Against landlords – how to solve the housing crisis
Nick Bano, Verso, £16.99

HOW can we solve the housing crisis? The government is set on relaxing planning restrictions in the hope that the private sector will step in and build the houses we need. Nick Bano disagrees. 

In his book Against Landlords – how to solve the housing crisis he argues that there is no shortage of houses – it’s simply that the prices are too high and this is caused by the high level of rent that landlords can extract with impunity from renters. 

He introduces his book with an apposite quote from Marx: “Poverty is a more fruitful source for house-rent than the [silver] mines of Potosi were for Spain... One section of society here demands a tribute from the other for the very rights to live on the earth.”

At the end of the second world war 61 per cent of dwellings were privately let. By 1973 this had fallen, largely as a result or rent controls, to 13 per cent and landlordism was on course to disappear. Thatcher and then succeeding governments have resurrected it with policies that ensure a buoyant and profitable private rental market: an absence of rent controls; no security of tenure; housing allowances that end up in the pockets of landlords; and few requirements on landlords to maintain their properties. 

There are, Nick Bano points out, now more than 2.5 million landlords in the UK – one in every 21 adults. There are more landlords than teachers. 

House prices, even when owner-occupied, reflect the expected future rental income that can be extracted from tenants by private landlords. Houses will, Nick Bano argues, remain out of reach of the many until rent controls are reintroduced and private landlords are appropriately regulated. It worked before, it can work again.

Nick Bano is a barrister specialising in cases against landlords and public authorities. He was a guest speaker at a recent public meeting called by the Croydon Morning Star Readers and Supporters Group where his proposed solution to the housing crisis was well received. Perhaps reflecting his training as a barrister, his arguments are tightly focused and he is seldom distracted into exploring alternative solutions. 

There is, accordingly, little consideration in the book of taxation as a potential remedy, local authority funding or the consequences for banks and building societies of the market price of houses relative to average earnings returning to 1970 levels. With mortgages currently totalling some £1.66 trillion, the potential for another financial crisis, if this were achieved, cannot be ignored. 

His proposed solution and these other possibilities are, however, matters which, even if their discussion is proscribed inside the Labour Party, should be discussed across the wider labour and trade union movement. 

Nick’s book is an excellent starting point for such discussions and is highly recommended.