A nationalist politician has used the left newspaper the Morning Star to make a vocal appeal for rent controls.

Luke Fletcher, the Plaid Cymru politician representing South Wales West in the Welsh Parliament, claims in the newspaper that the White Paper on housing currently under debate in the parliament effectively ignores rent controls as an option. 

He also dismisses the Labour-led Welsh Government’s suggestion that there is insufficient evidence that rent controls work, and says the government prefers to be “listening to the landlord lobby.”

Instead – in a lengthy piece – Fletcher claims: ”We don’t need more data to know that private rents have skyrocketed and that people are being priced out of their own communities.”

And he continues: “Simply adding more data to the pile won’t solve a thing. The Welsh government’s insistence on data-gathering exercises only delays meaningful change, while renters continue to bear the brunt of a market designed to extract profit from them. More data won’t make housing more affordable — action will.”

Fletcher is short on specifics but says that the rent control exercise under taken by the Scottish Government (led by nationalists) “created a loophole where landlords hiked rents between tenancies, undermining the entire system. Of course, this didn’t work.”

He instead advocates what he calls “second-generation systems” — policies that regulate rent increases, often linked to inflation or average income growth, and applying between tenancies as well as during tenancies “to ensure that landlords can’t jack up rents.”

Fletcher claims such systems work “in cities around the world” – although he does not given even one example.

His article suggests it doesn’t matter if landlords sell, because the properties stay within the market even if they become owner occupied. But he adds that: “The biggest worry is that landlords sell to the landlord arm of big banks or asset managers like BlackRock. There’s a space for government to intervene here and prevent this from happening.”

You can read the piece in full here.https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/housing-crisis-delaying-meaningful-change-broken-private-rental-system