Renting is something people do for a short time, when they are young, while they save for a deposit or wait for social housing – that’s still the perception of renting among many homeowners. That view, however, no longer reflects the reality.
There are now as many people renting privately as there are social renters and over a million families now live in rented housing. With a shortage of social housing and high prices locking people out of buying, we are entering a period when many people will have no choice but to rent long-term and may never buy – the so called ‘Generation Rent’. That’s why it’s important Labour makes renting a better option than it is at the moment.
Growing demand means rents are rising fast and becoming less and less affordable. The tenancy rules under which people rent (the Assured Shorthold Tenancy) allow landlords to end tenancies with only two months’ notice. In practice, it is often only a month. Standards in private rented homes are highly variable with a large proportion falling below the ‘decent homes’ standard which prevails in social housing.
Jack Dromey this week made the first solid steps to improve the situation for renters by proposing to regulate lettings agents.
Renters often fall victim to the actions of unscrupulous letting agents with their high fees, hidden charges and broken agreements. I’m not the only person to wonder why on earth it costs £100 or more to resign a tenancy agreement, when the cost to the agent is a second-class stamp. Or why people should hand over deposits of hundreds of pounds in cash without knowing whether they’ll get it back or if the person on the other side of the counter is reliable.
Labour is exploring a code of conduct for lettings agents, greater transparency in fees and charges and new standards people must meet before they open a lettings agency. Such rules have been in place for estate agents for a long time.
We’ll need to do more to make renting a secure long-term option and we can expect further measures from Hilary Benn and Jack Dromey in the coming months. This is the right thing to do and an important opportunity for Labour. When political parties respond to people’s housing needs and ambitions they reap a long-term political benefit.
Labour’s postwar programme of council housing helped give a majority of people a secure and affordable home. To this day social housing tenants are some of Labour’s strongest supporters.
Margaret Thatcher’s Right-to-Buy turned a generation of working-class people Tory by fulfilling their ambitions to own their own home (though to wider public detriment).
This new and growing constituency of renters (often the children of that Right-to-Buy generation) are yet to find a political voice and Labour is right to stand up for their interests.
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Tony Clements is a former policy adviser on housing and is an editor of Red Brick. He tweets @tonyclements1
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READ ON: For more articles on housing, see here
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As a private tenant, I do think more could be done to improve the quality of housing. I have been discussing the possibility of getting double glazing with my landlord for seven months now. He’s enthusiastic, but not very swift to back up his actions with words. I think I will get there in the end, and if he doesn’t act then I will move on (again) and try my luck elsewhere. That’s the market, and it just about works both ways, at least in my area. If Labour is proposing more regulation then I have one concern: any costly hoops you make landlords jump through to gain some kind of accreditation are going to result in even higher rents. Landlords are not philanthropists and will not absorb these costs themselves. What tenants need is a light touch approach to regulation, which keeps compliance costs down, but backed up by a very big stick for the minority of crooks who give the sector a bad name. The really tricky bit is going to be making privately rented home greener. Landlords are reluctant to invest and tenants don’t want to be lumbered with a debt for improvements that really only benefit the homeowner, as they push up their property value.
sorry your landlord is not listening to your very reasonable request about the double glazing. I am a landlord and have resisted raising my rents because I would rather have reliable tenants. I am not wealthy and the rent I receive goes to paying my bills and your landlord may be resisting your requests because he can’t afford it. Regulation is needed to stop unscrupulous landlords cashing in on desperate tenants but in this day of major housing shortages and very low wages maybe regulation wouldn’t hit the right target but it might sound good to the voter
Landlords can evict assured shorthold tenants without specifying a reason. In practice, this means that asking for repairs can trigger eviction, as indeed can a discriminatory landlord finding out that the tenant is gay – no reason need be given to end these tenancies, so no bad reason is ruled out. This simply cannot be right and the 1997 act must be changed to prevent these abuses.
Labour’s record includes creating 2 million more homeowners – and 1.9 million more renters. Weak regulation of the private rented sector is pushing us back to the days of the Rachman scandal.
Housing policy needs to be higher on Labour’s agenda and a key part of that must be ensuring that the private landlords can not exploit, abuse or wrongfully evict their tenants.
As a supporter of a third way approach to our ecconomy and our society, I do believe that Labour need to look at the Housing Co-operative Models, which provides social housing with community ownership, empowerment and responsibility. This could be one powerful option to deal with the affordable housing shortage.