Rents in the UK are out of control. In London, they now swallow more than 40% of income. Across England, it's 36%. For millions, life is no longer about living — it's about paying landlords.
This video explains why rent is dragging families and children into poverty, how landlords extract wealth from the poor to enrich the rich, and why rent caps and more public housing are the only way forward.
This is the transcript:
Rents are sucking the lifeblood out of the lives of many people in the UK.
Rental property is largely occupied by young people and people on low incomes in the UK, and of course, in very many cases, those two groups overlap, and as a consequence, a great many children in the UK also live in rental properties. And the cost of that property is rising.
New data from the Office for National Statistics shows that, on average in England, the cost of rental property in proportion to people's gross incomes rose by 3% in the year 2023/24, which is the most recent for which we have data.
In London, the cost is now in excess of 40% of the gross income of people who are renting their properties.
In England as a whole, it's now reached 36%.
In the Southwest of England, the data shows that the cost is now in excess of 30% of gross incomes of those who are paying rents, and that is, of course, because of the challenge from holiday lettings.
We are in a crisis situation.
Now, the story is not that grim everywhere.
In Wales, the average cost of renting is only 26% of gross income, which is still staggering.
In Northern Ireland, it's 25%.
And in the Northeast, the Northwest and the East Midlands, the cost of renting is declining, in particular in the Northeast, where it's fallen to only 20% of gross incomes - a substantial drop during the course of this period - but that's an indication of many of the economic problems that are going on there.
But the point in general is quite simple: landlords are taking a disproportionate amount of the income of younger and poorer people who are living in rental property.
Those people are not working for the sake of putting food on the table.
They're not working for the sake of having a good life.
They're working to pay their landlords.
We should have got beyond this point now.
It's wrong that we are paying for land time, and time, and time again, and yet we are.
It's wrong that people are being denied a chance to live on median earnings because so much of what they earn is being extracted from them by landlords who are charging excessive prices.
And remember, even social rents are defined in relation to these excessive prices, and therefore are unaffordable for many.
We can't live forever in a society where rents are literally dragging people into real poverty after tax and after paying for the essentials of living, where they cannot work out how to make ends meet.
It's unsurprising that we have millions of children in poverty in this country as a consequence. You could lay the fault entirely at the door of the excessive prices of rental properties.
Unless our government gets a grip on this issue, and it can only get a grip on this issue by either imposing rent caps or by increasing the number of government owned properties, whether that be government or housing association or local authority, I'm not too worried about, but under government control, unless more of those properties are made available at genuine social rents, there is no chance of this changing.
We are living in a society that appears to exist solely to extract wealth from the poor, to benefit the rich, and that is not sustainable.
Unless we change this, the way we live cannot survive, and that is a profoundly worrying prospect.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
There are links to this blog's glossary in the above post that explain technical terms used in it. Follow them for more explanations.
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Buy me a coffee!
For comparison, according to Statista (January 2025), the average private rental-cost as proportion of income in Scotland, is 26.6%.
Staggering indeed!
Man of the People and working class cosplay aficionado Nigel Garage owns a rental property in Surrey, so we can assume Reform have no intention to resolve this issue.
The UK has had some of the highest living costs in Europe for some time since Margaret Hilda Thatcher, but a number of recent articles in the Guardian have pointed out that it is not outside the bounds of reason for Europe to ‘catch up’ and catch the UK/USA disease.
I work with people who look after the homeless, I work with people who try to deal with bad landlords who rent out dumps, who run emergency shelters, and so forth and the housing ‘market’ is not working because the emphasis is on housing’s use as an asset to gain access to credit, income, savings etc.,to the point where its function as shelter just does not seem to figure anymore. Another downside is housing’s function as a liability – TV may give the impression that bad housing is being continuously turned into good but most of this seems to be cosmetic and says nothing about thermal qualities (including cooling as temperatures seem to go up), energy efficiency and air flow (which stops damp and mould).
Housing in England is totally FUBAR.
Noted
And I fear you are right
Actual investment in housing is tiny
We used to have a Rent Act by which tenants’ rents were assessed for fairness by an officer of local government. It would be a feather in the cap of any political party that had a policy of reviving something similar with the aim of protecting tenants.
I’m not against Landlords, in fact, many, including ours, are very good and believe in fairness. Sometimes they need legal protection from feckless tenants. Any new act would have to be balanced, although weighted toward the weaker party, invariably the renter.
Incomprehensible!
Incomprehensible to the outright home owner, benefiting from the state tipple lock pension and an additional personal pension. Possibly defined benefits pension.
And to many, many others not caught in the rent trap.
It’s the same with energy bills, at their highest proportion of spending since 1957.
Pretty graph at https://news.sky.com/story/energy-bill-spending-heads-towards-highest-level-since-at-least-the-1950s-12576940
But this should be of no surprise. Neoliberalism puts profits before people.
Since profits are a measure of success, it is working well… for the well-off.
It’s catastrophic for the average person.
I am in Marin County, California. A 900 square foot studio apartment rents for $2,000 per month. The 900 square feet includes a deck as part of the dimensions. The $24,000/year does not include electricity, water, or heat. In Marin County, California, the average hourly pay is around $26, or $52,000/year. Thus, the $24,000 annual rent is roughly 50% of the average annual income.
No laws forbid this gouging. We do not have rent control. We have a housing shortage. The limits to building more housing are numerous – raw buildable land is about $94,699/acre.
So the question is Who are these landlords? Who raised them? Who are their parents? And the final answer seems to be that these people feel zero responsibility to society in the disposition of their property.
Good questions
Surely though the real issue = and it affects owner occupiers, prfivate and social housing tenants is that the price of land has been allowed to rise out of control.
Going back to the 30’s when all those houses that were built outside London in particular the land could represent as little as 5% of the sale price, now its more than 50% yet agricultural land prices are about £10k/acre
‘Investment’ (note the inverted commas) is flooding in to UK housing. Professor Josh Ryan-Collins has shown that the proportion of homes bought as “additional dwellings” (second homes, holiday homes, airbnbs, buy to lets, and so on) has risen since 2016 from around 15% of the total to 45% by 2023 – it’s probably about half now. It’s not hard to work out why – the relatively wealthy see better returns from extracting rent, especially in England, than other ‘investments’. But for everybody else the effects of this are negative – and not only on housing. Rents extracted from local communities, for example, flow to wealthy areas, or abroad, instead of that money circulating in local economies; not just local businesses, but schools, etc, are killed by partially-occupied second homes and airbnbs; investment flows into unproductive assets rather than what’s really needed….
The government needs to redress this imbalance in the UK economy – and not necessarily by building more houses (let’s not forget there is an environmental cost to that – and the fact is that there are already more rooms per capita in the UK than there has ever been before) but by rent controls (as there used to be in the UK, and still are in other countries) and, especially, making the tax system truly fair and progressive across both earned and unearned income.
Thanks
I believe that the state of housing provision is one of the biggest drags on our economy and the biggest danger to social cohesion we face. One of the things that particularly annoys me is the degree of state subsidy in the shape of housing benefit that has gone to Landlords over the last 40 years. When people go on about the “benefit bill” and how it is unsustainable they do not seem to grasp that housing benefit subsidises the pension arrangements of a landlord class as much as it does the housing needs of lower income workers who are often reviled for needing the subsidy. Why has this happened? I think it is because people have lost trust in the financial system to provide them with secure pensions, so they have “invested” in more property instead, with all the attendant negative consequences for young people. Radical solutions- along with much more social housing for rent- better, more secure vehicles, for people to save for their old age, better state pensions. The idea that things like pensions and housing can be left to the market has led us to where we are. I do not know how we shift things so that we understand how bad neo-liberalism has been for our economy, our society and our general well being. The last time it took fascism and a world war. ” lest we forget” they said. Well we have.
Agreed
The Bow Group a right wing Tory think tank suggested that the Government set a target for average house prices of 4 times average earnings and they should then implement policies to bring this about
Not a lot to disagree with
[…] issue of rents was on my mind yesterday, with both a post and a video on the subject. So, last night I did a little back-reading on the subject to remind myself just […]
[…] You can see Murphy’s post in full here: https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2025/08/19/rent-crisis-britain/ […]
I became a landlord, like many, to support myself in retirement as the state pension is insufficient. It also provides good quality homes for 8 people. I paid 7% SDLT on purchasing and I have £400,000 in mortgages. Landlords are not treated like other businesses, we now cannot deduct the majority of mortgage costs before paying income tax. Mortgage costs have now tripled. Since 2015 Governments have pointed the finger at landlords as being the problem while using landlords as cash cows, which ultimately results in higher rents or landlords exiting the PRS. The PRS hasn’t grown out of greed, it has grown due to the lack of affordable housing for rent or buying. Most landlords have good relationships with their tenants. There are bad landlords AND bad tenants, both should be called out. The only way to reduce rents is to increase supply, particularly for key workers. This will only happen if governments build the social housing they should have built already. It’s in the interest of private builders to keep supply below demand. Look at the bigger picture, it’s not landlords that are causing the housing and rental issues.
There is very good reason why landlords are not like other businesses. Landlords are not, as such businesses. You let land. You do not create. Of course the rules should be different.
I totally support the sentiment of wanting to redress the appalling wealth imbalances that we are all acutely aware of. The legacy left by successive governments that have placed macro economic growth ahead of all other considerations, including building equitable systems of taxation and wealth redistribution is inexcusable. However, I don’t think that quoting a long list of statistics, that could as easily be used to highlight the lack of equitable investment across the country, makes for a particularly persuasive or sophisticated argument against ‘landlords’ in this case. Supply and demand dictate property and rental prices, and affordability is as much to do with what employers are prepared to pay their staff. So the issue is more complex, even at this basic level, than this account would suggest. The imminent Renter’s Bill is about to create a seismic shift in power in favour of tenants, leading to an exodus of landlords from the sector, which will almost certainly be comprised of a greater proportion of decent landlords who can’t afford the additional costs and risks that it will entrain (rather than the unscrupulous ones, who can and will find ways around the new regs). If I could afford to buy a property to rent out, it’s the last thing I would do right now. Landlords shoulder all the risks associated with the servicing of finance and maintenance of their property, not to mention dealing with increasingly entitled attitudes from tenants (aka the public at large). I’m very happy renting without having to worry about any of that, and yes, landlords benefit from the capital growth of their assets, IF they are able to balance the books, but compared to wealth generated by tech giants and banks, it’s small potatoes. For anyone genuinely interested in making meaningful changes for the better in social justice, lambasting a ‘group’ as diverse as ‘landlords’, is a waste of effort, and a dangerous distraction from the genuine causes of wealth inequality. There are definitely unscrupulous landlords, plenty of them, but lumping them all together the way this article does is grossly disingenuous, misrepresents the underlying issues and is just another example of stats being quoted to justify a populist political rant. Big business influencing government thinking, and poor tax policies are the real issues we should be focusing on.
I have to disagree.
You are completely ignoring the politics of Thatcher who permitted the landlord to explicit tenants. This is what has happened. The systemic issue is the problem, not the individual, I admit. Of course there are good landlords. But let’s get real, they are still in a system so biased against the tenant that the person renting has the odds deliberately stacked against them. You cannot ignore that issue.
Rental yields drive house prices far more than supply though of course the latter is a factor too.
Either in 1939 or shortly after rental controls were introduced and not removed after the end of WW2. In fact it was only under Macmillan circa 1960, that rent controls re the private sector were fully removed (I will find the source if anyone interested).
The legislation saw the recovery of the private landlord on the verge of extinction and over a longer period time a slow rise in house prices.
Richard, is right rent controls needed but the lead time on impacting house prices will take time.