Labour urged to regulate private rents

Reply to the comment left by JamesB at 04/08/2026 – 19:06
This is correct: I’m having to pay for some damage to my property caused by my tenants at the moment and it looks as though it was carelessness/negligence; but I am struggling to get evidence of that and I have no mechanism for recovering the money from them.

“Supernormal returns” is a lie from people who are too ignorant to know and who in any case don’t care enough to find out what the truth is because the reason for their lie is that they have another agenda. It is an anti-capitalist, anti-landlord agenda and these people won’t care about the truth because to them the end justifies the means and therefore justifies their lies.

Rents are linked to the value of the house not to the cost of a bottle of milk Buyers can identify with this .

Reply to the comment left by Paul Goulder at 06/08/2026 – 16:44
Labour don’t understand buying and selling. Labour has already triggered a sell-off of equities:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/08/06/burnham-tax-fears-spark-stock-sell-off/?msockid=0b8a4155c7db6ba1058955b1c6196a07

Labour were warned about this last year:

https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/tax/article-15212179/Chancellor-risks-wiping-4bn-UK-stock-market-Labour-targets-pensions-CGT-dividend-tax.html

When Rachel Reeves’ IHT changes bite in spring next year the IHT changes will trigger a dumping of UK investments in land and buildings because these are vulnerable to IHT changes. In fact, financial advisers and IHT advisers who are any good will already be advising investors of the increased IHT risk and from spring next year all of them will have to do it because they will have a professional obligation to do it.

In the United Kingdom most of the wealth is tied up in pensions and residential property. However, pensions (particularly SIPPS and SSAS schemes but also other pension schemes) are also invested in UK land and property. For any investors based in countries like Portugal where IHT is 0 for family members, it is not simply the case that investors are going to be punished for INVESTING in UK assets, families who have family members who are retired abroad or who are considering retiring abroad are actually going to be given a massive INCENTIVE to dump UK assets by the UK government.

As well as not having any real understanding of buying and selling (i.e. markets) because hardly any labour MPs have ever run a business, all left-wing governments have the same problems. They always destroy incentive, undermine investor confidence and trigger the flight of capital. For the true left-wingers this doesn’t matter. When their socialist policies fail their response is always “….well, that just proves that we need more socialism.”

But it is not the ‘think tanks’ and labour MPs who really experience the pain of this failure. If you are a working family, e.g. of a plumber or electrician, in the UK that spent many years saving for the deposit for your house from after-tax earnings then after many more years of hard work you might own a house worth £300,000 with a mortgage of £240,000. I.e. you own 20% of your house and the bank owns 80%. If an incompetent government triggers a big slide in the value of assets including residential property such that the value of your house drops to 80% of what it was previously the bank never loses, but you lose 100%. And to be clear this means that you lose 100% of everything you ever worked for and you lose all your hopes, dreams and aspirations. It is the small families who will suffer the most from a slide in the value of UK assets…they will be driven into poverty. And if that government also punishes employers for employing people then far more people will not have jobs and more children will be driven into poverty. On top of that the government is going to inflict Making Tax Digital on you if you are a self-employed plumber or electrician just to increase your pain because when the government collapses your business it is still going to tax you on profits that you are no longer earning.

Left-wing politicians and ‘think thanks’ who don’t really do much thinking and would be incapable of even wiring a plug need to be careful about the lies they tell because it is actually the little people who will suffer. The problem when left-wing governments trigger the flight of capital is that it is not the rich that suffer…the rich have already gone by the time a Gordon Brown or an Andy Burnham have turned up.

The argument for rent controls can never make sense until all a landlords costs are regulated to the same level That’s mortgage rates, taxes, repair costs, the purchase cost of items, court fees, licencing charges & the plethora of junk that litters my spread sheets on a daily basis. Literally everything.

It’s an utterly preposterous idea & would achieve nothing more than giving landlords yet another reason to exit the PRS. Or is that the plan, what government & these quangos really want to happen? It’s a fair question. Over regulation of any industry sector is a sure fire way to delete it.

Reply to the comment left by Landlord Phil at 12/08/2026 – 16:07
This is absolutely correct….OVER regulation of markets causes market contraction and competent economists know this. In a market where Labour have said that they need and want to build 1.5 million new homes, how does it make sense to OVER regulate the private rental sector? Surely, only a fool would do it.

The Labour Renters Rights Act is not light-touch regulation: It is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. And any Labour Landlord Database, if it goes ahead, will make the situation worse.