Social housing tenants need a rent freeze, not rent convergence

But the landlords got their way, and the government has decreed 10 years of rent rises, with inflation +1%. And now the government has come up with a further rent rise proposal, rent convergence.

The paper did not even ask whether rent convergence should be implemented – the government had already decided. The only question was whether the rises should be an additional £1, £2 or £3 per week. 

“The government did not even ask whether rent convergence should be implemented – it had already decided”

Predictably, given their previous call for ten years of above-inflation rent rises, London Councils and the National Housing Federation are asking for the maximum £3 increase.

To make matters worse, London Councils want “the introduction of a London Formula Rent Reset, giving boroughs extra flexibility over setting social rents to reflect London’s high property costs”.

These costs have made London’s housing unaffordable even for people on a decent salary. According to the government’s paper, in 2024 the average private rented sector rent in London was £471.96 a week.

How can these figures be made a yardstick for the rents of people on some of the lowest incomes in the capital?

It is particularly disappointing that social landlords should be trying to squeeze their own tenants, when they should instead be approaching the government for more money for maintenance, construction and buy-back of social rented housing.

But these rent rises will not provide the councils and housing associations with anything like the funds they need to meet the challenges in upkeep and new building that face them.

We already had rent convergence from 2002 to 2015, years in which few social rent homes were built, and in which, apart from the government funded Decent Homes programme of the last Labour government, the general decline in the standard of upkeep of many social rented homes continued.

Nor did rent convergence, as is argued, make rents fairer. As the London Tenants Federation argued in 2019, rent convergence resulted in “an extremely complicated, quite random, unfair and unjustified array of different rents for exactly the same type of rented homes”.

The neglect and underfunding of the social rent sector goes back more than 40 years. The 2010 Spending Review alone, as the 2014 Lyons Housing Review pointed out, saw capital investment in housing cut by 63% in real terms.

Squeezing tenants till the pips squeak will just further impoverish people who cannot afford it, without solving the funding problems that have made such a huge contribution to the current housing crisis.

Pat Turnbull, regional delegate, London Tenants Federation