BEFORE YOU PROTEST — ASK WHO WINS?
- 12 minutes ago
- 5 min read
A message from people working in housing to people campaigning about housing
You may have come here because you believe Britain's housing system is broken.
We probably agree with you.
Rents are high. House prices have become detached from ordinary earnings. Younger people struggle to buy homes. Social housing is insufficient. Many working people struggle to pass affordability tests for properties they could previously have rented.
Some of the people working inside letting agencies cannot pass the affordability tests applied to their own applicants.
Something has clearly gone wrong.
But before deciding who is responsible, perhaps we should ask a different question:
Who actually benefits from the solution you are demanding?
IS HOUSING A HUMAN RIGHT?
At international level, the UK recognises a right to adequate housing as part of the right to an adequate standard of living.
But that does not mean British law gives every individual an unconditional, enforceable right to be provided with a particular privately owned home.
There is an important distinction between saying:
"Everyone should have access to decent, secure and affordable housing."
and saying:
"Therefore another individual must provide it."
Food is essential to human life.
That does not make the farmer your enemy.
Housing is essential to human life.
That does not automatically make the person providing it your enemy either.
The real question is whether our economic and political system is producing enough decent housing at prices ordinary people can afford.
Increasingly, it isn't.
PERHAPS WE ARE ANGRY WITH THE WRONG PEOPLE
The person behind the desk in your local letting agency probably isn't a millionaire.
They go to work.
They pay rent or a mortgage.
They pay energy bills.
They buy increasingly expensive food.
They worry about interest rates.
Their wages have not kept pace with the cost of housing either.
Some cannot afford the properties they advertise.
The small landlord may be a retired teacher, builder, nurse, tradesperson or office worker with one or two properties forming part of their pension.
Government research published from the 2024 English Private Landlord Survey found that 45% of landlords owned just one rental property, while another 38% owned between two and four. Most landlords operated as individuals rather than companies.
That doesn't mean every landlord is good.
They aren't.
It doesn't mean every letting agent behaves properly.
They don't.
Bad landlords and bad agents should be challenged.
But it does mean that the cartoon of a vast class of enormously wealthy landlords exploiting everybody beneath them doesn't accurately describe much of the sector.
CAPITALISM HAS A PROBLEM
Perhaps there is another area where we might agree.
The economic system isn't working particularly well for ordinary people.
But is the problem really the existence of thousands of small businesses and individual property owners?
Or is it the gradual concentration of wealth, property and economic power into fewer and fewer hands?
There is a difference between capitalism and crony capitalism.
Competitive capitalism depends upon numerous independent participants: shopkeepers, tradespeople, landlords, builders, employers and entrepreneurs.
Concentrated capitalism produces something very different:
large corporations, financial institutions and governments dominating markets that ordinary people increasingly cannot enter.
The independent letting agency disappears.
The small landlord sells.
The small builder cannot compete.
The first-time buyer cannot buy.
And eventually the property is still owned by somebody.
Just somebody much bigger.
IF THE SMALL LANDLORD DISAPPEARS, WHO REPLACES THEM?
This is the question every housing campaigner should ask.
There are around 4.7 million private-renting households in England.
Those homes cannot simply disappear.
If individual landlords are progressively driven from the market, their properties must ultimately be:
sold to homeowners;
acquired by other landlords;
acquired by companies or institutional investors;
or replaced through substantially greater state and social housing provision.
So imagine the campaign succeeds.
The small landlord leaves.
The local letting agency closes.
Who owns rental housing afterwards?
BlackRock?
A pension fund?
A multinational property company?
A giant Build-to-Rent operator?
A housing corporation?
The State?
And an important second question follows:
Will the tenant have more power dealing with them?
BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU DESTROY
A tenant can telephone a small letting agency.
They may know the property manager by name.
The agent may know the landlord personally.
A landlord with two houses may agree to something because they know their tenant.
That relationship can certainly go wrong.
But compare it with renting from an institution owning 20,000 homes.
You don't negotiate with the owner.
You interact with a system.
A portal.
A call centre.
An algorithm.
A corporate complaints procedure.
The disappearance of small landlords doesn't necessarily liberate tenants.
It may simply industrialise renting.
CONTROLLED OPPOSITION?
Here is an uncomfortable question worth considering.
You may believe you are campaigning against capitalism.
But what if the practical consequence of the policies you support is the destruction of small capital while leaving enormous capital stronger?
That would be a remarkable outcome.
The protester attacks the local letting agency.
The small landlord sells.
The independent agency closes.
Ownership consolidates.
Corporate landlords expand.
And wealth becomes more concentrated.
If that is where the road leads, who was really challenged?
Certainly not concentrated capital.
We aren't asking you to accept the label "controlled opposition".
We're asking you to consider the possibility.
Judge a movement not only by what it says it opposes, but by who ultimately benefits if it succeeds.
TENANTS AND SMALL LANDLORDS MAY HAVE MORE IN COMMON THAN THEY THINK
Both are being squeezed.
Tenants face higher rents and living costs.
Landlords face higher borrowing costs, taxation, regulation, maintenance costs and compliance requirements.
Letting agents face increasing regulation, liability and administration while their staff experience exactly the same cost-of-living pressures as everyone else.
Meanwhile, housing remains scarce.
That scarcity pushes prices upwards.
We can spend years arguing about who should receive the shrinking number of available homes.
Or we can ask why one of the world's wealthiest countries has allowed housing to become so scarce and expensive in the first place.
THE REAL DIVIDE MAY NOT BE TENANT v LANDLORD
Perhaps it is:
ordinary people v concentrated economic power.
Tenant versus landlord is an extraordinarily convenient argument.
While the two sides fight each other, neither asks enough questions about land prices, planning, monetary policy, credit creation, taxation, housebuilding, the decline of social housing or the increasing concentration of property ownership.
Those are harder questions.
But they may be much more important ones.
WE DON'T WANT YOU TO STOP ASKING QUESTIONS
We want you to ask more of them.
Challenge bad landlords.
Challenge bad letting agents.
Demand decent homes.
Demand fair treatment.
Demand sensible rents.
But also challenge government.
Challenge corporations.
Challenge banks.
Challenge monopolisation.
Challenge a housing system in which someone working full time can struggle to afford somewhere to live.
And before attacking the independent businesses and small landlords still operating within that system, ask one final question:
IF YOU GET RID OF US, WHO DO YOU THINK IS COMING NEXT?
We might not be on opposite sides after all.
helpline see here - https://lettingsadviceservice.co.uk/
If you found anything of value on this site please 'buy me a coffee' all donations are used towards maintaining this site as a free resource ko-fi.com/le
Comments