A London Assembly Member is calling for rent controls to be introduced across the capital
While Croydon’s Labour-run council stages museum exhibitions on the history of the council house, as they meanwhile use public money to build houses for private sale which local residents cannot afford, a London Assembly Member has produced figures which shows that the borough is among the most expensive in the country, where 45 per cent of residents’ monthly wage goes on rent.
Croydon is 60th most expensive place to rent in the country when local average salaries are taken into account, new analysis of the latest figures from the National Valuation Office and the Office of National Statistics has revealed.
Tom Copley AM is backing the Mayor’s calls for rent controls to be put in place in the capital to “provide more stability for renters in a precarious and unforgiving market and economy”.
Copley is raising concerns about how the rises in the costs of living are placing huge pressures upon local people, in particular key workers and public sector staff, who deliver frontline services in the community – exactly the kind of people who in the past will have benefited from renting their home from the council.
Tom Copley: calling for ‘radical’ solutions
This month, the Mayor of London urged the government to provide City Hall with the powers to implement rent controls across the capital and introduce open-ended tenancies.
Over the last two decades, the proportion of Londoners privately renting has risen significantly from 11 per cent in 1990 to 26 per cent in 2018.
The Mayor has pledged to build 116,000 “genuinely affordable homes” by 2022.
However, recent analysis conducted by the Greater London Authority revealed that to meet the full demand for affordable housing in the capital, the government would need to allocate seven times more funding than it currently provides to City Hall for housing projects.
“These figures reveal the disproportionate extent to which Croydon residents are affected by the housing crisis and rising rents,” Copley said.
“It is high time we follow in the footsteps of other European cities, such as Berlin, and provide more stability for renters in a precarious and unforgiving market and economy.
“It is clear that we need rent controls in place across London, alongside other radical measures, to ensure that local people on lower incomes, as well as key workers at the helm of delivering vital public services, are not unfairly priced out of the capital.”
Might one of those “radical measures” be the building of council homes, for rent?
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