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Governments have built a heaven for landlords and a hell for tenants. It’s time to change the system.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 17th July 2019
I have a friend who works almost every waking hour, mainly to pay the rent. Her landlord lives on a beach, 4000 miles away. He seldom responds to her requests, and grudgingly pays for the minimum of maintenance. But every so often, he writes to inform her that he is raising the rent. He does not have to work, because she and other tenants work on his behalf. He is able to live the life of his choice, because they give their time to him. As there is an absolute shortage of accessible housing, they have no choice but to pay his exorbitant fees.
Rents charged at such rates – far beyond the costs of capital and maintenance – are, in these circumstances, a form of private taxation, levied by the rich on the poor. The penalty for failing to pay this tax is arguably greater than the penalty for failing to pay taxes owed to the state: eviction and homelessness. People say “I work for Tesco” or “I work for Deliveroo”, but the reality for many is that they work for their landlord. While the average mortgaged household spends 12% of its income on housing, the average renting household spends 36%. I have met plenty of people who hand over 50% or more.
The UK has become a paradise for landlords, and hell for tenants. Buy-to-let mortgages, easy evictions, uncapped rents, generous tax breaks and the replacement of social housing with housing benefit (a bill that now amounts to £22 billion a year, much of which is paid to private landlords) have turned the rental sector into a licence to print money, at the expense of both tenants and taxpayers. In the 13 years between 2002 and 2015, average wages for people who rent rose by 2%, but their rents rose by 16%.
Landlords get away with providing unfit and dangerous accommodation, and tenants have a powerful incentive not to complain to the local authority, as 46% of those who do so are summarily evicted. The government’s promise to repeal Section 21 of the 1988 Housing Act, that enables owners of property to evict their tenants without good reason, will achieve little if it is not accompanied by a cap on rent rises: otherwise landlords can engineer de facto evictions by hiking the price.
The effects are devastating not only for people’s finances, but also for their family lives and peace of mind, as Catrina Davies reminds us in her beautiful, elegaic book Homesick, published this month. After a childhood clouded by her father’s bankruptcy, the subsequent loss of the family home, destitution, divorce, chaos and mental illness, she finds herself on the wrong side of the magic line between those who own and those who don’t. She is engaged in an endless struggle to lead a good, fulfilling life, without being crushed by the demands of rent.
After living in a tent, a van and a static caravan, she rents a tiny box room in a crowded, angry house in Bristol, for £400 a month. While she struggles to meet her bills, her landlords blithely travel the world. Eventually, it all becomes too much. She flees into a collapsing shed in Cornwall, without planning permission, electricity or water. She now lives on the wrong side of the law, under corrugated iron and woodwormed timber, in extreme precarity, but with a measure of freedom she has not been able to find elsewhere. https://www.monbiot.com/2019/07/19/private-taxation/
Where is that 60% CGT!?
more to worry:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nqlr7Y7yocU
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