London council takes control of landlord’s 18 homes

This is a terrible situation, no rent for 5 years from 18 properties means the landlord is likely to go bankrupt.

If the council is now the landlord I assume the tenants cannot be evicted to sell the properties and nobody will buy in the first 4 years. Will the council make regular rent increases or will they be frozen.

It could have been entirely the landlords fault but we don’t know the real background.

hmmm… too many other questions to know what the real ‘story’ is behind this.

But true to type if there is something in it that a council can use to warn other LL’s, take possession/money/prosecute, then clearly its going to be used for full effect!

I can only assume if there are that many issues and costs to put things right on top of the fines etc then the LL may have made a financial decision to just let the council take over at the end of the day.

Can’t help thinking though if the council now have control and they are the LL – do the tenants become council tenants? If so the rents would become essentially capped. Ergo the council could actually make a loss on this overall in the 5 years….

The council may see it as a ‘victory’ – but is it really….?

There’s so much more we don’t know about this case. The landlord is either a sandwich short of a picnic or deceased. But one thing we do know for sure: the councils are far worse landlords than the majority of those in the private sector.

“Everyone deserves to live in decent housing”
No, they do not. There are many who are so antisocial that they should not be housed under any circumstances. The pyromaniac who torched three flats while we were going through the legal process of evicting, The hoarder who accidentally set fire to his flat, locked the door and walked away, the individual who woke everyone every night with his building shaking music,
Under the RRA these people will be enabled to stay for extended periods.

Private sector landlords need to recognise a fundamental truth: government no longer sees them as independent businesspeople. They are only tolerated while they are willing to shoulder the financial risk of property ownership, while government strips away the benefits through regulation, taxation, and constant interference.

You cannot leave a property empty, unfurnished, or awaiting modernisation without being penalised. You cannot freely determine the standard of risk you are prepared to take on a tenant. At every turn, the landlord is treated not as the owner of an asset, but as a public utility to be picked over at will. Property has been re-framed by government as a political resource, used to harvest votes from an entitled majority – a majority failed by successive governments that have never created an economy in which all can survive and thrive through their own effort.

In any normal market, a poorly run business would lose its customers, and those customers would go elsewhere. But government knows that many tenants do not meet reasonable commercial expectations to access an asset worth hundreds of thousands of pounds – an asset financed by the landlord’s creditworthiness, savings, or investment risk. Instead of addressing that gap by building its own stock for those in need of assistance, government has shifted the burden onto landlords. Tenants are to be supported not through public housing, but through the forced subsidisation of the private sector.

Worse, the legal mechanisms already exist to transfer private portfolios into state or quasi-state hands. All it would take is a redefinition of what constitutes a “failing landlord” – and mass confiscation could be justified overnight. Today, landlords are being fined for not policing tenants’ recycling compliance. Tomorrow, could this become the trigger for wholesale repossession?

This is not a functioning free market. Nor is it socialism in its old form. It is something more insidious: the effective confiscation of the rights of ownership, while leaving every burden and liability firmly with the landlord. The rhetoric is one of tenant protection. The reality is the quiet erosion of private ownership in favour of state control.

If landlords fail to see this, they are sleepwalking into the removal of their last freedoms. The only true regulator of landlord quality should be tenants themselves, by choosing to rent elsewhere if their needs are not met. Government intervention has gone far beyond the point of balance. It has gone beyond socialism. It has gone beyond communism. It is the appropriation of private risk for public gain – without consent, without compensation, and without end.

In the PRS if a tenant is unhappy with the property they should move.

The instant reaction is that everything else is more expensive so I can’t move. Let me translate, “my home is cheaper because it’s not as luxurious as elsewhere but I demand their quality at the same low cost” with charities insisting that is absolutely their right.

You’re missing the Big Picture. De facto ownership is being passed to tenants. The owner-occupied sector cannot absorb the existing rental stock, and most tenants do not meet the lending criteria to obtain a mortgage. Forcing rental properties into the hands of owner-occupiers would only depress property values further.

The rental sector is not going away — the question is simply who controls it. To date, government has left the capital requirement and financial risk firmly with private landlords, while steadily confiscating the benefits of ownership through regulation and taxation. Once values are sufficiently crushed, the state can step in and assume actual ownership — not as policy by design, but as a “last resort” created by its own measures.

We have been here before. The rent controls of 1977 destroyed the private rented market, and it took the Housing Act 1980 to begin turning it around. Even then, it was nearly a decade before the infrastructure of the PRS was rebuilt.

Unless landlords recognise what is happening now, history will repeat itself — but with even fewer safeguards for private ownership than last time.

Reply to the comment left by Paul Essex at 27/08/2025 – 11:04
In the PRS if a tenant is unhappy with the property they should move.

that is it. Correct. In a nutshell.

The issue is a lack of accommodation alternatives…

TOTALLY OUT OF THE LL’s CONTROL as we all know, yet this is where the buck stops apparently. A perfect political scapegoat/sitting duck scenario.

Everything therefore that follows on from this is an action to make sure the private LL is made to pay for the problem they cause when they ultimately have to evict a tenant, because it is deemed as all their fault…

The RRB is more about making sure the tenants who are housed stay put (whether they or the LL like it or not). Enforced occupation springs to mind.

Once that happens evictions will reduce (apparently) and so Labour can tick the box that they have secured more tenant rights over evil LL’s.

The fall out is that the growing numbers of those without accommodation now will struggle to get anything at all and future renters will have very little choice at all. Glass boxes in the sky – all mod cons but high prices to boot. Council waiting lists will bloat uncontrollably and hit bursting point. More councils will declare bankruptcy down to the costs of expensive temp accommodation.

With a distinct lack of ‘promised’ 1.5M units coming on stream and now asylum seekers getting turfed out of hotels only adding to the social lists, its going to be very difficult to then carry on with the same mantra that the PRS is to blame….

Shoot. foot. Own spring to mind

The current disharmony in the rental market is not accidental — it is being engineered by Government. By destabilising the sector, they create the cover story for an eventual “rescue” or nationalisation of the private rented sector, unless landlords can be driven out altogether beforehand. In the meantime, the disruption serves a political purpose: it delivers votes and strengthens re-election prospects, regardless of the long-term damage to housing supply.

We have seen this strategy before. In 1977, rent controls and punitive policies all but destroyed the private rented sector. Only with the Housing Act 1980 did recovery begin, and even then, it took nearly a decade to rebuild the infrastructure. Today’s measures risk repeating that cycle — only this time with far fewer safeguards for private ownership.

According to the current direction of policy, landlords now have only one acceptable role: to act as unpaid state workers, managing their own assets for the benefit of the state. Refuse that role, and you are deemed to have no place in the property market at all.

Reply to the comment left by Person Of The People at 27/08/2025 – 11:00
Outstanding summary.