In response to an ever increasingly serious shortage of student accommodation Chloe Field from the National Union of Students said the NUS wanted to see more affordable accommodation created and rent controls considered to stop prices escalating.
Because that’s what we need when faced with a housing crises – rent controls.
Well, Chloe I hope you’re not studying economics because you can kiss goodbye to any prospect of getting a first class degree and in my opinion you can kiss goodbye to a degree of any sort.
The answer, Chloe, is for successive governments to stop hounding the Private Rented Sector. For the Scottish Government to to stop treating landlords as pariah, for the Welsh Government to stop treating landlords as whipping boys, for the UK Government to stop taxing landlords differently to any other business and to make decisions about important topics like Energy Performance Certificates and the Rent Reform Act.
There is little doubt that housing in the UK is a mess. From the chaos Sadiq Khan would like to introduce to the bumbling promises of the Labour party to the continued prevarication of the Conservatives not one of them is getting it remotely right. And don’t think the SNP have got it right, they’ve franchised out rented housing in Scotland to the Greens who simply have no idea what they’re doing other than pampering to their core voters. The Welsh Labour party have stated they don’t think rent controls work and yet are spending taxpayer’s money consulting on that very idea.
It’s a shambles.
One thing that we do know is that rent controls don’t work. But it takes a special kind of numpty to think that rent controls are the solution to a rented sector housing crises.
Does Chloe Field or anyone else seriously think that more housing will become available if you put a price cap on it? In what world does that work?
Who in their right mind is going to provide a service that has an immediate price cap on it? Who is going to build homes knowing that a Government or Local Authority is going to tell you what price you can rent them for? And yet that’s exactly what these people think landlords are going to do.
Landlords are exiting the Private Rented Sector in droves. Across the country thousands of homes stand empty waiting for a buyer because landlords have had enough. They are sick of being treated like second class citizens, sick of being taxed differently, sick of having over 200 pieces of legislation controlling their every decision and most of all sick of having ‘experts’ like Chloe Field tell them how to run their businesses.
If all this sounds like I’m picking on Chloe then yes I am. But she’s just the latest in a long, long line of people who have pontificated about the Private Rented Sector whilst at the same time failing to understand it.
Given the right incentives, the right direction and the right legislation the UK Private Rented Sector could be superb. Instead it’s being driven to it’s knees by people who are more interested in sound bites than actually housing anyone.