There are patients who stay with you for life. Moments of indelible tragedy when healthcare reaches its limits. Giving chest compressions to Adam*, a boy rushed in from home who had stopped breathing, is one of those junctures.
Just two days prior, during an admission for wheeze, Adam’s worried parents had reported that the damp in their private-rented home was contributing to his symptoms. Now, here he was, despite the best efforts of staff, lying motionless on the trolley in front of me, his body in a state of physiological chaos, his life support systems in irretrievable failure.
Adam’s untimely death wasn’t just caused by illness – it was the result of conditions that made illness inevitable; the daily violence shaping the lives of millions of children and young people entangled in an unforgiving private rented sector across the UK.
While the effects of damp and mould on growing lungs have rightly gained salience, policymakers still turn a blind eye to how record-high rents threaten the life chances of our youngest and future generations.
Scribbling unaffordable housing costs in the medical notes has now become as customary as listening for a heart murmur or ordering blood tests. I’ve lost count of the number of times parents have told me that spending ever more on rent means little left for healthy food, energy bills, transport and the staples needed for a thriving childhood.
I’m not alone; 63% of UK health workers have seen patients who describe expensive rent as a concern for their health, according to polling from last year commissioned by Medact, a charity that supports health professionals to address the political and economic roots of illness. Colleagues in clinics, emergency departments and community centres in all corners of the NHS are seeing the same story repeated again and again.
Rents have outstripped wages for decades, and now over two million renters spend over 30% of their income on rent. Despite hard-fought gains by campaigners, revisions to the Renters Rights Act coming into effect today contain no robust mechanisms to address affordability. Without stabilising rent hikes – by limiting annual rent rises to the lower of wage growth or inflation, for example – households will continue to experience de facto Section 21 ‘no-fault’ evictions, with families left curbside facing temporary accommodation and appalling conditions that endanger young lives.
By the end of last year, 176,130 children were living in temporary accommodation in England, the twelfth consecutive record high and a 6% increase on the previous year. Left to pick up the tab, cash-strapped local authorities spent a combined £2.8bn on temporary accommodation in 2024/25.
At the same time, colossal sums of public funds that could be spent on addressing social housing needs are being directed to subsidise private landlords via local housing allowance. The UK government is projected to pay over £70bn in housing support to private landlords in England between 2024/25 and 2028/29.
This absurd fiscal contradiction underscores the primacy of wealth-extraction, profit-maximisation and the commodification of shelter for the developer-landlord whilst worsening a crisis of distributive injustice for those trying to get by. That this glaring paradox often goes unmentioned in the media reflects a warped discourse that undermines a national conversation on corporate lobbying, democratic accountability and housing justice.
It speaks to a deeper structural problem; inequities in our health and life chances arise from inequities in power. Landlords are disproportionately overrepresented in Parliament; lawmakers’ interests are antithetical to those of renters, and that’s before you even examine the opportunities for corporate state capture created by the powerful developer-landlord lobby.
The way in which renters lose out as a result of this was on full display this week, when housing secretary Steve Reed and housing minister Matthew Pennycook outright refuted the prospect of rent freezes less than 48 hours after they were teased by the chancellor. No 10 has since ruled the plan out. Six months earlier, Reed had held “emergency” talks to slash a requirement for 35% of newbuild developments to be affordable housing after developers lobbied the government to cut the target to 5%, according to a leaked memo reported on by the i.
In this context, the amendments to Right to Buy the government announced this week fall short of meeting the gravity of the political moment. A ban on selling social homes in the first 35 years after they are built and a requirement for social tenants to have lived in their homes for ten years, not three, before they can apply to purchase them are small steps towards protecting social housing stock, but are dwarfed by decades of haemorrhage and a succession of missed building targets.
At next week’s local elections in England and national elections in Scotland and Wales, fairness and affordability in the private rented sector will take front and centre stage for thousands of increasingly frustrated neighbourhoods and wards. That there is such strong support for rent controls among the public and health workers reflects how years of tinkering at the edges have failed.
Whilst local authorities remain powerless to stabilise rents, regional mayors are calling more explicitly for powers to do so, and the Green Party and Plaid Cymru are offering voters a compelling alternative to decades of inaction that have failed to meet the scale and urgency of a now mass-produced everyday hardship. Given the plurality of possibilities, the prospect of new electoral configurations that could promote electorally resonant policy demands is real.
Although rent controls would provide protection for those most exposed to the acute harms of the unaffordability of private renting, they must be viewed as just one element in a holistic re-imagining of a just housing system. They should be implemented attentively and be linked with policies that address the route causes of unaffordability such as extractive land and development models.
Civil society organisations, tenant unions and communities that have turned out in their thousands last month to push for radical change recognise the need for a comprehensive policy suite and are continuing to call for mass social home building, the resocialisation of existing housing stock and devolution of powers and resources to allow local authorities to acquire the homes of landlords exiting the rental market.
As communities prepare to vote and be heard in an electoral and political moment that’s wide open, the desperation for an alternative system is palpable. Our next generations are counting on safe, secure and affordable housing. Time tragically ran out for Adam and his family. We know why – and we know how to stop it happening again.
*This name has been changed
