This week, voters across England and Wales will go to the polls in the final series of local elections before the next general election. But one Conservative MP has decided he cannot support Rishi Sunak as Prime Minister, with former Health Secretary Dan Poulter announcing this weekend that he is quitting his party membership. Poulter, who is also a practicing NHS consultant, has issued a sharp rebuke to Sunak; writing exclusively for the Observerhe says his first-hand experience of the NHS mental health crisis has convinced him that “the only cure is a Labor government”. He will take up the Labor whip until the next election – which he has said Sunak should call as soon as possible – and then he will step down as an MP.
Poulter is absolutely right when he says that within the NHS – but also across every policy area – this is a government that has neglected the enormous social and economic challenges facing Britain. Public services are cracking under the pressure. From the tainted blood scandal to the Windrush victims and the Post Office scandal, ministers have scrambled to right the terrible harm the state has caused to people. More and more Conservative MPs are losing the whip and facing police investigations over allegations of sleaze and corruption.
Meanwhile, all opportunities for positive reform are completely lost in this end-time doom spiral. There is no better example than the Renters (Reform) Bill, which was stripped of key safeguards by ministers last week. The government has been promising to strengthen tenants’ rights since April 2019, when Theresa May announced she would scrap powers that allow landlords to evict their tenants without cause.
This is a reform that is urgently needed. The proportion of people living in the private rental sector has increased doubled in just two decades: in the late 1990s, approximately one in ten people lived there private rental properties; today that is more than one in five. Just thirty years ago, the private rental sector existed mainly as a short-term rental arrangement to provide housing for a few years before people entered the housing market. The vast majority of people bought their own home or rented social housing for the long term. Today there is a growing group of people who will never own their own home, for whom private renting is now a lifelong contract.
The private rental sector is not regulated in a way that recognizes this. Britain has some of the highest rents in Europe; but it’s not just the cost. It is the fact that much of the private rental sector is of appalling quality: a quarter of these homes do not meet basic standards, compared to 12% of social housing. There is a major lack of security, meaning landlords can lock out tenants without notice through no-fault evictions, or significantly increase rents.
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The cost and lack of safety create a whole new class of social problems: young families with children who lack housing security and may be forced to move mid-school year, but without affordable options close to their families and their parents. kindergarten. There is now a cohort of private renters who are retiring and simply unable to pay their rent. Four in ten tenants in the past year said they were forced to make an unwanted move, at an average cost of € €669 per household.
This is a class problem: wealthier families can protect their children from these consequences by helping them buy their own homes, while opportunities for those in less affluent families are severely limited by the state of the housing market. And it is those who are fortunate enough to act as private landlords themselves who benefit most from this state of affairs; Absurdly light regulation paves the way for rising rents.
May’s proposals – led in recent years by Michael Gove as housing and communities secretary – are certainly not perfect; they could go further. But they would have included important new protections for tenants, which would have slowed rent growth and provided greater security; in particular by eliminating no-fault evictions. Last week the Government toned this down significantly in the Renters (Reform) Bill when it was read in the House of Commons for the third time; it amended the bill to require the Lord Chancellor to investigate the implications of this for the courts before setting a date for scrapping no-fault evictions. This is a delaying tactic that the landlords have lobbied for. The protection period for new tenants during which a landlord cannot evict them because they want to sell or move into the property has also been reduced from two years in the original government consultation to just six months.
It is fundamentally wrong that the government has decided to side with landlords over tenants; and a sign of how weak Sunak is is that he has indulged in lobbying from his own backbench. There are countless other examples of governments pursuing policies doomed to failure in the name of electoral activity: the National Audit Office last week published a damning report concluding that there are significant uncertainties over whether its plans to increase the supply of free expanding childcare will be possible. due to a lack of capacity in the sector. Every day that Sunak delays the election is another day that the problems facing Britain are not addressed. He must heed his former colleague and immediately call a general election.