[Diggers350] How Starmer-Rayner Blackrock-Labour bowed to corporate landlords like L&G and its already backfiring
Tony Gosling
tony at cultureshop.org.uk
Thu Aug 21 02:45:27 BST 2025
How Labour bowed to corporate landlords and its already backfiring
https://tlio.org.uk/how-starmer-rayner-blackrock-labour-bowed-to-corporate-landlords-like-lg-and-its-already-backfiring/
SEE ALSO Whos 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, BlackRocks 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 Britains 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 TfLs
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 doesnt
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, weve
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 thats 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&Gs £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. Its 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
Its not just the varying quality of new builds
erected at pace thats worrying. Often, rents for
new-builds carry a 10pc premium much like new-build sales.
Britains biggest landlord, Grainger UK, collects
nearly £100m in rent each year.
In May, the London Renters Union campaign group
protested outside Grainger UKs head office
accusing the company of getting rich gentrifying
our citys 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 Governments 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 Labours 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 citys 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 Englands corporate
landlords despite all the well-received
lobbying is Labours 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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