When Boris Johnson launched his London Rental Standard (LRS) last May, he promised it would help “millions” of Londoners who rent privately - more than a quarter of its households, and rising - to do so “with confidence” while giving the city’s 300,000 landlords “peace of mind that they are complying with the law.”
He invited landlords to apply for his new “city-wide badge of accreditation”, which would be awarded to landlords and letting agents meeting a “minimum level of service” covering conditions, repairs and transparency over fees. The mayor set a target of awarding the badge to “100,000 of London’s landlords and agents by 2016”.
Nine months later Tom Copley, the London Assembly Labour group’s spokesperson on housing, thinks there is a problem. Pressing the mayor over his 2015/16 budget at City Hall on Monday, Copley told him that just 13,499 landlord accreditations have been issued. He asked Johnson what his budget contained that might help private renters stuck with bad landlords. The mayor said there are “ways of exposing such, ah, Rachmanite behaviour” but did not go into specifics.
Copley, pleasantly unsurprised, drew attention to Labour’s alternative budget which proposes devoting £1.6m to help boroughs with the task of upholding legal standards and measures to drive the worst landlords out of the market. Johnson’s response was to take diversionary refuge in the traditional, crowd-pleasing Tory howl against “rent controls” and to insist that his housing policies, which include encouragement for building new homes for private rent, would provide “the ultimate answer”, this being “to ensure that people have the widest possible choice”.
The outline of a traditional Lab-Con confrontation will already be clear: Copley’s approach to the private rented sector entails closer regulation and giving greater powers to tenants; Johnson’s is to foster choice through market competition and use voluntary sign-up promote basic standards enshrined in the LRS. But for Copley, the problem is not simply what he sees as the essential feebleness of the LRS or the rate at which it’s being embraced. It’s also about the mayor making more effort. Where’s the urgency? Where’s the focus? Where’s the will?
For the Lib Dems, Stephen Knight made a similar point about the mayor building affordable homes. Not for the first time he criticised the Johnson budget’s latest tiny reduction in the mayoral portion of the council tax, saying that the lump sum of cash lost as a result could instead be put towards a vastly increased affordable house-building programme in London. Shouldn’t that that be a higher priority than “essentially a trivial cut in council tax”?
Johnson questioned Knight’s maths and claimed his proposal wouldn’t work. But Knight pointed out that “it is something you could do as mayor to solve this gravest crisis facing the city.” And surely, even if Knight has been using an over-optimistic abacus, his case about priorities is sound. Band D London households will be better of by just £4 over the year as a result of Johnson’s move, but council tax cuts create good headlines. Meanwhile, as protesters in City Hall’s public gallery pointed out, London’s affordable housing crisis deepens.
But this is all par for the course for a below-average mayor whose energies are now, more than ever, being directed to becoming the next leader of the Conservative Party. Officially, his second term at City Hall has fifteen months to run. If he’s gone by Christmas, don’t be surprised.
Update, 18:08 A friendly contact at City Hall has brought to my attention the figures used in a GLA presentation made in January to the Haringey Council landlord forum about the progress of the London Rental Standard.
The penultimate slide says that 14,000 landlords are now accredited, of which 700 have achieved that status since the LRS was launched last May. This appears to mean that around 13,300 were already signed up to the seven separate landlord accreditation schemes that were already in existence and have been brought within the single LRS framework mentioned in the second paragraph here. Is an additional 700 a lot or very few?
A bigger win is claimed for the number of letting agent firms brought on board: 290 of these according to the presentation, all new, managing an estimated 98,000 properties. If this guarantees that all those properties are up to LRS standard it might be a result to boast about, even though the target of “100,000 landlords and agents” remains distant. Presumably, the mayor was briefed about this for Monday’s meeting. Perhaps he should have mentioned it.
