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.

Subletting isn't always illegal. If we were to go back to long term lets for private sector tenants it would likely be done under the assured tenancy model as it is with HA tenants where all you have to do is to get the landlord's permission.

There was loads of property available for 10k in the 80s, even many parts of inner London.

I had family members that got a huge house in tufnell park for 20k and were given loads in grants as it was in something like a London development area. Now they are worth over a million.

My grandmother was a single parent nurse, she bought a large three story house in Brixton/Clapham borders just on her wages. Now a nurse couldn't even afford a studio in Stratford.

What an odd post, you say electric is reguled as it's a monopoly

I'm not sure about this. In theory a great idea and renting should be affordable. However my dm was the landlord of a rent controlled flat in the 70s and she got less in rent then the cost of the upkeep.
So if the rent control was realistic on both sides I would say great.

Re. claims of Grenfell sub letting LINK PLEASE!

Has it all been proved. Is the inquiry and investigation finished because i cant seem to see it on the news.

The mental gymnastics coming from ppl re. Grenfell re subletting claims and having the long knives out for "fridge man" . All this is coming from people shit scared that this tragedy which should not have happened is going to affect the laws around property and affect profits.

This is whats behind the denigration of the Grenfell tenants.

Sub letting of council properties in central London is so endemic it would be very surprising if it wasn't happening.

Councils have just been turning a blind eye for far too long.

What an odd post, you say electric is reguled as it's a monopoly

Well technically the energy market is an oligopoly.

But the point still stands. It isn't regulated because it is an 'essential service' as you claim. It is regulated to prevent market abuse.

@Cameblackbenzleftwhite1

Ofgem's role is to protect the interest of consumers by promoting competition where appropriate.

So you can have a [hmmm] face too since actually, my claim is entirely accurate and you are spouting uniformed clap trap about things you seem to know fuck all about.

Please feel free to read all about the energy market [http://www.energy-uk.org.uk/energy-industry/the-energy-market.html here]] to enlighten yourself in ofgems role.

Don't get me wrong, anyone who doesn't exercise a right to buy would be a fool. Perfectly legal. And if that leaves them with a high rent London flat, they would also be a fool not to capitalise. ( does such a person get an exemption from the general landlord hate?)

But allowing right to buy and then blubbering that there are no council houses is student politics for the hard of thinking.

HelenaDove - a quick google will give you many, many articles about the sub letting in Grenfell Tower, including in The Guardian, in case the other sources are not to your liking.

I knew people who sub let their council flats. I have posted about this before, but one work colleague said that lots of her friends got flats in Lambeth by having their mothers write to the council to say they were being abused by step father. Then they promptly sub let the flat and lived at home, pocketing rent from tenant of their flat. This person had a really nice flat, too, in a Victorian small block, not a high rise. Must be worth an absolute fortune now. I believe that these days councils are not quite so free and easy with council flats, at least I hope they're not.

Anyway, back to rent control. Dsis had a rent control in a European city for many years. The rent was c. £100 inclusive of utilities per month. Now, the problem was that people "bed blocked" the flats. Older people would not downsize, and younger people were trapped in one bedroomed-flats. The landlord proposed a modest rent increase because the rent was ridiculous, but people refused (despite all going round in top of the range cars and wearing fur coats because of lack of rent) and so they shot themselves in the foot as landlord declared bankruptcy. The tenants could either buy flats on open market or move. Dsis was furious as if people had just been prepared to pay a bit more rent they could have stayed put.

Right so that's one example of a system not working. I can give you close to 80,000 examples of how the system - or lack of - we have here isn't working. That's the number of households living in temporary accommodation right now. I can also give you 4,000 examples of how the system in the UK is at absolute crisis point - that's the number of rough sleepers we have here.

What we are doing is not housing people satisfactorily. We cannot continue like this. We need a complete overhaul of housing full stop but some kind of brake applied is a useful first step, given that we are all but alone amongst similar countries with our lack of protection for tenants.

There are a number of different models that could be adopted - rates of rent set by square footage, by neighbourhood sale values, increases pegged to inflation etc. Most places that have a form of rent regulation also have a mechanism whereby improvement to property means that a higher rent can be charged so that would also go some way to alleviate the huge problem we have here with substandard rental accommodation - at present there is no incentive for a landlord to carry out improvement works.

Annegrommit still missing the point....

Rent per sqft. Never improve your property as you won't see a return on it so make sure it is maintained to the absolute minimum.

By sale values - same problem as the above but also nightmare for mixed neighbourhoods like mine. And then throw in the fact that not many sales happen in most places as housing turnover is very low in general as a proportion of total stock so prices will be stale.

Inflation pegs - hmmm. Low inflation but high wage growth would really be annoying and this artificially reduces returns. Or low inflation but high house price inflation means landlords would capitalise gains rather than taking income.

Rent adjustments for improvements.... MORE council workers making judgements on what is good for you so only state approved improvements will count. Forget wooden floors but say hi to pointless insulation or LED bulbs. Not to mention the deadweight cost of administrating all this bureaucracy...

We could just let the free market work, coupled with the changes to tax that actually favoured BTL over owner occupation meaning BTL drove out ordinary buyers as they could afford to pay more.

NONE of this addresses the underlying supply and demand imbalance.

Subletting in London is endemic. One local authority found a significant portion of its tenants were not at the house ever when they sent people round to visit. Tons of people I know have rented from people with council tenancies and had mail for their landlords being delivered constantly. One even had one room locked up as the landlord's room just in case the council came. The landlord there lived in Goa on the difference between the market rate and the council rate. That is a subsidy if ever there was one and is really annoying. Someone can't be housed who contributes to the local economy as somebody got lucky. The idea that this didn't happen in Grenfall is the one I find laughably naive.

Sub-letting should be absolutely clamped down on. Can't see why Councils ignore it. I suppose they think ah well it's one less homeless family for us to worry about.

Wisedad, I am growing tired of your economic illiteracy. You keep on bleating on about supply and demand without a clue as to what it means while talking about the supposed free market which is the one thing that the UK housing is not, shored up as it is by tax breaks for landlords and developers together with billions of pounds of cash handouts to landlords in top up benefits.

There is no such thing as a free market. Even the USA is interventionist where it wants to be. As are we, but in favour of those who already have a slice of the pie. Christ, I'd almost prefer a free market to the outright bent model we have now.

However what I would prefer even more was a model that at least tried to ensure that the provision of shelter was regulated to give protection to tenants, because the current situation is an expensive disaster.

Also re subletting the reason it is so endemic is because secure tenancies are like hen's teeth so of course people break the law to hold onto them. If they give up their tenancy there is no way they'll get another. If all tenancies were created more or less equal you wouldn't see this on anything like the scale it is now.

Still, I don't really know why I'm arguing the toss with someone who thinks that the sale of council houses means more owner occupiers.

I know a few accidental landlords, all down to job moves

But they are no where near london which i dont doubt has got out of hand...like house prices themselves

But the point still stands. It isn't regulated because it is an 'essential service' as you claim. It is regulated to prevent market abuse.

Nice to see you use the actual definition.

And why do you think it's one of the most heavily regulated? What is the underlying reason? Answer because it's an essential service

AnneGrommit Are you really excusing subletting of social housing? It's public property and a matter of public concern who occupies it. Anyone subletting it should never have social housing again.

No. I think it's pretty piss poor behaviour but it's inevitable when you have a two tier system in the rented sector. It's a consequence of policy and if politicians didn't think it would happen they are naive in the extreme.

Where does that figure of 1.5 million empty homes come from? Real data or extrapolation?

Louisianna16

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!.

Well, the cables and pipes belong to the utility supplier UNTIL they enter the wall of the house. Everything in the walls or in the house belongs to the house owner and he has to pay, maintain, etc. it
But of course he is not allowed to "fiddle around" with it himself - he has to pay certified companies to do the work.
(I'm not sure about the rules if only the owner himslef lives in zhe property, maybe it's differnet then, but if he wants to rent ist out, the work need to be done by a certified company)
More fun facts: If you own a house and rent it out, you can't just end the contract and get your tenant to leave. You have to have a valid reason for not wanting to rent to him anymore (you need the house for yourself/he has not payed rent for 3 months/structural work is needed/etc).
Fixed lenghth contracts are heavily regulated as well, and not the norm.
We have quite firm laws to make the people who rents more secure and less prone to beome homeless or need to move anytime.
We also have laws about how high rents are allowed to be, although they are not so very strict and seemingly quite easy to work around.
Although landlord associations are known to moan about the injustice, and how all the laws favour the renters, etc, somehow there are still LOADS of landlords all over he country, and buy-to-let is very sought after and widely usual all over the country ;-)

The subletting makes me really really annoyed too Andrew.

If you have been given a property at a reasonable rent then you should not be profiting from it by letting it out.