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%.
