In the final year of my undergraduate degree, I rented the cheapest flat I could with one of my friends. The rent was ridiculously cheap at £310 each per month and we quickly found out why: everything was falling apart, rainstorms had drawn in mice through the holes in the walls, the bathroom was constantly flooding due to the floors caving in under mould, and the boiler was over twenty years old. In the middle of a snowstorm in February, it broke down; I wore a hat and gloves to bed for a week and asked my mum to buy me an electric blanket while I waited for it to be fixed. “The repairman told us we need a new boiler,” I said to my letting agency weeks after asking if there was anything they could do to help us with the cost of our gas bill. They sent someone out to get a quote for a new boiler, but for the next four months we lived there, there sat the G-rated hunk of metal in our kitchen untouched, tripling our energy bills from the previous summer.
I vowed to move to somewhere like Glasgow after I graduated, convinced that although I’d have to pay a more ‘reasonable’ amount of rent, I’d have better luck escaping the small pool of bad landlords in my university city. After a couple of months of staring down £650 PCM single-bed properties miles outside the city centre, I gave up. According to the BBC, 40% of young people under thirty spend more than 30% of their income on rent (Agerholm & Smith, 2022), with average rent prices soaring 15% nationwide compared to what they were two years ago (Daily Record). The social and financial divide between tenants and landlords is more noticeable than ever, and as the private rental sector has doubled in size since the early 2000s (Agerholm & Smith, 2022), nearly everyone has experienced or knows somebody who has experienced anxiety over the costs of renting. I decided to stay in an area known as one of the cheapest in the UK to live in, with plans to split the cost of a one-bed flat with my fiancé from next year. I can only imagine how difficult it is for people without the same support network who can’t escape the more expensive regions.
These worrying effects are felt all over the country, but there is still a huge gap in average housing costs between cities. Renting in the Ayrshire town of Kilmarnock, for example, is almost ten times cheaper than finding a similar property in the posh South West of London (Murphy, 2022). Even within Scotland, Edinburgh is a city so crowded with eager tourists and international students who, through no fault of their own, have driven up property prices. To buy here seems an impossible feat. ‘In Leith, one-bedroom flats sold for an average £228,559, an increase of a whopping 43.5% [in the last five years],’ states Abbie Meehan in Edinburgh Live. Buyers frequently pay almost 110% over the Home Report value of a house or flat, adding to the competitive property ladder that’s already so hard to climb onto. Elsewhere in London, known as perhaps one of the most expensive places in Europe to live, the average monthly rent is almost twice that of the rest of England (Lott-Lavigna, 2022). Down here and in Wales, landlords benefit from being able to evict private tenants without having to provide reasoning under section 21 notices, which is an added stressor for those who might find themselves unable to afford rent; luckily, there is a plan to end this practice under new parliament.
The rising prices of energy bills and other living costs only exacerbate this financial squeeze. Many people made homeless this year cite unaffordable living costs as the reason for their lack of housing; the UK’s homelessness rate increased 11% in the first three months of 2022 alone, and a record-breaking number of 50- and 60-year-olds are being forced to house-share to split the bills and minimise their outgoings (Lott-Lavigna, 2022). Some families have not been able to get onto the property ladder and continue to rent, and for those who may have children to care for or other dependents they are responsible for, there are no pennies to spare. The average rent per month in the UK is over £2,000 for a flat or £2,150 for a house (Murphy, 2022); even on combined incomes, for the average household, this is steep. A cap on rent prices might be beneficial for those having to pay more for bigger properties and so far the trial data for this is promising, but a quarter of Conservative MPs are landlords and as such unlikely to support the prospect (Lott-Lavigna, 2022).
I tried to find a positive note to end this article on. Upon googling ‘UK rental market improving’, a few hopeful titles appeared on the first page. Magazines seemed eager to promote the idea that predictions for the UK rental market remained optimistic — however, it only took a few sentences worth of reading each piece to conclude the optimism was directed at landlords, not tenants. One article claims more than three-quarters of landlords with eight or nine rental properties are looking to invest in the next year (Buy Association, 2022). More than half of all landlords in one survey claimed more ‘eviction action’ was needed than usual; it’s hard to sympathise when you’re struggling on the other end. High tenant demand and rising house prices aren’t forecast to plateau anytime soon, and typically it is the majority of ordinary citizens that will deal with the worst effects of this crisis
Figure 1: A tent advertising housing as a human right, Forbes.
References
Buy Association (2022). ‘Landlords’ predictions for UK rental market remain optimistic’, Buy Association [online]. Available at: https://www.buyassociation.co.uk/2022/07/20/landlords-predictions-rental/ (Accessed 01/09/22).
Agerholm, H & Smith, C. (2022). ‘Growing share of under-30s pay unaffordable rent’, BBC News [online]. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-62525269 (Accessed 01/09/22).
Lott-Lavigna, R. (2022). ‘Selling up and raising rents: how landlords are cashing in and exacerbating the cost of living crisis’, The Guardian [online]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/31/britain-tenants-renters-landlords-profit (Accessed 01/09/22).
Meehan, A. (2022). ‘Scotland’s rental prices increasing at ‘fastest rate on record’’, Edinburgh Live [online]. Available at: https://www.edinburghlive.co.uk/news/scotlands-rental-prices-increasing-fastest-24898137 (Accessed 01/09/22).
Murphy, S. (2022). ‘The cheapest places to rent in Scotland right now, according to Rightmove’, Daily Record [online]. Available at: https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/scotland-now/cheapest-places-rent-scotland-right-27883239 (Accessed 01/09/22).
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