Angela Rayner, Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, has ruled out introducing rent controls. This is despite Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, calling for a cap on private rents. It is difficult to see how opposing rent controls as a policy is attractive to any group other than the tiny minority who are private landlords.
Effects of rent controls
The implications of using rent controls have recently been investigated, with particular reference to affordability, public spending, and landlord profits. The resulting report, from University College London (UCL), the New Economics Foundation and others, has one central conclusion:
“No other available policy instrument can deliver affordability improvements of this scale… for the households most at risk in the unfolding cost of living crisis – all while saving the government money.” (p.7)
If landlords with mortgages experienced a 20% rent reduction, their pre-tax profit margins would drop from 70% to 64%. This level of profit margin is 4.5 times larger than the average for UK businesses. Unmortgaged landlords would do even better.
For the tenants, this cannot just be about one household’s financial gain. Rent controls must pass over from one tenancy to another. The report recommends rent freeze periods too. Social protection needs to be applied to prevent landlords immediately selling properties with compensation to tenants for relocation by the landlord if a contract of whatever length is terminated before its due date. Versions of this policy are already in effect in Los Angele and San Francisco. The report suggests tenants should have a right of first refusal to purchase a property put on sale.
The subsidised landlord
The Government is paying about £13.4bn per year to private landlords for housing benefits. If tenants were in council housing, cooperatives, or housing association properties, this could be radically reduced. The big question is why subsidise private landlords at all? Would it not be better to phase out all but registered social housing providers? But then, the UK Government is subsidising fossil fuels corporations at about £17.5bn per year, which is another mystery.
How badly are tenants being hit by rents?
Private renters in England are generally in the least affordable accommodation in the developed world. The report indicates that about three-quarters of them are paying more than 30% of gross household income, with the poorest renters paying as much as over two-thirds. This compares with private rents up to 1980 averaging less than 12% of household income. This suggests successive Government policies have discriminated against private tenants and in favour of private landlords.
Choosing to fail to meet low-cost housing needs
The £13.4bn spent giving housing support payments to private landlords is greater than annual spending on affordable and social homes. The higher the reduction in private rents, the greater the spending power of households. One could be forgiven for thinking that the Government has not recognised this opportunity to boost growth – an unqualified imperative – through extra private spending.
The undeterred private landlords
The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government suggests private rented properties increased by 96,000 in the period 2023-25, negating any suggestion that the continuing cost of living crisis, or new regulatory requirements, is hitting private landlords.
Even in Scotland, with rent controls, private rentals increased by 3% between 2022 and 2025. Private landlords in England alone gained over £400bn in real property wealth between 1990 and 2022. This huge gain, including capital gains from increased property values, provides evidence of a massive failure to redistribute income and wealth, arguably worsening inequality instead.
If private landlords start selling properties under pressure of rent controls, or indeed required quality improvements in their properties, it seems unlikely from the report that even a 20% reduction in rents would alter the large profits typically gained by landlords.
So, phased legal reductions in rent under a national rent control plan could mean savings from reduced housing benefit bills, which in turn could be repurposed to purchase private landlord properties put on sale as these appear. Increased council housing acquired in this fashion could contribute to reducing temporary accommodation used by councils, for which exorbitant rents may be charged.
Caps on rent increases are needed to prevent private landlords hitting tenants in their remaining stock of rentals with higher rents to compensate for sales of some of their other properties. The larger numbers of landlords renting out single properties may be more likely to withdraw from renting altogether.
Debt relief for councils
Where councils have been suffering from higher spending on repairs and maintenance not covered by their own rental income, then the Government should be looking at debt relief to allow councils to have periods of debt increase during a transition to reducing private rental properties to being rented out by social landlords only.
Not mentioned in the report, land value taxation, if introduced, could be used to discourage second homes and short-term lettings. The number of second homes increased by 41% between 2008-09 and 2021-22, illustrating that there is a source of homes to meet local housing needs in areas where they are concentrated. These could be made available to local people through council purchase on sale, or through compulsory purchase in areas with high concentrations of such properties and a dearth of low rent/low price homes.
The report briefly mentions downsizing as a potential source of as much as 540,000 homes. However, this disregards transaction costs, costs of moving, and costs of upgrading of any new home which may not be energy efficient or may have other pressing issues needing potentially costly attention.
The rental homes crisis in Oxford
The main Oxford housing statistics page only offers data up to 2022. The information presented is from elsewhere, looking particularly at the 2025/26 period.
In January 2025, Oxford was the least affordable city in the UK with house prices over 13 times the average wage. Building more homes in Oxford relies upon Thames Water completing new sewage works to allow adequate capacity for these new developments. However, the suggested completion date of this work is 2031. Since Thames Water is highly indebted and struggling to continue in the private sector, it is unclear how it will obtain £240mn needed to upgrade sewage works serving Oxford, amongst many other priorities. Oxfordshire is already distinguished for its ‘growth industry’ of sewage dumping when Thames Water cannot cope.
Acorn, the renters’ union, reported in February 2026 that renting a property in Oxford cost £232 more per month in 2026 than it had in 2024.
A Freedom of Information request investigation revealed, in June 2026, that there were 3,000 applicants for council housing, with applicants wanting single person or family-sized properties facing waits of 10-20 years. At the same time, 56 properties were empty – requiring attention of various kinds before letting, out of council stock of about 8,000 homes.
This overall situation had pushed Oxford City Council to dedicate £32mn to obtain more temporary accommodation in March 2026. Such accommodation is more expensive than council rents would be; the City Council does intend to build a further 1600 ‘affordable housing’ units by March 2029, with a minimum of 850 lettable at a social rent.
Keyworkers
As Oxford is one of the least affordable first-time buyer areas, whether any additional market homes need to be built at all is a question. Shouldn’t all empty built environment housing options, building apartments above car parks, and buying homes on sale be implemented for additional council or keyworker homes?
Perhaps the scarcity of construction workers should mean getting rid of targets for market housing, with local councils setting aside some brownfield sites for self-build homes instead.
Local council targets must meet demand for council housing and keyworkers’ accommodation by offering part rent/part buy options.
Even with these measures, places like Oxford, Cambridge, London, and Brighton may have market prices so high they deter keyworkers taking on part rent/part buy and remaining in such areas at all.
So, the payment for the market element a keyworker home should face each month must be set far lower than market prices suggest and, if the householder wishes, for a far longer period than a conventional mortgage, and with a low fixed mortgage rate. As noted above already, debt relief for councils should be greater to assist this form of support where necessary. Councils should be free to set their own levels of council tax – or land value tax in the future – with no capping. Increased powers for local councils should mean more realistic staffing levels for all council functions in the future.
With thanks to Hazel Dawe for comments
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