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
Global health | Air pollution is helping to drive a rise in antibiotic resistance that poses a significant threat to human health worldwide, a study published in the Lancet Planetary Health journal suggests. Antibiotic resistance is one of the fastest-growing threats to global health, killing an estimated 1.3 million people a year.
Asylum | People seeking refuge who were ordered to live on a giant barge have been reprieved after legal challenges claimed the vessel was unsafe and unsuitable for traumatised people. As the first tranche of 15 people were moved on to the Bibby Stockholm in Portland, Dorset, lawyers said they were intervening to halt the transfer of dozens more on to the 220-bedroom vessel.
Retail | Britain’s stores are being forced to slash their prices to drum up business after dismal summer weather and ever-higher interest rates combined to depress consumer spending in July.
South Korea | The £1m cost of relocating the 4,500-strong UK contingent at the World Scout Jamboree in South Korea will affect the work of the Scout Association for as much as five years, the organisation’s boss has said. Meanwhile South Korea is having to move the thousands remaining out of the way of a typhoon.
Lobbying | The tech firm Palantir, which grew out of a US spy organisation, lobbied the UK disabilities minister to adopt new technology to crack down on benefits fraud, emails released to the Guardian have revealed. The correspondence provides the latest insight into how the firm – co-founded by Peter Thiel, the Donald Trump-supporting libertarian billionaire – is seeking to expand its influence and role within British government.
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.
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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).
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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.”
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15 consecutive months of 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.
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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.”
What else we’ve been reading
From fallouts over money to tension with oh-so-picky eaters, hell is (going on holiday with) other people. Luckily, Rachel Dixon has written a comprehensive guide to surviving a shared summer break. Hannah J Davies, deputy editor, newsletters
People have always assumed that Zoe Williams was older than her actual age. As she turns 50, Williams reflects on why she no longer cares what others think. “I can finally relax: whatever the hell happens, nobody could mistake me for 100,” she writes. Nimo
“It shows our budding families in the most beautiful light” – I loved this gallery of pregnant trans men underwater (pictured above), pegged to a new exhibition in Amsterdam.
HannahThis year, hay fever has been worse than ever for many people. Ammar Kalia was one such sufferer, so he decided to start using a nose bidet for two weeks to see if it helped his breathing. Nimo
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
Sport
Football | England put in a strong performance in their final match before the World Cup group stage, beating Nigeria in penalties. Nigeria – ranked 40th in the world, 36 places below the Lionesses – looked as if they would claim the latest big scalp and knock out the European champions. But after Georgia Stanway’s missed penalty in the shootout, England scored four goals.
Cycling | Gold medalist Elinor Barker was crowned world champion with 28 points in the women’s Madison at the UCI championships in Glasgow. Representing Britain, Barker and Neah Evans were seemingly poised to take gold in the 120-lap race, when a high-speed crash prior to the penultimate lap forced a dramatic restart. Barker and Evans then had to fight hard in the final nine laps to hold off closest challengers Australia by just three points to take victory.
Rugby | Henry Slade has been left out of England’s World Cup squad with Steve Borthwick also omitting Alex Dombrandt and Joe Cokanasiga from his final 33. Slade’s omission is a shock as Borthwick axed eight players who appeared in England’s disappointing defeat by Wales on Saturday.
The front pages
“Air pollution linked to global rise in deadly resistance to antibiotics” says our Guardian print edition’s splash headline this morning. There’s also the latest on the Bibby Stockholm, about which the Metro says “Not all aboard” as “Just 15 asylum seekers arrive after legal challenges”. The Daily Express vents its “Tory fury as lawyers block migrants on barge”. Tory MPs are revolting or at least in “revolt” in the Daily Telegraph “over ban on oil boilers”. “Suella: I’ll wage war on crooked migration lawyers” – that’s the Daily Mail while the Times has “Rising wages forecast to ease cost of living pain”. “Clueless” – the Daily Mirror says it’s “Tory immigration chaos” on the Bibby Stockholm. The i reports “A-level grades markdown: no exceptions for teacher strikes”. Top story in the Financial Times is “Private equity offers discount fees as dealmaking drought deters investors”.
Today in Focus
The legacy of Sinéad O’Connor
Film-maker Kathryn Ferguson and journalist Simon Hattenstone share their memories of Sinéad O’Connor and reflect on her impact on music and society
Cartoon of the day | Ben Jennings
The Upside
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
Take to the sky off a small island in Fiji and you will notice a distinct formation: an underwater art installation comprised of more than 100 sculptures that form a black imprimatur against the turquoise water. Dive down and you will see as many as 30 species of coral clinging to the sculptures. These steel artworks and their seabed companions are part of what’s been described as the world’s first sculptural coral bank, but could be described as an underwater farm. The marine invertebrates are grown by the non-profit Counting Coral and, when they grow large enough, the team takes clippings that are transferred to a conventional nursery, explains writer Sera Sefeti in a story about the project.
“It’s all pristine coral, and then you watch those reefs start to die off. That is shocking to me and scary,” says Counting Coral founder Jolyon Collier. “I don’t think Fijians are aware of the devastating effects it would have on them if they lost their coral.” He hopes his project can grow climate-resistant coral that can cope with warming oceans, storms and heatwaves.
The initiative is also said to be a boon for the community. Local resident Laben Naivalu says that people have to go farther and further into the open sea to fish. “This initiative will help us grow our coral reefs and return our fishing grounds to the way our forefathers maintained them.”
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Bored at work?
And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day – with plenty more on the Guardian’s Puzzles app for iOS and Android. Until tomorrow.
