To welcome rent controls in London

[Cameblackbenzleftwhite1]

Many other cities have them like Berlin and new York and it seems to work well. Helps people live in a city and not cleanse all the poor people out.

Daily mail foamers are hating corbyns plabs, so that probably means it's good.

Go and tell that to the tenants of Grenfell Tower.

HelenaDove Mon 25-Sep-17 15:34:41
www.portsmouth.co.uk/news/people/family-offered-50-after-toilet-collapse-nightmare-1-8162002
Add message | Report | Message poster HelenaDove Mon 25-Sep-17 15:36:01
"A FAMILY has been left ‘outraged’ after a housing management company offered them £50 compensation for ‘seven weeks of hell’. Wayne Sweeney from Havant rang Guinness Partnership reporting a leak like ‘a waterfall’ had streamed down the walls of his 
living room and hallway but after survey it was deemed safe"
Add message | Report | Message poster HelenaDove Mon 25-Sep-17 15:37:00
"He said: ‘I’m still concerned for the safety of my family as they assured me my ceiling was safe and two weeks later the ceiling collapsed and 
our toilet fell through the floor. ‘It was only by the grace of God my wife who is 36 weeks pregnant or my eight-year-old son with cerebral palsy were not sitting on it at the time.’ Wayne reported the incident to the Guinness Partnership and waited for a contractor. He said: ‘They finally sent someone round who said he was a windows and doors man and had no idea what he was looking for."
Add message | Report | Message poster HelenaDove Mon 25-Sep-17 15:38:12
"We have had this going on for seven weeks with them not coming round and not answering our calls. ‘My wife, Stacey and son, Cohen have had their summer holiday ruined because they have had to wait in for these people to come round.’ When the young family had a contractor round to fix their bathroom, Wayne explained: ‘The plumber said the chipboard that had been used was not waterproof. ‘They also said the extractor fan had been installed the wrong way, the pump was incorrect and the shower tiles had not been grouted. ‘Basically everything that could be wrong, was.’ Wayne spoke to the Guinness Partnership and he said: ‘They offered me £50 in compensation. ‘That is all they thought my family was worth. ‘My wife had to go to the hospital due to the stress these people have put us through.’ A spokeswoman for The Guinness Partnership said, ‘We’re really sorry that Mr Sweeney has had problems in his home. ‘We’ve now almost completed the repairs and we will be meeting with him next week to check that he is happy with the work and to discuss any further issues"

Again with the lack of understanding of the impacts of housing benefit. If you allow people whatever the local market rate is then demand is higher but there is no increase in supply so all prices rise.

There is no increase in supply not because of evil greedy developers but because of planning controls. Nobody in business is going to tie up working capital in non-productive sites just in case prices rise later. They buy options on sites from the owners and then try to get outline planning permission and then proper permission to build. No permission no money for the owner and no real cost for the builder and no capital tied up.

It's in the owners interest to get permission so they get paid. It's in the builders interest to build so they get paid. Planning is the blocker in a large number of cases.

I can't see how rent controls can work. If a LL has a £1.5k pm mortgage, there's no way he would rent for say £1k pm. End result? He sells and very likely that's one more property off the rental market.

sharksDen "You are buying a service. Nothing more, nothing less. It's a sad symptom of the entitlement of modern society."

and the number of times they don't get that service. Sometimes they even die as a result. You sound a shining beacon of humanity for sure.

everything belonging to the building itself like electricity cables, windows, water pipes, etc is clearly landlords

Gosh is that really the case in Germany NotEnglish ? In UK, fiddling around with electricity cables + most water pipes is definitely the remit of the Utility suppliers themselves - no way would a landlord be allowed near them!.

Structural stuff - roof, windows, brickwork, etc are LLs responsibilty , also internal stuff such as carpets cooker in unfurnished property.

Or what Helena said!

Tenants don't buy a service - that'll be hairdresser customers you're thinking of. A tenancy agreement creates a legal interest in a parcel of land. In most Western countries and a fair few less developed ones this interest affords tenants the same level of protection we used to have in the UK before Thatcher abolished it ie security of tenure and rent controls.

This was done specifically to encourage speculation in what has now become the housing market and together with the sale of public housing has led to the situation we're in now - owner occupancy at a lower rate than in the 1980s but unlike the 1980s tenants are mostly renting from private landlords whose rent demands cost us all £10 billion a year in top up payments in order that their supposed market rate rent can be paid. The quality of housing stock has also deteriorated with one in three private rental properties deemed substandard.

The erstwhile social housing is now owned at a rate of 40% by those same private landlords - it did the opposite of creating a nation of owner occupiers. The many points of failure of handing over provision of rented housing from state to private hands can be seen everywhere - from our housing benefit spend to the thousands of families living in unsafe temporary accommodation (the ending of a secure tenancy is the second most common cause of homelessness) to the exponential rise in the number of rough sleepers, a phenomenon of our society from the 1980s onwards.

So there is much to be done but given the monumental fucking over that private landlords as a group have dealt to this country, at least minimal regulation by way of rent controls is a start.

Sorry that should read *the ending of an assured shorthold tenancy

@annegrommit. It wasn't done to encourage speculation, it was done to allow people to charge a rate that allowed then to invest in the property and therefore improve living standards. No landlord will put money into a place unless the rent can rise and the tenants certainly won't put money in for capital improvements.

Rent controls are a recipe for deteriorating housing stock. You know this is true so you hide behind the idea that social landlords can fix it but they are subsidised housing stocks and that subsidy means some people get placed and some people don't. Those that don't have less stock to choose from as the rented sector is damaged by rent controls.

The Rent Acts destroyed the rental market. If it is to happen the price must be an efficient and non-discretionary mechanism for getting tenants out who don't pay for any reason - their problems are their problems, not the LL's.

And it cannot - absolutely cannot - be retrospective. Existing tenancies cannot be affected, however "exorbitant" the rent. There's something called the Human Rights Act.

Does the Human Rights Act have a section on landlords? Which article is that then?

Wisedad it was done to encourage more people to become landlords and put their money into housing. Ironically it didn't initially have the desired effect until the crash of the early 1990s which saw the start of speculative behaviour with predatory purchasing of repossessions.

YY Slim.

Unfortunately some people seem to see tenants wanting to live and wanting to be safe as being entitled.

And social housing is not subsidised. It pays for itself through rent receipts in perpetuity. The people who are being subsidised are the private landlords. I'll say it again, in case you missed it. £10 billion a year.

www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2017/09/14/will-grenfell-really-change-attitudes-towards-social-housing

It appears not!

AnneGrommit Article 1 of Protocol 1 if memory serves. If a landlord (and they are human too) is letting a house at £1,000.00 per month the State cannot deprive that person of the benefit of the contract by announcing that the rent is now £750.00 per month. Future tenancies, possibly.

I am a landlord (of one) in London.
Rent controls are a good idea. I don't think housing should be hugely profitable. Some profit is fine but it shouldn't be so good as it has been.

The state can and does step in when it's a question of public interest. Anyway, if rent controls do come in it'll be funny watching landlords - ie the human equivalent of carbuncles - arguing the toss about their inalienable right to gouge people.

Like it or lump it, LLs have the same human rights as other people.

I disagree. Berlin iirc is underpopulated which is why it is still cheap. Rent controlled apartments in NY are rare.

IMO we don't have a housing crisis as such, we have a work crisis.

We need to stop making out that London is the centre of the universe and instead invest in developing the rest of the country. There is no need for everyone to live in London. We need decent jobs in Birmingham, Leeds, Glasgow etc. Reduce demand and we reduce rent.

And I say that as a Londoner.

Like I say, it'll be funny. Bring it on.

Karalime - it's not just London. There are six million households spanning all parts of the UK whose rent constitutes more than 65% of their income after subsistence deductions (ie £75 for a single person, £125 for a couple etc). Rents everywhere are increasingly unaffordable and using housing benefit to shore up the gap between rents and earnings is unsustainable - that already huge £10 billion a year will just keep on rising. The only sensible way to stop the circle is to reduce what landlords charge.

There are various models of rent control/regulation in place in most developed democracies including various parts of the USA and lots of Western Europe. It works, in the main, perfectly fine. We are an oddity amongst our relative contemporaries in having an unregulated rental market and it is not working well in terms of society, the economy or in terms of the condition of rental stock.

Applying some simple supply and demand thinking......

So rent is unaffordable..... people don't create enough value add in their work to justify higher pay and because the supply of labour is too high so when they do generate more value there is someone to undercut their wage anyway..... and lots of labour means lots of people..... lots of people ,rams lots of de,and for housing which means rents are high.

We are talking at cross purposes. You say rent control is the answer to high rents. We say rent control is treating the symptoms not the cause of high rents.

You say. "So what? Other places have rent controls" as if that is some answer to the points being made..

We say "human rights act can't stop people from the lawful enjoyment of their own property, and that includes the right to contract freely". You say "so what? The landlords are carbuncles on the face of humanity".

It's this last one that is the language of hatred. You haven't responded to the points about supply and demand yet you seem to think by crushing supply you will fix the housing problems. I can't believe you are naive enough to think the state should therefore regulate even more of the economy to fix the problems the state has created by buggering things up in the first place. You blame people trying to make a living and look after themselves in an environment of crap savings returns and insecure futures that the state has created and given the historic massive tax incentives that the state has created. And yet more regulation is your answer? Why blame the little, and big, people for doing what they have when the elephant in the room gets ignored?

WiseDad Language of hatred? You should see some of the trolling the Grenfell residents have been getting.

That's not what supply and demand means.

Wages are low because we are largely a deunionised workforce which is increasingly falling out of the ambit of even nugatory employment protection - not just zero and short hours contracts but also bogus self employment ones the majority of which involve working for less than minimum wage.

The increasing gap between those at the bottom of the pile handing over +65% of their household income in rent to those at the top has nothing to do with supply and demand and everything to do with political and economic decisions that have made us a low wage economy where a significant section of the population is required to give increasing amounts of what insecure unreliable wages they get to people who can demand pretty much what they want in return for no security to speak of. This is not accidental. This is exactly the position that the tories like the working class to be in - disenfranchised, fearful and powerless. And it has fuck all to do with supply and demand. There are 1.5 million properties empty in the UK right now. If it was all about supply and demand there would be no rough sleepers, no (working) families living in B&Bs where they have to padlock their bags so that their kids' shoes don't get stolen. This is about, as such questions always are, inequality.