelessly unrealistic: there, average monthly rents have risen by 10.6%, to a truly eye-watering £2,035. Given that the median UK monthly wage currently sits at about £2,200, the dire affordability crisis all this points to is glaringly clear.
Everything, moreover, is woven through with a very British sense of the market’s base cruelty: late last year, an investigation by the Observer found that the rents paid by tenants in the wealthiest parts of Britain had gone up by an average of 29% since 2019, whereas for people living in the most deprived areas, the figure was a mind-boggling 52%.
In our cities, skyrocketing rents are partly a subplot of the pandemic and its long tail: younger people either continued to live with their parents or moved back home during lockdowns, but are now returning to independent living en masse, thereby causing a spike in demand. At the same time, a crazy rental market and the impossibility of buying somewhere to live seem to be convincing existing tenants to stay put, meaning that supply is being choked off. The result – which is also playing out in the suburbs – is a vicious circle, exacerbated by thousands of landlords and letting agencies shoving up rents for both new and existing tenants, simply because they can.
The picture in more rural areas may be even more extreme. In 2023, one study claimed that private rents in the English countryside had gone up by an average of 27% in a single year. Again, the pandemic is relevant here: many out-of-town housing markets started to drastically change when families joined the great Covid migration out of urban places. The rampant conversion of homes into Airbnb-type holiday lets has only worsened the resulting pressures. In these places, one of the most obvious results is a quiet epidemic of rural homelessness, reportedly up 40% since 2018.
All told, whole swathes of our housing arrangements are in a state of flux, and with social housing still marginalised and property ownership off limits for millions of people, a private-rented sector that cannot cope with the resulting situation has long since turned dysfunctional. In England and Wales, around 5m households now live in private rented housing, up from less than 2m 25 years ago. Age-wise, the proportion of people who are tenants peaks at around 30% among 25- to 34-year-olds, although the number of people over 65 in such housing is reckoned to have increased by about 55% over the past decade. But the share of the national conversation given over to this part of housing policy is still pitifully small: the result, perhaps, of the stupid idea that renting is either something you do in your 20s, or the shameful last resort of older people who are down on their luck.
The old Tory vision of the property-owning democracy might be a nice idea, but it has long distorted and misdirected the politics of housing. If people in power fixate on the kind of homes that are bought and sold, the rental sector tends to look not like a part of the social fabric that needs to be reformed and improved, but something people should simply be encouraged to leave. Meanwhile, everything is further distorted by a plain fact that tends to go unmentioned. According to the campaign group 38 Degrees, nearly one in five Tory MPs are also private landlords, something else that makes our politics look almost Dickensian.
The sense of almost Victorian neglect is only heightened by how much these issues intersect with poverty. Around 1.9m households in the private rented sector receive an element of universal credit based on the so-called local housing allowance (LHA), which is meant to cover the cheapest third of rents in any given area. LHA was frozen in 2020, leaving rents to soar away from what people could afford. Late last year, Jeremy Hunt used his autumn statement to belatedly announce that it will rise, by an average of around 17%. But that does not solve any of the fundamental problems, for two obvious reasons. First, unless the LHA is uprated every year, it will inevitably fall behind increases in rents. Second, research suggests that even increased local LHA rates will not cover the asking rents for anything like the share of rental properties the government suggests: according to the property consultancy Savills, just 8.5% of such housing will actually be affordable for the relevant people.
What a mess this all this. Nearly a quarter of private rented sector homes are still estimated to fail the decent homes standard. Arbitrary evictions seem to be soaring beyond control. The government’s milquetoast renters reform bill, which was at least meant to outlaw that practice, has reportedly been waylaid by Tory interventions about “the rights of landlords”, and may not make it through parliament before the election. In Scotland, the end of emergency rent caps and eviction protections for private renters at the end of March is forecast to cause huge problems: housing campaigners say they are already seeing cases of tenants being served with notice of rent increases of as much as 60%. The Labour party, in theory at least, has come up with a renters charter with solid and enduring protections for tenants, and plans to improve the standards of rented properties. There again, when Keir Starmer was asked last week if he supported the London mayor Sadiq Khan’s drive to introduce modest rent controls, he gave a very characteristic answer: “That’s not our national policy.”
And so here we are. We all know the essential nature of the contemporary British condition: that unending sense that nothing is reliable, even as we are told to shell out more and more money. The crisis in private rented housing might be the most grimly perfect example to date: the cost of one of life’s most basic essentials endlessly going up, while the people who have to pay get no corresponding increase in everyday security and stability. These are the kind of things that eat away at what used to be called the social contract. If they are not fixed, the anger and resentment that has recently washed through our politics may only be the start.
• John Harris is a Guardian columnist
