Council’s call for rent controls ‘would not lead to the skies collapsing’

Appeal to common sense: Cllr Sam Pallis (Labour party)

Hackney has seen “the largest increase in property values in the UK” and now the council has called on the government to give it the power to bring in rent controls.

On Wednesday (26 November) the Labour-run Hackney Council said it would petition the secretary of state for housing, Steve Reed, to allow it and other local authorities to put the brakes on skyrocketing rents.

According to the council, Hackney has seen the biggest jump in property values in the country over the last two decades.

The most eye-watering increase took place between 1997 and 2017, when house prices grew by 753 per cent.

The council said this had in turn caused market rents to rise by 49 per cent since 2010, now standing at an average of £2,102 per month.

Introducing the motion, Cllr Sam Pallis (Cazenove ward) said rent controls were “common sense” and “would not lead to the skies collapsing”.

The petition in full slammed the private rental sector for “driving inequality to morally indefensible levels” and argued that introducing rent controls in Hackney could “break the cycle of exploitation”.

This was echoed by his Labour party colleague, Cllr Jon Narcross.

“Rent controls are not some radical experiment,” he said. “It’s the last 40 years of unregulated rents which [have been] an experiment, and it’s an experiment which has failed.”

‘Self-congratulatory backslapping’

Though the motion was carried, the Green party and Independent Socialist opposition groups had jointly put forward an amended version which failed to gain Labour’s support.

‘On the same page’:Dalston councillor Zoë Garbett (Green party)

Accused of trying to score political points, Green party co-leader Zoë Garbett (Dalston ward) said her party was “on the same page” as Labour but wanted to strengthen the motion by adding calls for the Mayor to set up a commission to find the best possible way to control rents.

Ex-Labour party councillor and Independent Socialist Penny Wrout (Victoria ward), however, said her group had removed Labour’s “self-congratulatory backslapping, which is frankly embarrassing given [the party’s] track record of looking after private renters both locally and nationally”.

Labour party councillor Jasmine Martins (De Beauvoir ward) meanwhile took the opportunity to accuse the Greens of “utopian restructuring” and slammed the national party’s policy to abolish landlords as “a vision divorced from reality”.

While several local authorities in London have collectively lobbied central government for the power to control rents as part of London Councils, few have explicitly made these demands on their own.

The council’s pledge to renew calls for rent caps comes the same week it announced most private landlords in the borough would need to pay at least £925 for a standard licence to let out a single property from next May.

A selective licensing scheme is to be introduced for all private rented homes in 17 of the 21 wards in Hackney.

The wards have been selected because of high proportions of private rented properties and high levels of poor housing conditions.

In September, the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan issue fresh demands for rent controls in the capital after being initially rebuffed by the newly-elected Labour government last August.

In 2022, Mayor Khan urged the Conservative administration to let him freeze rents for two years, arguing that it could save families £3,000 a year on average by 2024.