[Diggers350] How Starmer-Rayner Blackrock-Labour bowed to corporate landlords like L&G – and it’s already backfiring

Tony Gosling tony at cultureshop.org.uk
Thu Aug 21 02:45:27 BST 2025



How Labour bowed to corporate landlords – and it’s already backfiring

https://tlio.org.uk/how-starmer-rayner-blackrock-labour-bowed-to-corporate-landlords-like-lg-and-its-already-backfiring/

SEE ALSO Who’s Really Buying Up Britain? (The 
Data Will Shock You) by British Home Group 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqGhVCuww7c

Build-to-rent companies are in line for a 
windfall while private landlords get squeezed

<https://www.telegraph.co.uk/authors/r/ru-rz/ruby-hinchliffe/>Ruby 
Hinchliffe 
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/property/how-labour-support-corporate-landlords-come-back-bite/

<https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/property/how-labour-support-corporate-landlords-come-back-bite/>
[]


Rachel Reeves bowed to corporate landlords in her 
Budget just as she 
<https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/property/stamp-duty/reeves-launches-tax-raid-on-second-home-buyers-and-landlord-stamp-duty/>mounted 
a fresh raid on ordinary families with incomes from second properties.

Private landlords now face tens of thousands of 
pounds in additional bills, from tax to licensing 
and energy improvements – while build-to-rent 
developers are on track for a £3bn windfall.

Many of these firms – which include FTSE 100 
companies and even banks – have long lobbied 
successive governments in an effort to squeeze smaller, private landlords out.

Deputy prime minister, Angela Rayer, was 
photographed just last month whispering in the 
ear of Larry Finks, BlackRock’s chief executive.

Grainger UK, whose biggest shareholder is 
BlackRock, currently owns over 11,000 rental 
homes. It is believed to be the biggest corporate landlord in England.

Legal & General (L&G) also claims to have poured 
over £3bn into rental investments to date.

Even Britain’s biggest bank, Lloyds, is honing in 
on the opportunity. Its build-to-rent company 
Citra Living now owns 5,000 properties and counting.

“Behind closed doors, Labour tends to be 
supportive of build-to-rent – but not in public,” 
one industry insider told The Telegraph.

Some Labour politicians have already staked a 
claim in the corporate landlord market. London 
Mayor and 
<https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/property/buy-to-let/sadiq-khan-places-for-london-landlord/>“renters 
champion”, Sadiq Khan, has said he wants to raise 
£187m come 2030 by building rental homes near 
Transport for London (TfL) stations.

To achieve this, Mr Khan needs to more than 
quadruple the number of rental homes on TfL’s 
books, from 4,000 to 20,000, by 2031. As of this 
year, TfL had started building 4,000 rental units 
– of which only around 1,500 have been delivered to date.

Dan Wilson Craw, of campaign group Generation 
Rent, said profit-driven institutional landlords 
had been linked to “unaffordable rent increases”.

He said: “Some [tenants] have had better 
experiences than renting from individuals with a 
small portfolio, but being corporate doesn’t 
inherently equate professionalism and long-term tenancies.

“While some pension funds [investors of 
build-to-rent] appear committed to longer 
tenancies, with limited annual rent rises, we’ve 
heard reports of other investment funds seeking 
to maximise profits through unaffordable rent increases and evictions.”


‘Are we building the ghettos of the future?’

Build-to-rent flats are often advertised as being 
<https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/property/buy-to-let/spent-thousands-future-proofing-property-done-nothing-epc/>“more 
energy efficient” than private rental homes, but 
as some residents in Wembley have found out – that’s not always the case.

<https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/net-zero/pay-86pc-more-energy-bills-rest-london-crazy/>Speaking 
to The Telegraph earlier this year, tenants of 
Quintain Living – a US-owned company – said they 
were paying 86pc more for their energy bills than the average Londoner.

This was in spite of the company advertising 
average savings of “56pc” on utility bills, 
thanks to every flat boasting an energy performance certificate rating of “B”.

A Quintain spokesman has since blamed a planning 
consent order, which required the developer to 
build two district heat networks to supply heat and hot water to the buildings.

In another case in Croydon, south London, 
residents in one of L&G’s £3,000 a month “luxury” 
build-to-rent developments have spent the last 
year fighting for better living conditions.

Reports from My London and Inside Croydon in 
September quoted some of the 251 tenants whose 
pets had even fallen ill from mould, which was 
first exposed by campaigner Kwajo Tweneboa.

Others reported collapsed ceilings and severe 
water leaks. L&G has since begun to fix the 
issues which it blamed on a “build quality issue”.

Richard Upton, a social developer and a visiting 
fellow at the University of Reading, said he 
“worries” when he sees schemes of thousands of flats going up.

“Is that a place for people to live for 20 years? 
With just a coffee shop underneath? This is where 
we need to be thinking more about mixed use, adding parks and other amenities.

“Such is the rate of inflation and the cost of 
new things, that those in new-build flats – 
especially in London – can just about afford to 
exist. It’s a good thing if income-to-rent ratios 
one day come down, if we build enough. But at 
what cost? Are we building the ghettos of the future?

“I fear there is a risk of quality being 
overlooked in the race for units. 
<https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/property/why-labour-housing-targets-doomed-fail/>The 
Government wants to build 1.5 million homes. The industry calls them units.”


Rent premiums

It’s not just the varying quality of new builds 
erected at pace that’s worrying. Often, rents for 
new-builds carry a 10pc premium – much like new-build sales.

Britain’s biggest landlord, Grainger UK, collects 
nearly £100m in rent each year.

In May, the London Renters Union campaign group 
protested outside Grainger UK’s head office 
accusing the company of “getting rich gentrifying 
our city’s neighbourhoods” and “lobbying [the] Government against our rights”.

In a thread on X, formerly Twitter, the campaign 
group also accused the company of putting up 
luxury flats for rent in historically 
working-class areas such as Tottenham or Canning 
Town which are “wildly unaffordable for local people”.

“Corporate landlords and developers are tearing 
our communities apart, pushing us out while 
lining their own pockets,” one of their tweets reads.

A member of the campaign group living in Seven 
Sisters claimed they were forced out by a 50pc 
rent increase, after their landlord cited a 
nearby Grainger UK development as “the new market rent”.

Grainger UK disputed this and said its Seven 
Sisters development, Apex Gardens, is regulated 
by the Government’s Regulator of Social Housing 
and includes a high proportion of affordable 
homes on rents below the open market.

Grainger UK told The Telegraph that rather than 
lobbying against renters’ rights, it has publicly 
supported Labour’s Renters’ Rights Bill.

In September this year, in an official London 
stock market announcement, Grainger Uk said it 
“looks forward to continuing to use its expertise 
to help inform and shape the final legislation”.

A spokesman for Grainger UK said that tenants of 
the company in London spend just “28pc” of their 
incomes on rent and that it has “no control over other landlords’ pricing”.


Costly legal challenges

The challenges that come with corporate landlords 
are already playing out abroad. In Berlin, where 
85pc of residents are renters, 
<https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/property/berlin-housing-mistake-private-landlords-mortgage-britain/>at 
least 250,000 homes are owned by corporations.

Their shareholders benefit from around 41 cents 
of every euro tenants pay in rent on average, 
according to the research arm of consumer lobby group Finanzwende.

Unprecedented rises in rents, paired with poor 
maintenance, has sparked city-wide protests and 
referendums to transfer ownership of the homes 
back to the state after it sold them off in the 1990s.

The city’s largest renter association told The 
Telegraph last year that while individual 
landlords typically raise rents by around 20pc, 
corporate ones will raise them by as much as 50pc.

One thing which is worrying England’s corporate 
landlords – despite all the well-received 
lobbying – is Labour’s plan to get rid of powers 
to write rent increases into contracts, 
<https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/property/buy-to-let/how-landlords-make-renters-rights-bill-work-favour/>as 
part of its Renters’ Rights Bill.

This change, once in legislation, will force 
corporations to serve tenants with rent notices 
which – unlike contracted rent increases – can be 
challenged in a tribunal if they do not reflect the “market rate”.

If tenants were to start challenging rent 
increases en masse, this could pose a serious 
risk to the income of these listed companies and their shareholders.

Some law firms have even suggested such 
“restrictions” on in-tenancy rent increases could 
lead to deep-pocketed landlords waging costly 
future legal challenges against the Labour 
government – particularly if rents fail to keep pace with market inflation.




































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