https://unherd.com/2025/11/can-britain-escape-its-housing-trap/
For most of the 20th century, private renting was a very different beast. Rent controls were introduced into the market in 1915, after landlords in Glasgow attempted to hike rates by 25% and, with most of the men fighting in war, the city’s women went on rent strike. This led to emergency war-time rental protections, which survived in some form until the Eighties. Moreover, private tenants had access to long-term security of tenure. Back then, landlords saw themselves as part of a particular community. Old-school businesses and occasionally paternalistic organisations became involved: the Sutton family, former dockers who had been investing in property since the 19th century, dominated the area of East London I grew up in. But others were sharks, who did their best to operate outside the legal structures. Associated with organised crime, they sought the most vulnerable tenants, often new immigrants. Peter Rachman, who owned more than 100 properties in West London, gained such a strong reputation for bullying and intimidating tenants that “Rachmanism” now describes this form of semi-legal landlord exploitation. Conditions in these homes were a living disaster: whole families in single rooms, outside toilets, rat infestations.
But by the Seventies, all types of private landlords were dying out. Property prices were low enough that many working families could afford to buy — and decades of major building programmes meant those who couldn’t were still able to get a council house. Indeed, even Right-wing commentators at the time believed the decline of private landlords was “quite irreversible” and that within a generation they would be “as extinct as the dinosaur”. Instead, we took a different path. In 1976, the UK got itself into financial trouble and had to go to the International Monetary Fund for a bailout. The terms of the loan demanded brutal spending cuts: and specifically targeted expenditure on new council housing. The IMF wanted the state out and the private sector in.
This was followed, three years later, by the arrival of Margaret Thatcher as prime minister. A leader who enthusiastically embraced the IMF’s philosophy, she cut spending on new council housing almost to nil, and introduced the Right to Buy policy, which saw millions of homes in the existing stock rapidly sold off. In 1988, Thatcher liberalised the rental market, axing rental control and introducing short-term tenancies with “no-fault” evictions. The idea was that private landlords would replace the state: people who couldn’t afford to buy would no longer get council housing. Instead, they would rent privately and claim housing benefit to meet the higher costs. As one of Thatcher’s housing ministers, George Young, said in 1991: “If people cannot afford to pay that market rent, housing benefit will take the strain.”
A housing strategy for the country would mean plotting a way out of this cycle of doom, and imagining a future where we no longer treat housing as a route to quick profits and instead as essential social infrastructure which we cannot do without.