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If you’re a renter, you have more political power than you realise

Private renters now represent an enormous group of people with the ability to vote

This is Home Front with Vicky Spratt, a subscriber-only newsletter from i. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

Good afternoon and welcome to this week’s Home Front, the penultimate newsletter before British voters go to the polls and select this country’s next government.

Having now worked as a journalist through four general elections, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much housing has featured this time around. One could argue (and, indeed, I would) that it hasn’t been central enough to the debate but, at least, it hasn’t been totally ignored.

As this newsletter has outlined in recent weeks, there’s a broad consensus between all of the political parties (except Reform) that the solution to the housing crisis is to a) build more homes and b) make sure that private renting is more equitable.

Labour and the Conservatives have made their respective pitches to first-time buyers, too: Help to Buy 2.0 plus a permanent stamp duty cut from the Tories and a mortgage guarantee scheme from Labour.

Since Labour published its manifesto, the party has also fleshed out its offer for private renters even further. Going beyond the Conservatives’ re-iterated commitment to bring back and bolster the Renters’ Reform Bill if elected.

Sir Keir Starmer has pledged to stop “rental bidding wars” in which landlords and letting agents encourage prospective tenants to put in offers and accept the highest. How, exactly, this would be enforced remains to be seen but, in spirit, it’s a pro-renter and pro-regulation move.

There’s good reason for this. Any party wishing to be elected would be out of their minds to ignore housing. In particular, the plight of private renters.

As recent polling conducted exclusively for me here at i by Ipsos showed, that vast majority of voters – 70 per cent – agree that there is a housing crisis. This figure has been consistent, representing a “flatline trend” for more than 10 years, Ben Marshall, the pollster’s research director told me when we discussed the results.

More than that, private renters in particular now represent an enormous group of people with the ability to vote.

According to the English Housing Survey, there are now 4.6 million households living in privately rented homes. That’s roughly double the size of the number of people who rented privately in the early 2000s. It’s also a bigger population than the number of people who live in social housing.

Estimates for the total number of individuals living in those 4.6 million households range between 9 and 20 million. A significant number will be old enough to vote.

Since 2010, the Conservatives have presided over a worsening housing crisis. It has spilled out from urban centres to the suburbs and, as I’ve reported, rural areas too. As the campaign group Generation Rent has noted in its research, there were 114 constituencies where more than 20 per cent of the population rented their home from a private landlord in 2011. There are now 194.

Think of this as the suburbanisation of the housing crisis, it has spread across the country and changed the make-up of significant constituencies as it goes. But the influence of the renter constituency doesn’t stop there.

At the end of 2022, the homelessness charity Shelter conducted some fascinating research. They identified 38 key battleground constituencies where private renters could swing the outcome of the next general election and dubbed them the “rent wall”.

They included Hastings and Rye (currently Conservative) where 22 per cent of the population rents privately. The national average is 15 per cent.

Hastings has an epic housing crisis. Private rents in the area have soared recently and the council’s temporary accommodation bill is now more than half of its total budgetary spend.

Other constituencies in the “rent wall” included Lincoln (currently Conservative). Here 20 per cent of the population rent their home privately.

Blackpool South , where 25 per cent of the population rent privately, is also included. Shelter’s prediction came true earlier this year when Labour won the seat (which will change name in this election due to constituency boundaries being redrawn) from the Conservatives.

London constituencies where the population of renters exceeds more than 20 per cent include Kensington and Bayswater, Finchley and Golders Green and Chipping Barnet. Outside of the capital it’s also worth keeping an eye on Colchester, Cheltenham and Burnley.

Crucially, Shelter also noted that the number of private renters in the Conservative heartlands of the home counties was also growing. This is down to a combination of factors, namely a shortage of affordable new homes and a lack of social housing.

Both Labour and the Liberal Democrats know this and have been actively targeting Tory “stronghold” seats.

This election was widely dubbed “the housing election”. It’s too soon to say whether the housing crisis will decide the outcome, as Shelter argues it will.

Ben Twomey, chief executive of Generation Rent, told me that the longer the housing crisis rages “the more people miss out on home ownership, start families while renting, and move further into the suburbs in search of lower rents and greater space.”

“This means renters are becoming a bigger voice in battleground constituencies that used to be dominated by home owners,” he added.

If the polling by Ipsos tells us anything, it’s this: even the number of Conservative voters who think that the Tories are handling the housing crisis well has fallen.

Last week, Housing Secretary Michael Gove said that passing the Leasehold (Freehold) Bill before Parliament dissolved for this election was more important than passing the Renters’ Reform Bill. That decision could yet come back to bite the Tory party.

Key Housing

New data from the property search website Rightmove shows that first-time buyers’ monthly mortgage repayments have jumped by 61 per cent over the past five years. This is because of high house prices and the jump in interest rates since the pandemic.

In 2019, the typical first-time buyer spent, on average, £667 a month on their mortgage. Today, Rightmove’s analysis shows that the average monthly repayment for those who have bought their first home is £1,075. That’s an increase of £400 a month.

Private renters matter in this election. So do homeowners who have been impacted by rising interest rates. Whoever forms the next government, is going to be unable to escape the impact that rising housing costs are having on people’s lives or on Britain’s economy.

And, finally, I’d like to flag a really important story about housing standards.

On Friday, a coroner concluded that mould could have been one of the causes of a Nottinghamshire mother’s deadly illness.

Jane Bennett, 52, died on June 8, 2023, at King’s Mill Hospital in Sutton-in-Ashfield due to acute exacerbation of non-specific interstitial pneumonitis.

Jane lives in a bungalow owned by Mansfield District Council from October 2022 until she was admitted to hospital for the final time in May 2023.

Ask me anything

Since the Bank of England decided to hold interest rates at 5.25 per cent last week, I’ve had several questions like this:

When will the Bank of England cut mortgage rates?

Firstly, the Bank of England doesn’t control mortgage rates. Mortgage lenders do. However, the Bank’s rate does impact the cost of lending for mortgage providers.

Secondly, predications about when we will see the first cut range from August to November.

But, it’s worth noting that even when the Bank of England does cut its rate it is likely to do so only by 0.25 per cent or 0.5 per cent. This won’t make mortgages substantially cheaper than they are now.

High housing costs are here to stay. For now, at least.

This is Home Front with Vicky Spratt, a subscriber-only newsletter from i. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

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