Why I’m taking action for rent control

On Saturday 14th December, people from across London will march to demand action on skyrocketing rents explains London Renters Union member Elyem Chej.

Like most ordinary Londoners, it’s not often that I go into the centre of the city. The heart of our metropolis has long been the preserve of tourists, shoppers, and the super-rich. But on the 14th December, I’ll be one of the several hundred tenants from across the capital coming together to retake the streets in protest of extortionately high rents.

Rents have been too high for too long. But in the last few years, London’s rigged renting system has gone into overdrive. The few neighbourhoods which used to be (comparatively) affordable have all but disappeared as developers and landlords have tightened their grip on our city.

As a result, many tenants are forced to hand over the majority of our income to our landlords. That means half of our week, we are working for our landlords. That leaves little left to spend on the essentials. Millions of us are cutting back on the basics like food and heating. Hundreds of thousands of us have simply been unable to keep up with landlords’ ever-growing demand for profit and have been forced into homelessness, living out of suitcases in cramped temporary accommodation.

This crisis is affecting everyone I know. Personally, I’ve been evicted, only to see my landlord sell the ex-council flat I called home for half a million pounds. I’ve been forced to pay upwards of £1200 for a single room in a shared house, only to find the place riddled with disrepair. Even for my friends who have found themselves a decent place, there is always the underlying knowledge that this too is temporary.

Our human right to housing is more important than a landlord’s desire to accumulate profit. That’s why we are coming together to demand rent controls. Rent controls are simply limits on how much landlords can charge for housing that would work to make renting more affordable for everyone over time.

Such a system is nothing new. Over 100 years ago in 1915, tenants in Glasgow went on rent strike and won the UK’s first rent controls. These basic protections were the norm for much of the twentieth century until Margaret Thatcher abolished them in 1988. We don’t just need to look to the past to see the power of organised tenants. In Scotland, in Barcelona, and across Europe, renters are taking action and they are winning rent controls too. Now it’s our turn.

This fight is about more than just our personal bank balances. The fight for rent control is the fight for ordinary people to have a say over the shape of our city. It is about the kinds of communities we want to build and the kind of political system we need to ensure we can all put down roots and thrive.

We are sick of seeing our city carved up by the rich and powerful. London has become a place where profit takes precedence over people — where entire communities are being displaced to make way for identical rows of dreary chains, where schools are shutting down because families can no longer afford to live here, where the average rent is higher than the monthly salary of a care worker or a teaching assistant. The people who keep this city running are made to feel increasingly unwelcome as our homes are turned into assets to be accumulated and exchanged by a wealthy few.

The housing crisis is a national disgrace. It’s also a political choice that has been decades in the making, from the sell-off of our council homes to the removal of basic tenancy protections in the 1980s. While our movement has fought hard to win an end to so-called “no-fault evictions” in the upcoming Renters’ Rights Bill, when it comes to affordability, the Labour government has taken its hands off the wheel. Instead, politicians are rolling out the red carpet for developers who seek to build expensive flats on our doorsteps that ordinary people cannot afford, and that may only serve to push rents up higher.

What’s worse is this appalling state of affairs is being bankrolled by the state. The government is subsidising private landlords’ extortionate rents to the tune of 70bn (over a five year period). That’s before you account for the billions spent every year on temporary accommodation for homeless families, dwellings that are usually provided by private providers and are often unfit for human habitation.

No person could deny that the current system is failing to meet our needs. The Thatcherite experiment has failed. Landlords are clearly unable to regulate themselves and something as fundamental as housing should never have been left to the market.

Rent controls can help take the pressure off people right now and discourage further parasitic speculation while we fight to reverse the privatisation of our housing system and win public homes for everyone who needs them.

London is for everyone. It’s time to take back our city and demand a housing system that works for the people who actually live in it, rather than those who seek to profit from it. Organised tenants have won before and we can win again. Join me and hundreds of other renters this Saturday 14th December at 11:30am in Cavendish Square Gardens to say it’s time to cut the rent.

See you in the streets.