Homeowners have it tough. Renters have it tougher ... so where’s the plan to help?

The UK’s housing market is in perma-crisis but all the attention is focused on buyers, writes James Moore. Renters are under unprecedented pressure – it’s time the government took them seriously

Average rents in Great Britain have now passed the £1,300 a month mark (PA Wire)

Someone should confer upon Britain’s renters an official right to feel furious. If there is any group in the perma-crisis that is Britain’s housing market deserving of being heard, it’s surely them.

The latest update from estate agent Hamptons makes that clear, serving as a bright red flashing light bearing the legend “problem” or perhaps “crisis” even “emergency”. Its figures are horrible. The average rate of annual rental growth on a newly let property hit 12.0 per cent in August, which is the fastest since the company first started producing its lettings index in 2014.

The average rent paid in Great Britain crossed the £1,300 per calendar month mark for the first time last month, less than a year after breaking the £1,200 barrier and barely three years since passing £1,000.

In other words, this runaway train is picking up speed with no obvious buffer in sight.

As ever, the increase is not uniform. Scotland, for example, saw rents rising at a record 13.4 per cent, pushing them above the average paid in Northern England or the Midlands.

Rents in London – and you knew this was coming, didn’t you – have risen at a double-digit pace in 16 of the last 18 months adding an astonishing £5,508 to tenants’ average bills. The average monthly rent in inner London now stands at £3,076.

Let’s put that in context. The NASUWT, a teaching union, publishes pay scales on its website. They show that a newly qualified teacher will receive roughly £5,000 more working in inner London than someone starting out in a provincial classroom.

That might initially sound tempting, given what the capital has to offer. Here’s the problem: that extra money will barely cover three months of the extra rent in inner London, which is pricing out people our capital city needs for the place to function. The same could be true of other hot areas in terms of rent.

Government efforts – and most of the media’s attention – when it comes to housing are almost solely directed at buyers, who tend to be better off and in the fortunate position of being able to use their housing costs to purchase an asset.

Ministers might very well argue that the various iterations of their ‘Help to Buy’ schemes were aimed at assisting renters, by helping to underwrite high loan to value mortgages that lenders were, and often still are, wary of offering.

Research by national housebuilder St Modwen Homes found that the average deposit for first-time buyers across the UK now stands at a hefty £36,489. Saving that amount of money for people with student debt, maybe children, and sky-high rents in the midst of a cost of living crisis is all but impossible.

Ministers might tell you that this underlines the importance of ‘Help to Buy’ and the low deposit mortgages it facilitated. But that ignores the most obvious problem. While the scheme increased the supply of buyers, it did not at the same time increase the supply of homes for them to purchase, which, as housing charity Shelter noted, in the end served only to increase prices to the ultimate benefit of sellers.

House prices have been coming down of late. Property website Rightmove said more than a third of the homes listed for sale had gone through at least one price reduction in a bid to tempt buyers. That’s the highest figure recorded since January 2011. The Nationwide Building Society recently said affordability has improved.

This is all good news for people contemplating buying and escaping the vicious rental trap, even at a time when mortgage rates have been shooting for the moon (with the Bank of England set to add some rocket fuel at its next meeting).

But buying is still, for a sizeable number of renters, nothing more than a pipe dream. They badly need a break. But from where? There is preciously little sign that their plight is even being considered, much less addressed.

That needs to change. Prices are rising at such a clip that renting is becoming unaffordable, What happens to those who can’t make rent in the current environment? I think we all know. We’d just rather not think about it.