Cost of Living: Private rented sector

Claudia Webbe Excerpts

Tuesday 18th July 2023 Westminster Hall

[Claudia Webbe (Leicester East) (Ind)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Huq. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Andrew Western) for bringing forward this extremely important debate. The UK is a country shamed by the poverty of its people and especially of its children. The Government’s failure to act to curb the corporate profiteering that is driving inflation is just one of many ways in which the Government are fanning the flames of the cost of living emergency. In this country, 14.5 million people live in poverty and 4.3 million of them are children. In the last full calendar year, real-terms wages fell by 3.1% while, according to the latest ONS figures, private rents rose by 5% in the year to May.

Figures from Generation Rent tell us that private rents have increased by 22% since March 2021 and have been pushed up further in response to even higher interest rates and as landlords take advantage of the crisis to improve profits. As a result, private renters in England pay up to 40% of their median household income on rent. Rent as a share of income is at its highest level in over a decade. While the Scottish Government took action last year to at least temporarily cap rent increases at 0% through the Cost of Living (Tenant Protection) (Scotland) Act 2022, the Westminster Government have allowed rents to be driven by the market and by greed, with little thought for the additional burden it places on the backs of those already going under.

The Government’s Renters (Reform) Bill, which was introduced in May almost a year after the planned reforms were announced, has seen its Second Reading delayed until at least the autumn, with no date yet announced despite the imminent recess. Meanwhile, more than 4 million households that rent privately—a number that has doubled in the two decades of failure to build council and social housing—continue to face unsecure tenancies, arbitrary and back-door section 21 no-fault evictions and often appalling living conditions. In the middle of a cost of living crisis, they are also paying over £570 a year more than they need to in energy costs, according to E3G, because of landlords’ refusal to upgrade heating systems and insulation. As a result, fuel poverty charity National Energy Action has noted that private renters are more likely to be fuel poor than people in all other types of tenure and more likely to live in the leakiest properties, often needing to spend thousands of pounds more than the average household just to keep a healthy temperature at home.

We have seen, in the case of the odious Illegal Migration Bill, just how quickly this Government can force legislation through Parliament when they have a mind to do so. Against the backdrop of a perfect storm of misery for millions living in privately rented accommodation, the Government must—yes, must—urgently publish an accelerated timetable for the Renters (Reform) Bill and combat the affordability crisis in private renting, which is absent from the proposed measures, but will at least go some way toward reducing the injustice and inequality of private rent.