A Labour Mayor whose post was abolished by a public vote last year now wants to become an MP.

Marvin Rees’ position as Mayor of Bristol was abolished in a referendum vote by some 56,113 people in May 2022; the position officially ends in spring 2024.

Now Rees – one of the country’s most outspoken advocates of rent controls for private landlords – wants to become a Labour MP in the city, posting on Twitter that he has applied to become the party’s parliamentary candidate for the Bristol North East constituency. This is a new constituency created by a boundary review; it will be the fifth seat in Bristol.

Within days of seeking the nomination for the constituency, Rees appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme accusing the city’s private rental market of being the “Wild West” requiring what he called “intervention”. 

When asked about rent controls Rees said: “Well, I recognise that there’s a complexity, but what we certainly need is intervention in the rental market. And whether you call that control or not is up to you, but there needs to be an intervention because allowing this Wild West of the rental market with rents growing out of pace to people’s income.

“So what we have at the moment in Bristol is, over the last decade, rents have gone up about 52 per cent, wages have gone up 24 per cent, so you can see that there is a huge price to be paid for that, not just in the individuals impacted. 

“By the way, a good quality home is one of the most significant public health interventions we can make that would give us resilience against future pandemics, such as Covid. It means we can actually recruit teachers, nurses to Bristol, which we’re struggling to.”

Rees also expressed sympathy with landlords, adding: “We have to recognise that some landlords just will be very small people who have invested in a property for their pension. That does not make them bad, that just means that whatever has happened to them financially in our pensions system has not supported people so they are driven to a cannibalisation of the housing market. We have to take that into account. It has to be part of a wider approach that means building homes as well.”

Last year Rees appeared more aggressively in favour of rent controls, teaming up with local anti-landlord activists to look at how to introduce rent controls in the city and holding a so-called summit on the issue.

At the time he said: “The national housing crisis poses big challenges for our city and tackling it remains one of the council’s top priorities. As well as accelerating the building of affordable housing across Bristol, we are currently strengthening our powers to tackle rogue landlords, and we have invested £42m in improving the energy efficiency of our council homes.

“I made a manifesto commitment to campaign for the power to introduce rent controls to make Bristol an affordable living city, and we are calling on government to give us the power to regulate rents. Piloting rent control in Bristol will allow us to take a step towards tackling our local renting crisis and will help us develop learnings and that can inform wider positive change for the rest of the city.”