Renters HELD TO RANSOM: 2.4 million British families crushed by runaway rents
Damning new report exposes how ordinary working people are being bled dry, with millions skipping meals just to keep a roof overhead. The solution? Lock rents to wages and stop the rip-off.
Britain is in the grip of a renting nightmare. A staggering 2.4 million households across the UK are now paying rents they simply cannot afford, according to a new report from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR).
That’s nearly half, 45 per cent, of every family renting privately. And the rot is spreading fast: an extra 250,000 households have been dragged into unaffordable rents since 2023.
Two and a half million households. Working families. Pensioners. Young people just trying to get a start. All handing over more and more of their hard-earned pay just to keep a roof over their heads.
Hungry in plain sight
The human cost is staggering. More than one in five renting households with sky-high housing costs are now skipping meals or shrinking their food portions just to make ends meet. Hunger. In one of the richest countries on earth. In 2026.
Almost one in ten private renters are forking out more than 70 per cent of their take-home pay on rent. What’s left for food? For heating? For the kids? Nothing.
And it’s about to get worse. Another 340,000 households will be tipped into unaffordable rents by the end of the decade without intervention. The war in Iran is pushing inflation up, and mortgage rates are rising, the perfect storm for landlords to pass the pain onto tenants.
Working families squeezed dry
Don’t believe the lie that this is just about people on benefits. Three-quarters of working-age renters with crippling housing costs live in households where at least one adult is in work. The report makes clear that significant numbers of households in trouble receive no direct housing support through the benefit system.
Dr Maya Singer Hobbs, senior research fellow at IPPR, pulled no punches. “Millions of renters are being pushed to the brink by a housing market that simply isn’t working for them,” she said. “This is no longer a marginal issue affecting a small group, it is a mainstream cost-of-living crisis hitting working households across the country.”
The market won’t fix this
The same old voices will tell you the market will sort itself out. Just build more houses, they say. Wait for supply and demand to work their magic.
But rents shot up by 9.1 per cent in a single year to March 2024. Wages haven’t kept pace since 2023. As Dr Singer Hobbs warned: “The current system leaves renters exposed to global shocks and rising costs they have no power to control.”
The rental market isn’t free and fair. It’s rigged. Moving costs thousands. Landlords hold all the cards.
Time to fight back
The IPPR has a plan. They’re calling for a “double-locked” rent system that ties rent increases to the lower of wages or inflation. Landlords still get a fair return. Tenants get protection from being fleeced.
Had this policy been in place since 2020, rents would now be at least 7 per cent lower, saving the average renting household £850 a year in England and £1,700 a year in London.
London’s Deputy Mayor for Housing, Tom Copley, is on board. “The evidence clearly shows that Londoners would overwhelmingly back new plans to put a cap on rent increases,” he said, urging ministers to devolve the power to cap rents to City Hall.
It’s not pie in the sky. France, Ireland, Spain and Scotland are all acting. And 75 per cent of UK adults back rent controls.
The government has the tools. It has public support. What it needs is the guts to act. Whose side are they on?