Squats and squatting / London housing

It’s nice to see rent control on the agenda, despite it being for such a small selection of buildings and fairly mediocre terms. The Mayor has limited power for deep change, but it could be much fairer than this:

To ensure the new homes are “genuinely affordable”, Mr Khan is proposing to set the rents at 40 per cent of average key worker household incomes after tax.

Annual rent increases would potentially be set in line with wage rises, or at two per cent each year, depending on which is higher.

Affordable rents tend to be understood as less than a third of take-home pay, not 40%.

And if the increases will behave similarly to market rents anyway (wage increases get transferred into rents as it stands), this won’t really improve things dramatically. Public sector rents should be at, or close to, the cost of provision, with allowances for inflation on maintenance work. Defining rules for future wage theft on a percentage basis seems rather arbitrary.

Better than nothing though, I suppose…

That's what I meant. It's definitely not a lot, but in the current absurd climate ...

Yeah, agreed. I wonder if a 'light touch' policy like this might get some backing from the Labour right crowd though. Might soften their ideas on rent control a little I guess?

No idea. I'd be very surprised if the current Government did anything useful in that respect. They're only placeholders until the next Tory government.