The government is right to give Generation Rent a break

It is now treated as common wisdom that the Conservatives have lost the youth vote because the youth have no capital, and “you can’t be a capitalist without capital”. But as a member of the fabled “youth”, I’m not entirely sure that’s true.

From what I’ve seen, modern millennials aren’t as interested in ownership as our parents were: we take out Netflix and Spotify subscriptions instead of buying DVDs and records – and because lots of us settle down later and travel more in our 20s, we are often happy defer the responsibility of home ownership.

As the situation stands, though, renting doesn’t work. Middle earning millennials in London – many with children – are spending well over half their income on rent, and are rewarded by landlords who turf them out with just two months notice, having forbidden them from putting up pictures during their tenancies.

Jeremy Corbyn seems to understand their plight and has focussed his housing promises on renting. He has promised to impose rent controls, and even suggested making it illegal for landlords to ban their tenants from having pets. In 2017, the rhetoric paid off: according to data from the British Election Study, a massive swing to Labour by private renters (who make up 70% of the 25-34 age bracket) helped to deprive the Conservatives of their majority.

If the situation in New York is anything to go by, rent controls are a very bad idea indeed. But the government’s decision to overhaul English residential tenancy rules to outlaw no-fault evictions is long overdue. European countries have far bigger rental sectors than we do, but they also have much tighter regulation which lends some much-needed balance to the landlord/tenant relationship. Until now Britain’s landlords (who have also managed to hold onto to quite a few rather attractive tax breaks) have had it all ways.

Of course, the long term solution to the housing crisis, as has been said time and time again, is to overhaul our extraordinarily inflexible planning system and build, build, build. Thanks to antiquated ‘green belts’, strict controls on height, lack of fiscal incentives at the local level to develop and ‘not in my backyard’ (NIMBY) behaviour, a vanishingly small 2% of England is built on. That’s a massive issue in a housing crisis, and at some point, it will have to be addressed it head on.

But until politicians find the guts to do so, it is quite right that the Conservatives are thinking seriously about reforming the enormous private rental sector. And who knows, Generation Rent may even thank them in the polls.