Private rents unaffordable for many families in the South

Congratulations to Shelter, whose research has highlighted that families have been priced out of rental property in the majority of local authorities in England. Shelter’s Rent Watch found that average rents in the private housing market were unaffordable for ordinary working families in over half of English local authorities.

In the South East, only two of the 66 local authorities analysed had affordable median rents that took up less than 35% of local median full-time pay (a widely accepted measure of affordability). In the South West and East the figures were 5 out of 34 and 16 of 46 respectively.

The findings show that tenants in many rural areas in the south were struggling to find affordable homes to rent, with homes in Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham cheaper to rent than in north Devon or north Dorset.

Writing on the progressive housing blog, Red Brick, Steve Hilditch offers a useful insight into the problem of increasingly unaffordable private rent levels, and the blog is a useful place to explore some of housing challenges Labour needs to get on top of.

For many voters under 35, renting in the private sector is likely to be their only option for the foreseeable future. As Hilditch says “given that over 40% of homes in the sector fail to meet the decent homes standard, tenants often get very poor value for money as well as insecure terms “ Labour needs work out how it can help protect such tenants, and what might be done to tackle this growing problem of unaffordable homes.