Let down: Rental regulations, subsidies and tenants’ rights across the English-speaking world

KEY POINTS

• The private rented sector contracted from the 1920s to the early 1990s, but has since grown, doubling from less than one in ten households in 1990 to just under one in five today.
• Most renters would like to move into homeownership, but the age at which people buy their homes, if they do so, has risen, and so people are staying in the private rented sector for longer.
• Acknowledging that long-term renting is here to stay, and that the renter experience needs to improve.
• Apart from English-speaking countries, others such as Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany, with greater experience of a large private rented sector can also provide valuable lessons in how renting for the longer term can be done:
• Regulations like rent controls can help renters, but are tricky to calibrate to avoid unintended consequences.
  • A broad analysis of controls in Europe indicates that controls do not hold back the growth of the sector. Places with rent controls do not necessarily have lower rents as a share of income, but changes in this ratio are more stable. Countries with rent controls also have had a faster growing private rental sector in the decade to 2022, than countries without controls.
• Stronger renter protections do not seem to have a negative effect on supply: Despite concerns that greater protections for renters, particularly abolishing no-fault evictions, will have a negative effect on supply – there is limited evidence to support such concerns, and where the data does exist, it generally indicates that protections have little effect on supply.

RECOMMENDATIONS

• Use the planned Private Rented Sector Database to understand the rental market better
• Make renting genuinely affordable for the long term
• Streamline dispute resolution to a single body
• Abolish section 21 evictions