The Economist - USA (2020-08-29)

36 TheEconomistAugust 29th 2020

1

“I

deally,” wroteGeorge Orwell in “The

Road to Wigan Pier”, his account of

pre-war poverty, “the worst type of slum

landlord is a fat wicked man, preferably a

bishop, who is drawing an immense in-

come from extortionate rents. Actually, it is

a poor old woman who has invested her

life’s savings in three slum houses, inhab-

its one of them, and tries to live on the rent

of the other two—never, in consequence,

having any money for repairs.”

When Orwell was writing, almost 60%

of Britons rented their homes from private

landlords. After the second world war the

private rental sector (prs) shrank to insig-

nificance, thanks to the rise of social hous-

ing and the subsequent liberalisation of

mortgage lending. But rising house prices

and the need for a substantial deposit have

reversed the trend (see chart).

As renting has grown, renters have

changed. Back in the mid-1990s around one

in 20 families with children lived in the

prs. Now more than one in five do. More

than half of all private renters are now over

35. A form of tenure once confined to urban
    centres and university cities has spread to

the suburbs and small towns. Some of the

fastest growth in the five years to 2017, the

most recent period with reliable data, came

in places such as Purbeck and Hertsmere.

That presents the Conservative Party

with a problem. Since Lord Salisbury es-

poused “villa Toryism” in the 1880s, it has

been the party of home-ownership. Marga-

ret Thatcher gave this purpose new vim by

selling off social housing. The notion that

home ownership makes people conserva-

tive, by giving them a stake in the social or-

der, is embedded deep in the Tory soul. But

economics and politics both argue for mea-

sures that favour renting. A large rental

sector encourages mobility and thus helps

promote growth. At the same time, today’s

renters are the kind of people whose votes

the government wants.

That long-term conundrum is over-

shadowed by the acute problem that the

crisis has created. Housing charities esti-

mate that some 200,000 private tenants

have slipped into rent arrears over the past

six months. In the early days of the pan-

demic, the government put in place a tem-

porary ban on evictions from rental prop-

erties that was due to expire on August

24th. Three days beforehand, it extended

the moratorium for another four weeks.

This hand-to-mouth decision-making

suggests that the government is struggling

to deal with the problem. That’s partly be-

cause Britain has not only a lot of tenants

nowadays but also a lot of landlords. While

one in five English households rents pri-

vately, more than one in ten households

own more than one property. Most land-

lords let fewer than five properties. For

most, their rental property is a substitute

for a pension or a supplement to one. They

tend to be the older, better-off voters who

make up the bedrock of Boris Johnson’s po-

litical coalition—the contemporary equiv-

alent of Orwell’s old ladies.

But landlords are outnumbered by ten-

Housing

Generation rent grows up

The shift in housing tenure towards renting creates a problem that Conservatives

find hard to handle

The road back to Wigan Pier

England and Wales, households in the

private rented sector*, % of total

Source:MHCLG *YearsendingMarchfrom 2011

1

60

40

20

0

1910200090807060501939

Britain

37 StudyingMandarin

38 Bagehot: Germanophilia

Also in this section