Earlier this summer, after months of screeching U-turns, the government embraced the worst of its nature — ending the eviction ban and exposing hundreds of thousands of renters to the capricious whims of their private landlords.

While the vaccine rollout has led to a blanket insistence that the UK is “over the worst of the pandemic,” around 686,000 renters remain on furlough. 445,000 are in rent arrears and many are facing losing their home. Keir Starmer, never one to let a national crisis get in the way of his avowed lack of politics, sits on his thumbs. That leaves individual MPs, city mayors, and tenant unions to take up the call for a sidelined policy: rent controls.

When rent controls last existed in the UK, the number of private renters fell by 80 percent. Quick to paint this as a dystopian development for tenants, landlords’ associations deliberately misrepresent the situation by equating the reduction in the private rented sector to a national housing crisis: they tell a story of venal populists poaching the votes of naïve serfs with simplistic, cosmetic fixes. Rent controls, they argue, drive well-meaning landlords out of the market and leave tenants with nowhere to turn.