Against Landlords: How to Solve the Housing Crisis
Nick Bano
Verso, 2025, £10.99
The idea that British industry is held back from fuelling a golden age of economic growth only by excessive regulation used to be a staple of right-wing think tanks. In recent years, however, it has become increasingly popular in left-wing think tanks too, with the planning laws seen as the particular enemy.
One reason for this is that people who work for left-wing think tanks have more in common with people in right-wing think tanks than they do with the rest of the population. They live in the same city and went to the same schools, for instance.
And creating a new folk-devil, the Nimby, does save an awful lot of, well, thought. Once you have given people who disagree with you a label, then you need only invoke that label to invalidate their arguments (see also ‘woke’, ‘remoaner’, ‘terf’, ‘boomer’ and many others).
So you can condemn Nimbys and sound left-wing without asking whether planning laws are really the problem when approaching 90 per cent of all planning applications are approved; without asking whether the building industry would be able or willing to participate in a boom large enough to reduce house prices noticeably; and without asking why some children go to the sort of schools that produce people who work for think tanks and some don’t.
Nick Bano, in this short and readable book, argues that our problem is not a shortage of supply but the scourge of landlordism. Fifty years ago, private landlords, from Rachman to Rigsby, were derided and the breed seemed to be on the way out. Now daytime television shows have would-be buy-to-let landlords as their heroes.
The problem, as Adam Smith and Karl Marx both argued, is that rented housing is a natural monopoly. The level of rent is set, not by competition between landlords, but by how much tenants can afford to pay for shelter. So, rather than look to more house building to solve our problems, Bano argues, we need more tenant activism and legal reforms.
At last year’s general election, the Liberal Democrats advocated an increase in house-building to 380,000 a year across the UK, but in calling for this figure to include 150,000 social homes, delivered through new garden cities and community-led development of cities and towns, we did show some concern about the form of tenure and the quality of what is delivered.
Oh, and Bano offers a neat label to use in retaliation. If someone calls you a Nimby, call them a Supply Guy in return.
Jonathan Calder
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