The Office for National Statistics has confirmed what every renter in this country already knows. Average private rents have hit £1,381 a month, up 3.5% in the twelve months to April 2026. In London the figure is far higher. In the South East it is creeping up. In supposedly affordable corners of the North, families who used to budget £600 a month now find equivalent properties listed at £900 or £1,000.

This is happening at exactly the same moment Labour's flagship "Renters' Rights Act 2025" took full effect on 1 May 2026. The Act was sold as the saviour of the private rented sector. It has, predictably, done the opposite. You cannot legislate scarcity away. You can only make it worse.

What The Act Actually Does

The Renters' Rights Act ends Section 21 "no-fault" evictions, restricts rent increases to once per year and to "market rates", and introduces a national landlord database. On paper, that sounds like extra protection for tenants. In practice, three things have happened.

First, landlords are leaving. The Section 21 surge in evictions before 1 May was real and documented — many landlords used the run-up to the Act to exit the market entirely rather than face the new regulatory regime. Second, those that remain have priced in the extra risk. Higher rents at the start of a tenancy now bake in the expectation that the landlord may struggle to remove a problem tenant later. Third, lenders have repriced buy-to-let mortgages to reflect the new uncertainty. Those costs flow straight through to the rent the tenant pays.

Supply Has Collapsed

The bigger picture is even worse. London housebuilding is at its lowest level since the Second World War. National planning permissions are at a 15-year low. NHBC registrations for new homes have collapsed quarter on quarter. Labour pledged 1.5 million new homes by the end of the Parliament. They are not even on track for half that.

When you destroy the rental supply chain at the same time as you fail to deliver new homes, you get exactly what we see today — record rents, record homelessness, record numbers of children in temporary accommodation. This is not bad luck. It is policy choice.

The Hidden Costs To Tenants

Tenants tell me the same story across Preston East. They are spending more than half their take-home pay on rent. They cannot save for a deposit. They cannot plan for children. They cannot risk turning down a contract or changing jobs because they know the next tenancy will cost £100 a month more than the one they're in. The supposed "protection" of the Renters' Rights Act delivers nothing to a tenant who simply cannot find a property to rent.

Meanwhile the housing benefit system is failing them too. The Local Housing Allowance remains frozen even as private rents climb. Big Issue research suggests more than 160,000 low-income private renters are now facing rent shortfalls of hundreds — sometimes thousands — of pounds a year. They are not work-shy. They are not "scroungers". They are working people watching the cost of a roof grow faster than their wage packet.

The Wrong Diagnosis

Labour's analysis of the rental crisis is wrong at the most basic level. They believe the problem is "bad landlords". The real problem is too few homes and too many rules. Until that changes, every "renters' rights" headline will be followed by another record-high rent figure six months later. The two are not unrelated. They are causally linked.

What Reform UK Would Do

Reform UK would tackle the rental crisis by tackling the housing crisis. We would streamline planning to unlock brownfield development and back the small and medium-sized housebuilders who Labour's planning regime has crushed. We would reform stamp duty to free up under-occupied homes. We would restore confidence in the buy-to-let market by removing the punitive double taxation on small landlords — most of whom own one or two properties, not vast portfolios.

Above all, we would tell the truth. There is no "free" intervention in the rental market. Every new rule costs tenants in higher rents, fewer choices and lower quality. Labour have legislated harder and delivered less. Reform UK would deliver more homes — and let working people get back to having a chance at a decent place to live.