Jeremy Corbyn calls for rent controls to prevent ‘excessive’ landlord profits

Selective memory loss from Comrade Corbyn if he doesn’t remember how the rent controlled statutory tenancy housing had ended up by the late eighties and the regulatory changes since then.

I bought a property at auction in 1990 with a sitting tenant, rent was £12.50 a week (in the north) and only increased marginally every couple of years. A very basic property, no CH and the very long standing tenant was happy with it. According to the BoE inflation calculator that is just over £30 a week now.

The climate of the time was depressed values because of the low rents (I paid £11,000). A similar property, modernised with vacant possession would be 7 or 8 times the price now.

Thirty quid a week wouldn’t cover the rip off licence fees today that no doubt Corbyn thinks is necessary and a bit of basic certification and maintenance..

Very little margin these days after finance and all other costs (in comparison to far simpler and less risky investments) the only carrot left is increase in property value over the longer term from the financial leverage The sort of control level Corbyn will want is guaranteed to produce a capital loss with a sitting tenant.

He says "dont people have a right to a roof over their head"?
To which I would say.....dont people have a right to eat?
So does he think we should have food price controls too?
Tesco make a wee bit more of a profit than me I would assume.

Is Corbyn well meaning but ignorant?
Or, does he just want a Communist state?
If the second, maybe he should move into the Kremlin!
I am sure he would be welcome there.

Jeremy Corbyn would be better to look closer to home…..

Wake up and smell the coffee, comrade: Jeremy Corbyn's wife sells 'fair trade' beans sourced from 'happy workers' in Mexico. Guess what? They live in shacks and are dirt poor, exhausted... and very angry
• Corbyn's wife, Laura Alvarez, runs a business selling coffee beans
• Some poverty-stricken farmers earn 93p for each 500g bag sold for £10
• Workers live in tiny shacks with their families, starting long shifts at 4am
• Farmer pleaded with company director Miss Alvarez, 46, to 'think about us'

To quote Churchill..."capitalism is the unequal sharing of wealth, socialism is the equal sharing of poverty"

Private landlords provide accommodation at zero cost to the councils, and add Billions of pounds in taxes to the country.

And Corbyn wants to destroy that? To be replaced by what?
Councils are all broke.

Maybe if government used the taxes landlords pay, to build houses, we might not be in a housing shortage.

Reply to the comment left by Cider Drinker at 03/02/2025 - 09:30
Jeremy Corbyn is a dangerous Communist and understands nothing.
Rent controls didn't work in Scotland and didn't work in England after the excesses of the late Peter Rachman .
They will force more landlords out of business and create more homelessness,more council bankruptcies and more rough sleeping.
Once this happens and even before it does Lloyds Bank through their subsidiary,Legal and General and people like Vanguard and Black Rock will cherry pick the best properties and tenants leaving the homeless and marginalised tenants high and dry.
Without new housebuilding landlords will walk away and unlawful evictions will mushroom.
The courts are jammed up with cases and no new money is going in to render the court system fit for purpose.
This is deliberate action on the part of Angela Rayner and of course Starmer.
Landlords operating at a small scale will be scapegoated and in some cases bankrupted but the housing crisis will grow exponentially till 2029 unless World War 3 morphs from cutting Internet cables and sabotage into a hot war requiring fighting men and woman going physically into war zones.

Reply to the comment left by Cider Drinker at 03/02/2025 - 11:40
He states that your take home pay on an 80k salary is around 48k . I don't think it's landlords that's ripping people off.

Reply to the comment left by Martin at 03/02/2025 - 11:10
I think that in general labour politicians have very little understanding of business, economics, the environment or the sciences that underpin all these things. For example, nobody who really understood business and who was shouting that their number one priority was to grow the economy would increase employers' national insurance in a service economy dominated by small businesses. It's nuts.

The recent inclusion of farmland in the inheritance tax net is another example of lack of understanding. The problem is that it is a blunt instrument that does a great deal of collateral damage. The gross margins available from many activities in farming are notoriously poor and profitable farms rely on economies of scale, which means that in order to pay an inheritance tax bill family farms could have to sell land and this undermines the long-term viability of their farms and drives their families out of farming resulting in loss of skills.

But if somebody says to you "..we are going to include your house and your pension in the inheritance tax net..." then you have to say to yourself "...if I have to pay it, why is it that farmers don't have to pay it?" It's a fair question.

The problem is that a blunt instrument like this is environmentally damaging because if farmers are forced to react then they may be back to grubbing out hedgerows and coppices, as they were forced to under the common agricultural policy, in order to make their farms sustainable.

If you follow the argument to its logical conclusion then you could say to yourself "...because small portfolio landlords are unable to offset their finance costs their net margins after tax may well be even lower than the net margins from farming. If my family house, my pension, my buy-to-let (which for many is also a pension) are all caught by inheritance tax, then again why should farmers also not pay it?"

If the land that those farms that have put into usage under the new agri-environment scheme in order to increase biodiversity and restore soils was also taken out of the inheritance tax net then that would probably do something useful. There was a quote last night on Countryfile that 70% of the world's wetlands have been lost since 1970. If it could be taken out of the inheritance tax net if it had public rights of way across it then that would do something for the public benefit. If the land allocated to hedgerows and conservation headlands could be taken out of the inheritance tax net then this would also be useful. But the blunt instrument gets wielded by people who don't know what they are doing and the potential collateral damage is enormous.

If the EPC meant something (it doesn't today) and you then lifted band A properties out of the inheritance tax net you could probably do something about emissions at least to show leadership on the world stage even if the net global effect was minimal. The after-tax gross margins on many buy-to-lets is lower than the gross margins available from farming and people need a roof over their heads just as much as they need food and a place to go for a walk.

The problem with these blunt instruments that are driven by media soundbites and the political dogma of people like Jeremy Corbyn who don't know what they are doing and don't actually care because they believe in something else is that they do far more harm than good.

Reply to the comment left by Dylan Morris at 03/02/2025 - 12:05
Yes, I am afraid of that too. I think it could well happen - or a limit on rent increases locally.
So, I strongly advise to not drift too far off local market rent levels, as i explain here:
https://www.lettingfocus.com/blogs/2024/05/test-post/

I wonder if Corbyn was a council tenant at one stage and then purchased his house under right to buy??
The BBC interviewer did not challenge Corbyn especiaally when he said that people were paying £2000/month for a flat giving the impression that this would be one ondividual and they would have to earn circa £80,000pa to afford it.
Well I let properties in London some are houses and anything that I let for £2000/month is usually shared by at least 2 people so we would usually be looking at more than one income to cover it.
Corbyn will get what he wants with the RRB because when tenants start taking their rent increases to the ombudsman which I believe they will be advised to do by Shelter, Generation rent and others and assuming it takes several months for the Ombudsman to decide and they will not back date the increase but could either allow any increase to take place from the decision date or some future date of their choosing then rents will come down.