Robert Booth Social affairs correspondent
Fri, 19 April 2024
Residential properties in London, where average montly rents have risen by £207 over the past year.
Andy Leek’s escape to Argentina from Britain’s soaring rents is no doubt extreme. But the fact that this relatively successful artist feels he is better off paying transatlantic air fares than stumping up for ever-rising landlord demands is indicative of a crisis that only ever seems to get worse.
Polls show 23% of voters now rank housing as the most important issue facing the country, up from 14% at the December 2019 general election. More people now rate it as the priority than crime or the environment, according to YouGov. Yet little is done.
The historic rises in private rents recorded by official statisticians this week confirmed the pain renters are already feeling in their wallets. Across England renters are paying £107 more a month on average compared with a year earlier, and it is almost double that in London. Private rents keep rising faster than inflation and far above pay rises, driven in part by the continued high cost of borrowing for landlords but also the chronic mismatch of supply and demand.
For example, housing associations started building only 60 new homes in London in the last three months of last year, according to the latest provisional official figures – the lowest number in more than 30 years, if confirmed.
The constant rent increases are causing upheaval for families who face no choice but to move somewhere cheaper, often again and again. The financial cost of these unwanted moves by renters has been estimated at more than £500m a year by the housing charity Shelter. It reckons there were more than 800,000 such upheavals in the last year.
The social cost, not least to children, is even greater. Polly Neate, Shelter’s chief executive, said it was “impossible for renters to put down roots knowing a no-fault eviction could plunge them back into chaos at any moment”.
Which brings us to the government’s totemic promise on reforming private renting in England and Wales: banning section 21 notices, the legal provision that allows landlords to evict tenants without a specific reason such as failing to pay rent or antisocial behaviour.
This reform, first proposed by the Conservative government in 2019, still has not been enacted amid opposition from parts of the landlord lobby in the House of Commons.
The Renters Reform Coalition, a group of charities and campaign groups representing tenants, has estimated that nearly 100,000 households have been put at risk of homelessness as a result of the practice in the meantime.
It points out that this change has taken longer than Brexit, leaving “England’s broken renting system” unfixed. The renters (reform) bill is expected to return to the Commons next week for another go.
So what might Labour and the Conservatives offer the one in five households in England and Wales now living in privately rented accommodation when the general election finally comes?
Neither party accept the argument for any kind of long-term rent controls as are being proposed in Scotland (the Labour mayors of Greater Manchester, Liverpool and London have called for rent freezing powers).
If the Conservatives do not ban no-fault evictions before the election, Labour has said it will. But it remains unclear how far it would tighten up on other forms of eviction that could provide a backdoor. In short, renters would be wise not to expect too much from the manifestos.
Artist evicted by London landlord cuts rent by commuting from Argentina
Robert Booth
Fri, 19 April 2024
Andy Leek was sofa surfing and sleeping on floors after his landlord evicted him.Photograph: The Guardian
An artist who was made homeless after being evicted by his private landlord in London has started effectively commuting from Argentina where the rent is so much cheaper that it covers the cost of air fare.
Andy Leek, 38, whose Notes to Strangers works are pasted on to walls and junction boxes across more than 20 British and European cities, has moved to Buenos Aires where the rents are several times cheaper and he travels back to the UK roughly every two months for work. The flight costs less than a monthly train season ticket between Bristol and London.
His move is an extreme, and carbon intensive, example of what happens when people are priced out of the UK’s rent hotspots, and comes as the average UK private rent increased by a record 9.2% in the last year (11.2% in London), according to the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics, released on Wednesday.
Interactive
It is the highest annual increase since 2015, when the data series began and equivalent to an “eye-watering” £2,500 rise in the average annual rent bill in London, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
“I have so much love for London but I am so angry with it,” said Leek, who pastes up handwritten A4 notices with encouraging messages such as “wrong decisions still move you forward” and “I wish you would keep some of your kindness for yourself.”
“I think a lot of people feel that way. The more the housing crisis completely hamstrings us, the more people are going to live in Glasgow, Manchester or far-flung corners of the world.”
In recent years, the soaring cost of renting has driven more and more people out of the capital. New analysis for the Guardian by Hamptons, shows that in the first three months of 2024, 36% of London renters who decided to move house left the capital, up from 27% in 2012. The number quitting the city in the last year dropped slightly towards pre-pandemic levels.
Leek, a former art director at an advertising agency, earns money by selling versions of his Notes to Strangers works, taking special commissions for brands and public speaking. He paid £1,000 a month for a flatshare in Brixton, but had to sofa surf and sleep on floors after the landlord evicted him and he could not afford London’s rising rents, which are up 30% since 2015, the latest ONS figures showed.Interactive
In Argentina, he is making a documentary about an emerging rock group, which focuses in part on the even deeper cost of living crisis there, where extreme inflation means prices rose more than 50% in just the first three months of this year.
He said he “feels kinship” with the band, Los Titeres – which translates as the Puppets – whose progress is being hindered by having to work day jobs and who cannot afford to make high-quality recordings.
“This is an impossible situation when groceries double in price,” he said. “How are you meant to live? It’s a heightened version [of what is happening in the UK]. I went shopping with the lead singer and she was doing the maths [on the prices] in her head. You walk around the supermarket and you feel pain.”
Since moving to Argentina Leek has paid as little as £400 a month rent for an apartment and flown back to London four times saying: “It works out far cheaper than staying in London, dealing with the hassle and not getting by.”
His relocation 7,000 miles away is far more extreme than most people who are deciding to leave Britain’s most expensive rent hotspots in London. Private renters leaving the capital are now most likely to move to Epping in Essex, Broxbourne in Hertfordshire and Tonbridge and Malling in Kent, according to Hamptons’ research among its wider network of Countryside agencies. Other popular destinations for ex-London renters are Watford, Luton and Slough.
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