CROYDON COMMENTARY: ‘Abolish Landlords’ was a catchphrase at the recent Green Party conference, where it was recognised that correcting decades of failed housing policy will need a raft of solutions.
PAUL AINSCOUGH explains
Block by block: ‘Build Baby Build’ is the housing equivalent of running a bath with the plug left out
At the Green Party annual conference, a motion was passed which was quickly known as “Abolish Landlords”.
Let me start by explaining what that doesn’t mean.
We are not proposing to make it illegal to rent out a flat, contrary to the false claims made by some billionaire-funded politicians on the far right.
What we are doing is challenging the policies of the last 40 years that have abandoned the government’s responsibilities to ensure everyone has somewhere to live and which have left housing in the hands of private landlords.
As Alexander Sallons, who proposed the motion, made clear, the “Abolish Landlords” title is deliberately provocative. We want to get people talking about this issue and question why having somewhere to live is seen as an opportunity to make money, instead of a basic human right.
We can all see that housing in this country is a mess. People with spare money are being advised to buy up properties as “an investment”, while people who are struggling to get by are seeing their rent go up faster than their wages.
At the same time, the number of empty properties is going up, while the number of homeless people is going up. London councils have sold off half of their council houses, losing the rent that they used to bring in, and are now paying a fortune for temporary accommodation for families with nowhere to live.
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We need drastic change.
The government’s Renters’ Rights Bill is a step in the right direction, but Labour are refusing to tackle the fundamental problems.
Their only answer is to let private developers build all over our countryside, the Green Belt and our local green spaces. As others have said, pushing their “Build Baby Build” approach without tackling the underlying problems is like trying to fill a bathtub by turning on the taps without putting the plug in.
The problems with housing go back to Thatcher’s attempt to privatise rented housing in the 1980s. More than 40% of council houses bought under her right-to-buy scheme are now just being rented out by private landlords for private profit.
On last night’s BBC Panorama, academic Prof Abi O’Connor said: “We’ve literally taken a private asset, that was good for our country, and we’ve given it over to the private sector to allow landlords to make a profit off the fact that people need somewhere to live.”
Like most of those Conservative privatisation experiments, it has failed and needs reversing.
Going back to the bathtub analogy, the Green Party wants to put the plug in.
We would start by ending the right-to-buy scam. We would also end the financial incentives and tax breaks that were set up to encourage private landlords. We would end buy-to-let mortgages and bring back rent controls to stop landlords exploiting renters.
Right-to-buy scam: Prof Abi O’Connor is outspoken against passing public assets into private hands
We would introduce a land value tax to shift tax from tenants to landlords, increase taxes on empty properties to incentivise bringing them back into use, and introduce national insurance on rental income so landlords pay the same tax on their earnings as everyone else.
When it comes to housing supply, instead of just building more and more houses, the sensible thing is to start by making better use of the properties we already have. A Green government would finance the purchase of empty properties, properties being sold by provate landlords, and those properties that aren’t being maintained properly by landlords.
All of this would increase the supply of healthy, truly affordable homes without having to build so many more.
When we do build new housing, the Green Party wouldn’t follow the Labour and Conservative model of just letting private developers do whatever they want. We don’t want more of the luxury investment properties that make the biggest profits for developers. We should be building the types of properties we really need in the places where they are really needed.
We would not only tighten up planning regulations, we would also create a government-run national housebuilding programme. Brick By Brick, Croydon Council’s failed developer, is a perfect example of what can go wrong when individual councils try to build properties themselves, so we will bring in a properly regulated, innovative and trustworthy government building company that local councils can then apply to.
All of these changes wouldn’t necessarily abolish landlords, but they would move masses of rented housing stock back inton public control and restore the government’s responsibility to make sure everyone has a suitable place to live.
We must stop private developers creating the sort of unacceptable housing conditions most recently highlighted by housing campaigner Kwajo Tweneboa at a Parliamentary Select Committee hearing.
Fairfield casework: Paul Ainscough says that Green councillors Ria Patel and Esther Sutton (right) deal with large volumes of housing complaints
In Croydon this would make a massive difference. The 2021 census showed that more than a quarter of households in the borough are in private rented accommodation. That figure has only likely increased since then.
As a candidate to be a councillor in Fairfield Ward in Croydon town centre, I have seen how much time our two Green councillors, Ria Patel and Esther Sutton, spend on helping residents with issues with their landlords. I know from other Green candidates that these issues aren’t just in the town centre, and that they affect renters all across our borough.
Most of the measures mentioned here will will need change at government level, but we can make a start on Croydon Council.
A Green council in Croydon could increase taxes on empty properties. We could tighten up planning rules, and we could reverse the council’s disgraceful decision to lower the proportion of social housing that developers have to build in the town centre when we actually need far more.
We could also improve council building controls to help prevent dodgy development practices like we’ve seen in The Fold, where tenants are forced to live in unacceptable conditions.
Getting Peter Underwood elected as Mayor of Croydon next May and more Greens elected as councillors would mean we could start getting on with these improvements. Electing us would also send a powerful signal to government that these are the changes that people really want, and they had better get on with delivering them or they will be replaced by Greens at the next General Election as well.
- Paul Ainscough is a Green Party candidate for Fairfield ward at the 2026 local elections
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