‘Failed experiment’: Dalston councillor challenges London mayor to bring in rent controls

Cllr Zoë Garbett AM addresses rent commission. Image: London Assembly

Dalston councillor Zoë Garbett has pushed for rent controls to be introduced to protect tenants –  denouncing the “failed experiment” of removing them more than 30 years ago.

At a City Hall roundtable on Tuesday, representatives from various groups met to discuss how to effectively introduce rent caps across London’s private housing.

Cllr Garbett AM, who sits as a Green on the London Assembly and Hackney Council, directly challenged Mayor of London Sadiq Khan over a commitment he made five years ago to hold a panel on the subject, which has yet to materialise.

“We don’t get change by sitting and waiting,” she said.

“Housing is increasingly financialised and organized around market coordination at the expense of public good.

“This has included scaling back regulations of the private sector, ending rent controls, which we did have in the UK until 1988, Right to Buy and shorthold tenancies.

“We could say that we’ve had a failed experiment of not having rent controls.”

The panel heard from a diverse group of private and social housing tenants, academics, unions, and others.

Abbi Brown, who is partially deaf and a wheelchair user, described her difficulty in finding private rented accommodation, after she and two others were served with a Section 21 (or “no fault”) eviction notice.

“I could see my two non-disabled flatmates could have easily found a nicer flat, for less money, if only they weren’t living with me.

“So I started to think: if it was so hard for me to find a place to live, maybe I wasn’t supposed to live at all,” she said.

Brown recounted that upon finding a new place to live, she was too scared to ask for a ramp to be installed in case it risked her being evicted once more.

“I don’t mean to sound Dickensian, but for many disabled private tenants, this is our reality.”

Kim, an Acorn renters’ union member, spoke of how her landlord proposed a 74 per cent rent increase on the flat where she had lived for more than two decades.

After attempted negotiations to bring the rent down, the landlord issued Kim with a no-fault eviction, at which point Lambeth Council intervened to inform the landlord that their Section 21 notice was invalid.

“[The landlord] agreed to offer me a new tenancy agreement with a 70 per cent increase, which I accepted as my mental health was suffering. I was exhausted and the the prospect of losing my homes of 22 years was terrifying.”

Kim, who said she is now paying an extra £420 per month, is worried about what the next increase might be.

In 2019, Mayor Khan launched a report stating his intent to establish a commission for designing an effective rent control policy.

He was not present at Tuesday’s panel.

Khan currently lacks the power to bring in price caps on private tenancies, but has qualified his support for the plan by saying he would not want to simply “copy” other cities’ policies.

In 2021, he said: “Council housebuilding is a form of rent control. They build the homes, and the rents are controlled and there is security of tenure.”

The policy has long been controversial, and has received notable pushback from economists and landlords.

Many critics point to its potential squeeze on the housing supply, as lower profits prompt landlords to leave the sector.

Others have suggested that it would discourage landlords from properly maintaining their rented properties.

The New Economics Foundation, a think tank that Mayor Khan has worked with previously and holds “in high esteem”, has argued that controls should not be seen as a cure-all to unaffordable tenancies.

To bring a meaningful solution to the housing crisis, it says caps must be accompanied by the expansion of social housebuilding and the welfare system to make sure low-income households can afford to live where they need.

But if implemented in a “sustainable” way, the Foundation argues that caps can remove some of the “unhealthy, investor-led demand for London’s homes”.

Beth Stratford, an economist from University College London, was also present, and echoed panellists’ calls to control rents but warned how things could go wrong.

“We want to avoid a situation where landlords have greater power to discriminate based on race and disabilities, and all of that could happen if you design a system which ends up being two tier or multi-tier.”

Roz Spencer, from tenancy support service Safer Renting, said that while it would not be “a bad thing” if the private rented sector shrunk as a result of the controls, the commission needed to be realistic.

“The whole objective of regulating the private rented sector is like a three-legged stool: you’ve got affordability, quality and security. If you leave any one of those three unregulated, that’s where [the problems] will bulge out,” she said.

In September, the government introduced new legislation to protect private tenants to the House of Commons. It is expected to become law next year.

Alongside other measures the Renters’ Rights Bill would ban Section 21 evictions, outlaw bidding wars, and make the Decent Homes Standard for social homes apply to private landlords.

After the commission concluded, Garbett said she was “tremendously proud of the people—specifically the renters—who spoke up in support of rent control from City Hall”.

She added: “We know homelessness is increasing, we know 95 per cent of low-income households can’t afford private rentals, and we know more and more houses are overcrowded.

“Rent control can’t keep being just a talking point—it needs to be in the Mayor’s housing policy.

“I sincerely hope the mayor is inspired by my commission, which proves that such a body is both possible and productive.

“Founding his own rent commission would not only fulfil a campaign promise, but assure Londoners, desperate for a solution to our city’s housing crisis, that their mayor is ready to act.”

Councillor Garbett AM will put the commission’s findings directly to Sadiq Khan at the next Mayor’s Question Time on 21 November.