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17/12/25 3:30 pm
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The Green party has called for mayors to be given the power to set rent controls in a bid to stem renters’ spiralling costs.
Speaking on the Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme, leader Zack Polanski said he also wouldn’t oppose the initiative on a national level.
Polanski - whose party has four MPs in the House of Commons - said he was focused on winning a general election outright and that the upcoming Gorton and Denton by-election offered an opportunity to claim more seats.
He said in the current climate, renters were the group most feeling the pinch, “stuck in over inflated market where landlords can often charge what they want”. Polanski pointed to the 16 European countries that had brought in rent controls which had been successful.
“I think the obvious thing to do here is to look at the evidence of where it’s not worked and not do that - look at where it’s worked and make sure we adopt a similar system," he explained.
“The mayors need to be given the powers for rent controls now…based on local incomes, based on affordability, based on housing stock, because we need to build more houses too. Someone needs to do that and whether it comes at the most local level or the national level, that’s a conversation I’m open to, but the problem that we need to fix is the spiralling rents as they’re getting more and more expensive.”
In December, the Green party admitted it only wanted to make life more difficult for private landlords, after delegates at the party’s national conference in Bournemouth voted to abolish them.
They were told that, “the private rental sector has failed [and is] a vehicle for wealth extraction funnelling money from renters to the landlord class”. However, Bristol’s Green MP Carla Denyer admitted this could be misleading, and explained that the motion did not literally seek to abolish landlords, but rather to put in more regulations and taxes on private rentals through measures such as rent controls and expanded social housing.
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