Rent Crisis In Britain

Rents Are Sucking the Lifeblood Out of the UK

Rents are sucking the lifeblood out of the lives of many people in the UK. Rental property is largely occupied by young people and people on low income in the UK. And of course, in very many cases, those two groups overlap. And as a consequence, a great many children in the UK also live in rental properties. And the cost of that property is rising.

New data from the Office for National Statistics shows that on average in England, the cost of rental property in proportion to people's gross incomes rose by 3% in the year 2023-24, which is the most recent for which we have data.

In London, the cost is now in excess of 40% of the gross income of people who are renting their properties. In England as a whole, it's now reached 36%. In the southwest of England, the data shows that the cost is now in excess of 30% of gross incomes of those who are paying rents and that is of course because of the challenge from holiday lettings. We are in a crisis situation.

Now, the story is not that grim everywhere. In Wales, the average cost of renting is only 26% of gross income, which is still staggering. In Northern Ireland it's 25%. And in the Northeast, the Northwest, and the East Midlands, the cost of renting is declining. In particular, in the Northeast, where it's fallen to only 20% of gross incomes, a substantial drop during the course of this period, but that's an indication of many of the economic problems that are going on there.

But the point in general is quite simple. Landlords are taking a disproportionate amount of the income of younger and poorer people who are living in rental property. Those people are not working for the sake of putting food on the table. They're not working for the sake of having a good life. They're working to pay their landlords. We should have got beyond this point. Now, it's wrong that we're paying for land time and time and time again. And yet, we are. It's wrong that people are being denied a chance to live on median earnings because so much of what they earn is being extracted from them by landlords who are charging excess prices. And remember, even social rents are defined in relation to these excessive prices, and therefore are unaffordable for many.

We can't live forever in a society where rents are literally dragging people into real poverty after tax and after paying for the essentials of living where they cannot work out how to make ends meet. It's unsurprising that we have millions of children in poverty in this country. As a consequence, you could lay the fault entirely at the door of the excessive prices of rental properties.

Unless our government gets a grip on this issue, and it can only get a grip on this issue by either imposing rent caps or by increasing the number of government-owned properties, whether that be government or housing association or local authority, I'm not too worried about. But under government control, unless more of those properties are made available at genuine social rents, there is no chance of this changing.

We are living in a society that appears to exist solely to extract wealth from the poor to benefit the rich and that is not sustainable. Unless we change this, the way we live cannot survive and that is a profoundly worrying prospect.

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