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Who’s afraid of rent control? Not disabled people
The UK is an outlier in not controlling the private rental market, and disabled people are paying the price, writes Mikey Erhardt, policy and campaigns officer at Disability Rights UK
Mikey Erhardt is a campaigner at Disability Rights UK
“No proposal for reform should be considered too extreme or utopian, given the severity of the situation we face.”
That’s what Luke Beesley, co-chair of the Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People, told me. His appeal comes at a time when almost half of the more than 300,000 homeless people in England and Wales are disabled.
The Labour government described its first attempts at fixing our broken housing system by making changes to the National Planning Policy Framework as “radical” and “decisive”. Yet it has failed to push forward the bare minimum required, not even bothering to take up recommendations from its own MPs to support the construction of more accessible homes.
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This means little progress will be made to improve the realities of the housing crisis for disabled people.
Just 9% of homes have the most basic levels of accessibility. Disabled people are rapidly being pushed into the instability and danger of renting privately, where the Equality and Human Rights Commission estimates that one in three have an unmet housing need.
Almost 20% of disabled people rent privately, and this number will continue to grow as council waiting lists continue to balloon. The government makes no progress in generating more accessible homes.
Many campaigners continue to focus on the need for accessible homes, especially more accessible social homes. Nothing I write today takes away from this. But in some ways, it doesn’t matter how many accessible homes we build if disabled people can’t afford to live in them.
“In some ways, it doesn’t matter how many accessible homes we build if disabled people can’t afford to live in them”
Luke told me that disabled people, while welcoming the proposed end of no-fault (Section 21) evictions, “are just as likely to lose our homes from rents rising faster than our wages and benefits as from landlords consciously deciding to kick us out”.
How will the ever-increasing number of disabled renters, with the overall number of disabled people now surpassing 16 million in the UK, find a home at all when rents are now at the highest point on record, swelling past inflation?
A spokesperson for the London Renters Union put it clearly to me earlier this year: “Access to a secure and affordable home has become a privilege, when it should be the bare minimum. Disabled people are disproportionately hit by our rigged renting system, with many forced to hand the majority of their incomes over to their landlords.”
Speak to any disabled renter, and they’ll tell you that rents have been too high for too long. Shockingly, UK renters spend more of their income on rent than almost anywhere else in Europe.
And yet rent control – the tool many of our European counterparts, such as Germany and Sweden, rely on to stop rent from spiralling – is one the government has gone out of its way to stress it will not implement. The minister responsible, Matthew Pennycook, has continued to emphasise that he and the government have no desire to even think about capping private rents.
The government argues that we can simply build our way out of this mess. But as much as some models found that achieving the government’s ambitious homebuilding targets could, in theory, lead to 9% lower rents, taking us back to rent levels from 2023, that is not exactly a boon for the 50% of private renters who have found it difficult to keep up with bills and credit commitments. And this, of course, relies on hitting bold building targets, which have themselves come under much fire recently.
This argument misses the point that we don’t have time to wait. Mass building, even with a streamlined planning system, is no overnight job; building a single home can take up to four years, and the impact on rents (albeit ad hoc) takes longer. Past estimates from Ian Mulheirn, csuggested that building 300,000 homes a year would only result in a 10% reduction in house prices over 20 years.
Do disabled renters who face over £1,000 in extra costs a month and earn almost a fifth less than non-disabled people have 20 years to wait for rents to come down by just 10%?
The government’s refusal to be bold comes at a time when studies continue to show that controlling private rent works. A recent wide-ranging survey looking at housing affordability across seven European cities (Amsterdam, London, Paris and the Belgian cities of Antwerp, Bruges, Brussels and Ghent) showed rent controls drove improvements in housing affordability and reductions in housing inequality. The same study showed that the tighter the rent controls, the greater the improvements in affordability – even controlling irregular construction rates.
“The way rent controls are discussed across housing media might make you think that the UK is following a common path, but, in fact, we are an outlier worldwide for having a totally deregulated private rental system”
The way rent controls are discussed across housing media might make you think that the UK is following a common path, but, in fact, we are an outlier worldwide for having a totally deregulated private rental system. Sixteen countries in Europe use rent controls, and until the deregulation brought in by the Thatcher government, we used to have rent controls in this country.
As recently as 1980, tenants paid on average 10% of their income in rent. Today, that figure has ballooned “upwards of 30%”, Abi O’Connor, a researcher at the New Economics Foundation, told me.
The crisis we face is so multifaceted that controlling spiralling rents must be an urgent priority. If we don’t, millions more will be plunged into poverty, and economic growth will decline as people have ever-less disposable income beyond housing costs.
I have no desire to split hairs over the merits of inflation metrics or argue that rent controls can fix our issues without building more social-rent accessible homes and the creation of more social housing. But the faith that many campaigners put in private developers and buildings as opposed to controlling rent levels is startling.
Even house builders themselves often struggle to offer a reason why the stagnated supply of accessible homes isn’t simply a desire for higher profit margins. Sam Stafford, planning director of the Home Builders Federation, told a select committee last year that it was the cost of building accessible homes and the lower profit margins that held developers back. “[The M4(3) standard] is very expensive to make wheelchair-accessible homes beyond detached or bungalow homes […] Bungalows rub up against the drive for density, so we have conflicting policy objectives already,” he said.
Perhaps the government should start listening to disabled people rather than those looking to exploit the housing crisis for private profit. As Luke told me, “There is no answer to the housing crisis for disabled people that doesn’t require a radical overhaul of the private rented sector.”
Let’s hope the government learns this lesson quickly.
Mikey Erhardt, policy and campaigns officer, Disability Rights UK
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