Average Rent hits record £1,393
Average rents hit a record £1,393 a month as Jeremy Corbyn's Your Party demands a freeze and statutory rent controls.
Private renters are paying landlords a record £1,393 a month, nearly half average pay, and Jeremy Corbyn’s Your Party wants an immediate freeze, with Your Party rent controls to follow.
The average UK rent rose 3.7% in the year to July, the sharpest rise recorded this year, according to the Office for National Statistics. Against average gross pay of £3,046 a month, that leaves a typical renter handing over close to 46% of their income before anything else is paid. It is against that backdrop that Your Party launched its rent controls campaign on 21 August, with Corbyn demanding a freeze followed by statutory controls and a “Landlords and Tenants” campaign tool built around the image of a rigged game of snakes and ladders.
Your Party rent controls campaign explained “For millions of renters, payday has become the day they feel their landlord’s bank balance heave,” Corbyn said. He called the housing market “a rigged game of snakes and ladders” in which “private renters have no security”, and argued the surge in rents is “not simply the unavoidable consequence of a housing shortage” but “the result of political choices”. Your Party’s own figures, not yet independently verified, put rents up 32% since 2021 and landlord income at more than £80bn a year, up 27% over the same period.
That case would carry less weight without what happened in government a month earlier. On 24 July, Housing Secretary Angela Rayner ruled out rent controls on BBC Breakfast, telling viewers “I don’t think that rent freezes, rent controls, is a way forward at the moment” and pointing to Scotland as a cautionary tale. Only days before, Prime Minister Andy Burnham had told reporters he was weighing a rent freeze as part of a wider package. No freeze followed.
A reversal Burnham signed his own name against
Burnham has been here before, on the other side of the argument. As mayor of Greater Manchester in 2023, he co-signed an open letter with the mayors of London and Liverpool, the Green Party’s co-leaders and tenants’ unions, demanding the power to freeze private rents and warning that failing to act would “halt an eviction crisis” with “a devastating social impact”. As Prime Minister, his government has now ruled the same policy out. Generation Rent’s chief executive, Holly Williamson, said the group was “very disappointed” that ministers are “not considering it as part of the government’s cost of living focus”, while the landlord trade body NRLA, which spent July lobbying against controls, argues they “restrict housing supply, which does not help anyone”.
The government’s strongest ground is Scotland, the only part of the UK to have tried a rent cap in practice. A review for the Scottish government found its 2022 emergency measures had little clear effect on affordability, and that some landlords raised rents more sharply between tenancies to offset the risk, with roughly 8,000 homes lost from the private rented sector. Rayner’s argument, that the three-month-old Renters’ Rights Act, which lets tenants challenge rises at tribunal and has raised the threshold for eviction over arrears, should be given time before reaching for controls, is not simply a landlord talking point.
But it leaves the same choice unresolved for tenants now facing a record rent bill and, for those in arrears, a stricter three-month threshold before eviction proceedings can start. Rents have risen every month this year. The next test of who Westminster listens to comes at the Autumn Budget.
