Can anyone solve the housing crisis? | Local elections report

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]I don't see why any landlord's making profit of rent or off housing, right? If I pay rent to my house, it's for a human right I'm paying just to maintain that home. I think that should be the basis.

[00:00:08]It has to be a thing where a two-bedroom flat literally is £600 maximum. That is what it has to be. And for all the landlords who complain about that, I mean, it's tough luck. You know what I mean? I We're not going around playing with people's lives. So, >> is the housing crisis about to get worse? Labour's renters's rights act has come into effect. It bans section 21 no fault evictions and bidding wars on prospective rentals. Tenants are no longer tied into fixedterm contracts and can challenge their rent increase if it's above market rate. Many welcome it as a win for renters, but others claim it may only deepen the housing crisis.

[00:00:39]And ahead of local elections, both Labor and the Green Party are fighting for voters over the issue. The Greens are expected to win historically safe labor seats in urban areas like Hackne, where the average rent for a one bed flat is £1,954.

[00:00:54]They're promising things like rent controls, which Labour's housing secretary, Steve Reed, has definitively ruled out.

[00:01:00]>> Can you rule out rent controls, temporary or otherwise? Yeah. Yeah, I' I've ruled it out in parliament just in a couple of weeks ago.

[00:01:07]>> Meanwhile, Labor are hoping to claw back votes from the Greens by lombasting their previous record on housing.

[00:01:13]>> The whiff of hypocrisy from the Greens over housing is strong. They've done everything they can to stop housing and social housing being built and now they're trying to hypnotize the electorate into believing uh that they're somehow in favor of building the homes that the Labor Party is getting on and delivering.

[00:01:31]>> But what do voters think?

[00:01:32]>> Would you like to see rent controls?

[00:01:34]>> Yeah, absolutely.

[00:01:35]>> 100%.

[00:01:36]>> Yeah, >> I feel like it makes sense and it feels like so many other countries in Europe do it.

[00:01:40]>> My rent increases every year. When I first moved in, I was paying 650 and I'm now paying closer to a grand.

[00:01:47]>> A lot of the places that you end up looking at are so small, so dingy, so rundown, not looked after, and then it's kind of like what am I paying for?

[00:01:56]>> I think people who are against rent controls have to answer the question of how bad has homelessness got to get. You know, the new stats were out today, quarterly stats from the government. 800 households a day at risk of homelessness, 180,000 children growing up in temporary accommodation. That temporary accommodation is in the private rental sector. It's hotels, it's bed and breakfast. So the argument against is that more private sector landlords will leave the sector. Where do those homes go? Either first-time buyers buy them, maybe other landlords buy them. But what the government would be good to do in the short term, and this is why building isn't just enough, is to incentivize councils and housing associations to buy up those homes back into council ownership at the same time as building the new ones that we need as well cuz it's not enough to just build on its own. We've had 30 years of, you know, private house builders leading the way with house building and that's why we have the crisis we have now. We need to go back to a model that is council led. You'll still need private developers to build, you know, homes for ownership and homes for private rent, but it's councils and housing associations that actually know what homes are needed and, you know, social rent homes are the ones that people are waiting for that gets people out of the private rental sector.

[00:03:11]>> It's unaffordable. I'm a I'm a primary school teacher and I work in Hackne and I'm renting in Hackne and I pay nearly half of my salary on my rent. I pay uh around £850.

[00:03:28]Yeah. Not including bills.

[00:03:29]>> To be honest, I'm in a lucky situation at the moment because there's four of us living in a two bed.

[00:03:35]>> Yeah. Two couples, separate couples. So, we're I'm paying 650 at the moment, which is probably the cheapest that I've paid.

[00:03:42]>> There's a bathroom between four people.

[00:03:43]>> Me, myself, I'm moving away because it's just come to that stage, which is like too too much money, too expensive. So rent controls are something that used to just be a part of our toolkit in in Britain for a very long time in the 20th century for dealing with househ housing costs. So we we did them in some form uh from 1915 for the whole of the 20th century basically after that and actually we still have 75,000 households in this country today who live uh in rent controlled uh houses. So they've always been with us but they have dropped away. So they they're a really small part of the toolkit at the moment.

[00:04:18]At the New Economics Foundation, we do think that rent controls should play a bigger part in the future. Um, they have to be designed very carefully. There are examples around the world of where they've worked and there are examples of where they haven't worked.

[00:04:29]>> Can you tell me about where we've might have seen some successful examples of rent controls?

[00:04:34]>> Yeah. So, there there's lots of lessons that we can learn both where rent controls have worked and where they haven't. Um I think some of the some of the sort of most state-of-the-art policies that are out there at the moment um include for example the French system where they basically have two systems which are going one puts a national um sort of control on how much landlords can raise rents each year and the second system is one that just applies in areas of acute housing pressure. So for example Paris where a bit like London the capital city has particularly expensive housing. So that um that that that um policy of rent controls puts slightly stricter controls on um how much landlords can raise rents in areas of pressure and it works reasonably well. They're still evaluating exactly what it's done, but it has definitely reduced um rents in in France probably by about 5% compared to the way where they would have been over the last 6 years. And so that it's not a massive massive change, but it's a quite a significant improvement in affordability. And it does show alongside examples like in Scotland or Ireland or Germany that actually rent controls are a very normal part of housing policy in many many countries and they could work here as well.

[00:05:42]>> How much do you think it should be to rent a room in a shared flat with four people?

[00:05:48]>> God, I don't know how dreamy am I can I be?

[00:05:51]>> I would say 500 would be nice.

[00:05:54]>> 500 quid would be nice. No money would be nice, but you know. Do you think that with how much you're paying in rent that you'll ever be able to afford a house?

[00:06:02]>> Uh, no. I don't think I will. I think I'd be able to afford mortgage, but I don't think I'd because of how much rent is, I'd never be able to save up to do a down payment.

[00:06:11]>> Uh, my name is Dylan Law. I'm running for Downs Councelor, but I'm also running for deputy mayor in the May local elections. Steve Reed, the housing secretary, said accuse green counselors of blocking thousands of homes from being built, >> including social rents and affordable houses. What would you say to voters who might be concerned hearing that?

[00:06:31]>> I mean, the Greens will only ever block developments which aren't in the public interest. So, if I decide I'm going to build a massive block like they trying to do in Tesco Mong Lane or 500 luxury flats for two grand a month, that benefits no one in the area. All the 8,000 families on the housing register won't be able to get on those. The only people you will be able to get on those are people who don't already live in the burough, right? So that's why they go those kind of developments get blocked.

[00:06:50]Obviously you can then just pinpoint that, twist it and say, "Oh, they blocked developments." Yeah. When they're not in public interest. If they were in public interest and they social rent homes, we would approve them.

[00:06:59]>> Right. And this is the same person who's also having 2,000 dinners um with with with private developers. I mean, I don't do that. I would never do that. Do you know what I mean?

[00:07:07]>> A lot of young people now are feeling pretty hopeless about the possibility of ever being able to buy a house, especially in London. Do you think you'll ever be a homeowner?

[00:07:14]>> Uh doubt it. not without rent caps. So, not without um like a decent wage, right? Wages haven't risen nearly as much as pensions. They haven't nearly risen as much as in the inflation rate.

[00:07:23]Um I many people on the minimum wage and find it difficult to do. I mean, I've seen people who have uh bachelor degrees working minimum wage jobs. So, there's actually no ability you're going to be able to afford a house when house prices are raising 10 times quicker than your wages are. So, I don't think I will be unless there's like a massive intervention. The idea is to have a cap on how much an individual can charge rent. I mean, housing is a human right.

[00:07:43]Do you know what I And that's that's what we believe. That's that's what many the average person believes as well. And if you have a system where someone can't charge 2 grand, which is extortionate with £2,000 extortionate for a house, um then you're going to have a much beneficial system, right? Many people spend 6% of the housing costs, sorry, 6% of their income on rent post tax, right?

[00:08:00]If you can reduce that number down to 10 15%. That's a lot more disposable income for other methods. Do you know what I mean?

[00:08:05]>> Well, £1,945 is the average rent for a single bed in um in Hackne. with rent controls, what would you like to see that price be?

[00:08:14]>> I mean, well, look, county council rent is £600 a month on average, right, for a two-bedroom flat >> and the council operates that cost.

[00:08:21]>> Obviously, there's a little bit of margin on top of that, but I mean, I don't see why any landlord's making profit of rent or of housing, right? If I pay rent to my house, it's for human right I'm paying just to maintain that home. I think that should be the basis.

[00:08:32]So, if it has to be a thing where a two-bedroom flat literally is £600 maximum, then it is what it has to be.

[00:08:37]And for all the landlords who complain about that, I mean, it's tough luck. You know what I mean? that we're not going around playing with people's lives. So, >> is it one or the other? Is it we can build our way out of the housing crisis or we have rent controls?

[00:08:48]>> It's definitely not either or. So, at the New Economics Foundation, we think that new housing supply should come alongside rent controls. Partly it's because they act over different time frames. New housing supply takes a while to improve affordability, whereas rent controls could do so much faster. Um, but also because we know that in a sense they're acting on two different things.

[00:09:07]supply kind of eases the shortage of housing and that will improve many aspects of the housing system, but also rent controls can do other things. They can tackle affordability directly, but they also just even up the the sort of power imbalance between landlords and tenants. And that ought to be better for for lots of other aspects of tenant well-being, for example. It ought to raise the equality of homes and it ought to allow people to be more secure in the homes that they live in. you have to do rent controls and you have to do new house building all at the same time because the new homes that's you know that's the long-term solution. uh rent controls will keep affordability you know there's an affordability crisis but I think what they're both missing is that one the scale of ambition you know4 billion pound affordable homes program over 10 years um we were calling for that to be 10 billion pound a year not five or6 billion pound a year that gets you to 90 to 100,000 social rent homes a year but that's a much bigger pot of money and I think another part of it is also like I was saying buying back the private rented stock that was sold off and also housing benefits. I think um the local housing allowance rate governments like to freeze and unfreeze it hasn't kept pace with inflation. That's the biggest driver of homelessness. So you need benefits reform as well as building new homes and bringing more stock immediately back into the sector.