In a BBC interview in July (Gregory 2026), Housing Secretary Angela Rayner explicitly ruled out introducing rent controls in England. This move was intensely criticised by those on the left, notably Green Party leader Zack Polanski, who described Burnham as “continuity Starmer”, and former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who stated firmly that “we need rent controls and we need them now”. Rayner justified the move by arguing that the Renters’ Rights Act, introduced in May this year, is already having a “significant impact on the market”. The former Deputy PM also questioned the effectiveness of rent controls introduced in other parts of the UK at reducing prices.
The Renters’ Rights Act certainly has merit; however, its primary focus is to ensure that tenants are treated fairly once they are in a rented property, rather than making rent more affordable across the board. It has banned Section 21 evictions (no-fault evictions) and also limits rent increases to once a year and not within the first 12 months of a tenancy (Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government 2026). This is a significant change, given that between 2021 and 2024, 70% of landlords chose to use a Section 21 eviction rather than a Section 8 eviction which requires reasonable justification and evidence (Smith 2024). This greatly helps tenants avoid unfair and untimely evictions and provides them with a greater sense of stability.
But how has rent itself been affected? According to a Deposit Protection Service poll taken just after the Act was introduced, 68% of surveyed landlords plan to raise rents on at least some of their properties (Shoffman 2026). However, that figure is not as shocking as it sounds, as in July 2025, 67% of landlords were already planning to raise rents within six months (Lendlord 2025). In the year between July 2024 and 2025, rents across England increased by an average of 6.0% (Office for National Statistics 2025). This rate has fallen slightly, with rents forecast to rise by 4–5% by the end of the year (Peachey, 2026), which would be closer to average wage increases. Therefore, the claim that the Renters’ Rights Act has had an impact holds weight, but it clearly has not yet done enough to ease the strain on private renters, who now account for one in five British households (Baxter et al., 2026).
Despite this, the annual rate of rent increases in Scotland, while temporary rent controls were in place, was just 3.6% (Office for National Statistics 2025) less than half the UK-wide average of 6.7%. The Green Party announced a policy for an ‘emergency brake’ on rents that would “prevent rents rising above CPI, wage growth or 2% – whichever is lowest” (Green Party 2026), supposedly capping these rises at an even lower level. However, what these figures do not show is that newly agreed rents in Scotland during those temporary restrictions rose by 8.2%, far above the 6.7% national average (Connells Group 2026). Rent controls are not simply a ‘one-step fix’ for the rental crisis, as some seem to suggest; they must be used wisely and in conjunction with other policies, most importantly the construction of new social housing.
420,000. That is the number of homes that were unbuilt despite having planning permission in 2018 (Kentish 2018). By early 2024, the figure had surpassed a million (TerraQuest 2024). The main argument constantly raised against rent controls is the potential impact on supply, or the lack of it. If landlords cannot make the profit they want, they will sell up, making the remaining properties on the market more expensive because there is less competition (Living Rent 2020). But what if landlords were to lose their grip on the housing market? What if half of those unbuilt homes were built as affordable or social housing? Not only would this give those looking for rental properties more options, it would also make rent control a viable policy: landlords selling up would become a much smaller issue, and those who remained would have their prices more effectively regulated.
Although I believe the housing market should be more consistently regulated in the long term future, rent controls are not the way to go at present. They are much more effective in keeping a stable market under control, like in Germany, rather than fixing a crisis. Understandably, people are desperate for rapid relief; however, to have a lasting effect, the necessary infrastructure needs to be in place before regulations are introduced. The government must act against property developers who are sitting on plots of land without building on them; that is what the country needs in order to change, and they must not only deliver on their recent promise of “over 40,000 new social rented homes” (Nerval, Knight and Clark 2026) but they must use this as just a starting point, and continue to develop and reform the social housing system. Ultimately, rather than an emergency brake on the current market, we should put our foot on the accelerator and start expanding the affordable housing supply before we seek to properly regulate it.
Bibliography
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