In an alternative universe, Britain has a government that helps those who need it most, first. In reality, Britain has a Government saying that support for people struggling to pay their mortgages is “under review”, while ensuring that private landlords can still evict renters who fall behind on rent.
A Government that, during the pandemic, said that landlords and people with mortgages were allowed to ask their lenders for payment holidays, while renters were offered absolutely nothing.
A Government that has frozen state support for low-income renters at 2019/20 levels even though private rents have since hit historic highs, creating what homelessness charities have described as a financial “black hole”.
That’s a problem, because we have more people living in privately rented homes today than we do in social housing and being a renter is becoming less and less affordable.
Since the start of the pandemic, rents have continued to hit historic highs across the country. Last month, average monthly rents outside of London passed £1,000 for the first time. According to property listings website Zoopla, private renters are now spending more of their wages on rent than at any other time in the last 10 years.
Zoopla’s data is just one record. Over the last year, I’ve heard from renters who have been hit with 20, 30 and, even, in one case, a 70 per cent rent hike by their landlord. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) also just recorded the most expensive rents since their records began.
We know (because poverty experts like the Joseph Rowntree Foundation keep telling us) that millions of people are already behind on bills or housing costs and that millions of people are getting into debt to try to keep up with their outgoings, with renters and those on low-incomes most impacted.
Inflation remains higher than the Government or the Bank of England hoped, signalling that rising living costs are not coming down soon. And yet, talk of the financial stress faced by people with mortgages – who are generally wealthier and more likely to have savings – dominates headlines and parliamentary debates.
Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is reportedly meeting major mortgage lenders and plans to “pressure” them “to do more to support” struggling homeowners. But what about renters? Even talk of supporting people with mortgages sounds callous and cruel when private renters have not been supported at all for years.
The Conservatives position themselves as the historic party of government. As the old adage goes, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. Well, either the Conservatives can’t remember, or they are wilfully ignoring the lessons of British history.
When William Beveridge published his 1942 report that would become the blueprint for the cradle-to-grave social security we know in Britain today, he lamented that, though he had addressed his “five giants” – want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness – there was one issue that he just couldn’t get to grips with. It was what he called “the problem of rent”. Rents, he noted, were expensive and varied across the country.
Today, we are no closer to fixing “the problem of rent”. In fact, the politicians who have stalked the corridors of power in recent decades have made it far, far worse by freezing available support, delaying new regulations and failing to build enough truly affordable social homes, pushing those on low incomes into private renting where landlords can pass rising mortgage rates and bills onto their tenants.
How short-sighted it will all prove to be.
Homelessness is already rising – there are at least 271,000 people recorded as homeless in England, including 123,000 children.
One of the leading causes of people losing their homes is being kicked out by their landlord. Private renters tell me week in, week out that they face impossible choices: between paying their rent and feeding their children, between transferring money to their landlord and eating – or else facing eviction.
If housing costs surpass a third of someone’s income, they are deemed unaffordable. Well, back in 2019, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation warned that nearly half of the poorest renters were spending more than a third of their income (including housing benefit) on rent. Because rents have increased so much since then, this number will now be higher.
While Scotland brought in an emergency rent freeze last year, there has been absolutely no support offered in England and Wales. If paying your rent is a problem, this Government does not want to give you an answer.
We may yet find that the Government is forced to come up with meaningful support to help people pay their mortgages when rate rises feed into the market. It might not happen soon, because pumping money into the economy would drive inflation and not bring it down, which is the whole point of rising rates. But it will happen if inflation continues to stick around, rates keep rising and people default on their mortgages in the months or years to come.
Renters should be helped first, rather than leaving them to fend for themselves or fall into a fraying welfare safety net that can barely support them.
Britain has come crashing out of the post-financial crisis era of low-interest rates and, because private renters are as exposed as their landlords to rising rates, the fact that we don’t have enough social housing means that millions of renters are in a dangerous situation with nowhere else to go.
In the early 50s, after Beveridge published his report, prime minister Winston Churchill ordered his minister of housing, Harold Macmillan, to “build houses for the people” urgently. That Conservative government set about a huge housebuilding drive, delivering 300,000 homes for private sale and social rent a year. They knew that affordable social housing was the solution to the “problem of rent”.
Last year, our Government managed just 26,485 affordable homes while more than a million households languish on social housing waiting lists.
The “problem of rent” is not difficult to solve, our Government just doesn’t like the solution, tried and tested as it is, and they are prepared to throw private renters to the wolves as a result.
Vicky Spratt is i‘s Housing Correspondent
