Tenants’ groups, MPs, and housing activists held a demonstration in Parliament Square calling for rent controls and a new generation of council houses.

Groups including London Renters’ Union joined MPs Chris Hinchliff, Hanna Spencer, Bell Ribeiro-Addy, Nadia Whittome, and Jeremy Corbyn. Hinchliff told the 200-strong crowd: "The call for rent controls is such a reasonable, moderate request, given the scale of the housing crisis and the scale of the cost of living people are facing. Yet it would keep £14 billion in the pockets of renters, and I can think of no other policy that would do as much for growth and living standards across the country."

SpareRoom’s latest research found that in the second quarter of 2026, average asking rents outpaced average budgets in half of the UK’s 35 biggest cities for flatsharing. Meanwhile, the Centre for Research in Social Policy says families need an extra £8,000 a year to reach a minimum acceptable standard of living in the PRS.

Its report into the Minimum Income Standard found that a lone parent with two children now needs £67,600 a year when renting privately, compared with £59,800 in social housing.

Thinktank

Thinktank Compass reports that in 2024-25, private renters spent an average of 34% of their household incomes on rent, far higher than those with mortgages (19%) and those in social housing (28%).

It believes rent controls address the immediate affordability crisis facing renters, save government significant sums in housing benefit, protect tenants from having retrofit costs passed on as higher rents and open up the opportunity for rapid tenure shift by triggering an increased rate of landlord exit. Compass says a proposed public housing development corporation could use the resulting fiscal savings to acquire properties systematically as landlords exit, upgrading and retrofitting them into permanently affordable homes for social rent.

The group has called for a new backstop, capping rent increases at the Consumer Price Index (CPI) within tenancies, and CPI + 2% between tenancies.

Photo: London Renters' Union

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