Both Labour Party prime minister Keir Starmer and chancellor Rachel Reeves are private landlords. They are benefiting from a housing system that has left 1.1 million children in poverty, 690,000 of which are renting from the private sector, which is shown in new research from the Resolution Foundation.
Starmer and Reeves: making gains from the scam
Starmer is renting out his north London home after moving into Downing Street. Meanwhile, Reeves rents out her former family home in south London for around £3,200 per month.
The prime minister is also making gains from the housing bubble through the value of his house. When Starmer and his wife bought the Kentish Town property in 2004 it was worth £650,000 – now it’s worth almost £2 million.
In Starmer’s recent relaunch he pledged to tackle the housing crisis through getting “Britain rebuilt”. But will he increase the amount of affordable and social housing to address rip off rents and ballooning house prices? Or better still, stop treating housing as an asset and provide them at cost price with an affordable pay-back scheme. This may not be likely given how much he is benefiting from the rip off system.
Lack of social housing
Social housing is of course a better option for Britons than the private rented sector. Data shows that the government delivered just 700 net social homes in the year ending in March 2024.
The low amount of social housing is plunging children into poverty. The Resolution Foundation analysis found that if the government moved 300,000 private renters into social homes, it would reduce the housing benefit bill by £850 million per year. Such a move is key to addressing private landlords leeching huge profits. But still, while social rents improve public budgets, they remain pretty high and do not count towards ownership of the property.
Alex Clegg, Economist at the Resolution Foundation, said:
Over a million children living in poverty today would not be below the poverty line were it not for sky-high housing costs, especially in the private rented sector… in the longer term, investment in house building – especially social housing – is essential to both reduce the rents that low-income families are paying and ease the pressure on the housing benefit bill.
Indeed, the government spends a whopping 88% of its housing budget on subsidising rents. That’s instead of actually building and maintaining housing. This chimes with the amount of private rented households in the UK almost tripling from 1999 to 5.6 million in 2021. It followed the introduction of parasitic (when compared to providing housing at cost price for a non-bubble value) buy-to-rent mortgages in 1996.
Private landlords: shameless
Both Starmer and Reeves are landlords and they hold the highest positions in the cabinet. And more broadly, 85 MPs are landlords this parliament – more than half of which are from Labour (also the biggest party). So are they really going to fix the housing system?
Featured image via Guardian News – YouTube and The Independent – YouTube
