A prominent rental activist has used a left wing website to suggest that the private rental sector may be better off if it was smaller, and run by more corporate landlords.
Tom Darling of the Renters Reform Coalition writes in ‘Left Foot Forward’ that investment from buy to let landlords has not led til improved housing quality, and he says: “Renters face far worse quality homes than owners or social renters, with about one in 10 living in homes with a category 1 hazard, which pose the most serious risks to human health. The growth in the number of rented homes can be tracked back to the 1980s. Margaret Thatcher’s Housing Acts removed tenant protections and introduced the right to buy, and eventually ‘no fault’ section 21 evictions came into force.”
And he adds: “Since then England has been observing an experiment in leaving private rented housing to a very lightly regulated free market.”
Darling casts doubt on whether significant numbers of landlords have sold up in recent years, and suggests that even if they did, so what?
He writes: “These homes are bricks and mortar. They don’t vanish when sold. Some houses would be bought by landlords (possibly larger and more professional landlords willing to comply with government regulations); others would be bought by first time buyers, particularly if enough landlords sold to push house prices down – resulting in large numbers of people swapping renting for home ownership.”
In the article in LFF – which is funded by, amongst other organisations, Unite The Union – he groups together Conservative members of the House of Lards and landlords, and doubts the truth of claims that landlords are leaving the market.
He states: “Anyone familiar with housing policy will have heard this refrain before – it is essentially all landlords’ representative groups say. Similar arguments were put forward in response to buy-to-let tax changes, the letting fees ban and cap on deposits brought in by Theresa May, and her pledge to end section 21 no fault evictions in 2019. I could go on.
“It’s a rather cunning sleight of hand. Those lobbying for landlords realised some time ago that there is little public sympathy for people who own multiple homes and charge people to live in them, so instead of focusing on the plight of landlords they warn of potential harm to tenants.
“The idea that less supply of rented homes is bad has an intuitive power. It fits neatly with most people’s understanding of supply and demand.”
He concludes his opinion piece by saying that with the Renters Rights Bill now progressing through Parliament, if “some landlords are no longer viable under the new, reformed system, then in my view they weren’t fit to provide housing in the first place.
I certainly won’t shed a tear if the scales of England’s housing system – which for so long have been weighted towards landlords – start to tip back towards the one in five of us who rent our home.”
You can see Darling’s lengthy article here. https://leftfootforward.org/2025/02/the-renters-rights-bill-challenging-the-backlash-from-landlords/
This article is taken from Landlord Today