How Starmer-Rayner Blackrock-Labour bowed to corporate landlords like L&G – and it’s already backfiring

How Labour bowed to corporate landlords – and it’s already backfiring

Build-to-rent companies are in line for a windfall while private landlords get squeezed

SEE ALSO Who’s Really Buying Up Britain? (The Data Will Shock You) by British Home Group

Ruby Hinchliffe

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/property/how-labour-support-corporate-landlords-come-back-bite/

Rachel Reeves bowed to corporate landlords in her Budget just as she mounted a fresh raid on ordinary families with incomes from second properties.

Private landlords now face tens of thousands of pounds in additional bills, from tax to licensing and energy improvements – while build-to-rent developers are on track for a £3bn windfall.

Many of these firms – which include FTSE 100 companies and even banks – have long lobbied successive governments in an effort to squeeze smaller, private landlords out.

Deputy prime minister, Angela Rayer, was photographed just last month whispering in the ear of Larry Finks, BlackRock’s chief executive.

Grainger UK, whose biggest shareholder is BlackRock, currently owns over 11,000 rental homes. It is believed to be the biggest corporate landlord in England.

Legal & General (L&G) also claims to have poured over £3bn into rental investments to date.

Even Britain’s biggest bank, Lloyds, is honing in on the opportunity. Its build-to-rent company Citra Living now owns 5,000 properties and counting.

“Behind closed doors, Labour tends to be supportive of build-to-rent – but not in public,” one industry insider told The Telegraph.

Some Labour politicians have already staked a claim in the corporate landlord market. London Mayor and “renters champion”, Sadiq Khan, has said he wants to raise £187m come 2030 by building rental homes near Transport for London (TfL) stations.

To achieve this, Mr Khan needs to more than quadruple the number of rental homes on TfL’s books, from 4,000 to 20,000, by 2031. As of this year, TfL had started building 4,000 rental units – of which only around 1,500 have been delivered to date.

Dan Wilson Craw, of campaign group Generation Rent, said profit-driven institutional landlords had been linked to “unaffordable rent increases”.

He said: “Some [tenants] have had better experiences than renting from individuals with a small portfolio, but being corporate doesn’t inherently equate professionalism and long-term tenancies.

“While some pension funds [investors of build-to-rent] appear committed to longer tenancies, with limited annual rent rises, we’ve heard reports of other investment funds seeking to maximise profits through unaffordable rent increases and evictions.”

‘Are we building the ghettos of the future?’

Build-to-rent flats are often advertised as being “more energy efficient” than private rental homes, but as some residents in Wembley have found out – that’s not always the case.

Speaking to The Telegraph earlier this year, tenants of Quintain Living – a US-owned company – said they were paying 86pc more for their energy bills than the average Londoner.

This was in spite of the company advertising average savings of “56pc” on utility bills, thanks to every flat boasting an energy performance certificate rating of “B”.

A Quintain spokesman has since blamed a planning consent order, which required the developer to build two district heat networks to supply heat and hot water to the buildings.

In another case in Croydon, south London, residents in one of L&G’s £3,000 a month “luxury” build-to-rent developments have spent the last year fighting for better living conditions.

Reports from My London and Inside Croydon in September quoted some of the 251 tenants whose pets had even fallen ill from mould, which was first exposed by campaigner Kwajo Tweneboa.

Others reported collapsed ceilings and severe water leaks. L&G has since begun to fix the issues which it blamed on a “build quality issue”.

Richard Upton, a social developer and a visiting fellow at the University of Reading, said he “worries” when he sees schemes of thousands of flats going up.

“Is that a place for people to live for 20 years? With just a coffee shop underneath? This is where we need to be thinking more about mixed use, adding parks and other amenities.

“Such is the rate of inflation and the cost of new things, that those in new-build flats – especially in London – can just about afford to exist. It’s a good thing if income-to-rent ratios one day come down, if we build enough. But at what cost? Are we building the ghettos of the future?

“I fear there is a risk of quality being overlooked in the race for units. The Government wants to build 1.5 million homes. The industry calls them units.”

Rent premiums

It’s not just the varying quality of new builds erected at pace that’s worrying. Often, rents for new-builds carry a 10pc premium – much like new-build sales.

Britain’s biggest landlord, Grainger UK, collects nearly £100m in rent each year.

In May, the London Renters Union campaign group protested outside Grainger UK’s head office accusing the company of “getting rich gentrifying our city’s neighbourhoods” and “lobbying [the] Government against our rights”.

In a thread on X, formerly Twitter, the campaign group also accused the company of putting up luxury flats for rent in historically working-class areas such as Tottenham or Canning Town which are “wildly unaffordable for local people”.

“Corporate landlords and developers are tearing our communities apart, pushing us out while lining their own pockets,” one of their tweets reads.

A member of the campaign group living in Seven Sisters claimed they were forced out by a 50pc rent increase, after their landlord cited a nearby Grainger UK development as “the new market rent”.

Grainger UK disputed this and said its Seven Sisters development, Apex Gardens, is regulated by the Government’s Regulator of Social Housing and includes a high proportion of affordable homes on rents below the open market.

Grainger UK told The Telegraph that rather than lobbying against renters’ rights, it has publicly supported Labour’s Renters’ Rights Bill.

In September this year, in an official London stock market announcement, Grainger Uk said it “looks forward to continuing to use its expertise to help inform and shape the final legislation”.

A spokesman for Grainger UK said that tenants of the company in London spend just “28pc” of their incomes on rent and that it has “no control over other landlords’ pricing”.

Costly legal challenges

The challenges that come with corporate landlords are already playing out abroad. In Berlin, where 85pc of residents are renters, at least 250,000 homes are owned by corporations.

Their shareholders benefit from around 41 cents of every euro tenants pay in rent on average, according to the research arm of consumer lobby group Finanzwende.

Unprecedented rises in rents, paired with poor maintenance, has sparked city-wide protests and referendums to transfer ownership of the homes back to the state after it sold them off in the 1990s.

The city’s largest renter association told The Telegraph last year that while individual landlords typically raise rents by around 20pc, corporate ones will raise them by as much as 50pc.

One thing which is worrying England’s corporate landlords – despite all the well-received lobbying – is Labour’s plan to get rid of powers to write rent increases into contracts, as part of its Renters’ Rights Bill.

This change, once in legislation, will force corporations to serve tenants with rent notices which – unlike contracted rent increases – can be challenged in a tribunal if they do not reflect the “market rate”.

If tenants were to start challenging rent increases en masse, this could pose a serious risk to the income of these listed companies and their shareholders.

Some law firms have even suggested such “restrictions” on in-tenancy rent increases could lead to deep-pocketed landlords waging costly future legal challenges against the Labour government – particularly if rents fail to keep pace with market inflation.

 

‘Diggers letter’: Corbyn hits back at Rayner’s war on allotments

Corbyn hits back at Rayner’s war on allotments

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/08/05/corbyn-hits-back-rayner-war-allotments/
https://archive.is/Ke7oe
Former Labour leader and vegetable-growing fan accuses Housing Secretary of trying to put a nail in the coffin of a long British tradition
Tony Diver Associate Political Editor
Related Topics

05 August 2025 6:00am BST
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Jeremy Corbyn has accused Angela Rayner of hammering a nail in the coffin of community allotments after she said councils could sell them off to raise money.


https://archive.is/Ke7oe

The former Labour leader criticised his former colleague after The Telegraph revealed she had agreed for eight allotments across England to be sold since last years general election.

Writing for The Telegraph, Mr Corbyn said the decision would fill many with deep dismay and accused Ms Rayner of making the future of these precious spaces even more perilous.

Praising the Diggers, English Civil War dissidents who sought common ownership of land, he said: Is this government going to put the nail in the coffin of the joy of digging ground for potatoes on a cold, wet February Sunday afternoon?
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Mr Corbyn, who has recently turned his back on Labour to launch a new party, is a keen horticulturist and uses an allotment near his north London home.

He has said his favourite crop was marrows, and that time spent growing produce helped alleviate the stress of working in Westminster.

Ms Rayner has changed the rules on local government assets to give cash-strapped councils more flexibility to sell off land, including allotments and school playing fields.

Some of the land, including a community allotment in Storrington, West Sussex, has been sold to developers to build new homes.

Mr Corbyn said Labour should have more regard for the troubled history of land ownership, and the struggle over access by those who simply want to grow their own crops.

He wrote: Of course, social housing is desperately needed, but we need not sacrifice these vital green spaces to build it, he wrote.

We can build on ex-industrial land and take over empty properties. Even then, we should ensure social housing is accompanied by community gardens and adequate growing space.
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Under a century-old law, the Housing Secretary is required to give permission for any to be sold off by local authorities.

The list of eight allotments she has agreed to be sold were revealed in Parliament last month, and include sites in Somerset, Nottinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Hertfordshire.

Mr Corbyn has said he does not use any weedkiller on his allotment, which can make the process of weeding it laborious, but believes that each gardener has their own philosophy.

I like a marrow, he told his local newspaper earlier this year. You get a long marrow which is basically a courgette and cut it long ways; take out the seeds to plant again for next year, then fill it with chopped vegetables, onions, make some indentations in it and smother that in olive oil and bake it very slowly.

His intervention on allotment policy is one of the first criticisms of the Labour Government since he launched his new political outfit, which will be called Your Party until supporters have voted on a name.
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The party supports nationalisation of public utilities and infrastructure, and will have the support of trade unions, he said. It is also opposed to the Israeli governments assault on Gaza, but other policy decisions will be taken after a vote of members later this year.

Ms Rayner previously served in Mr Corbyns top team as shadow education secretary, before winning the deputy leadership of the party in the year Sir Keir Starmer became the party leader.

Her department said that councils should only sell off allotments where it is clearly necessary and offers value for money.

A spokesman added: We know how important allotments are for communities, and that is why strict criteria is in place to protect them, as well as school playing fields.

But the Conservatives said the policy was a kick in the teeth to local people who dont have access to their own gardens and called for the Government to do more to protect green spaces.

 

The loss of allotments makes us all poorer

By Jeremy Corbyn

News that Angela Rayner may approve allotment sales will fill many with deep dismay.

Allotments have always been under threat from developers. Now, that threat seems to have government backing, which makes the future of these precious spaces even more perilous.
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Those advising government and local authorities should have some regard for the troubled history of land ownership, and the struggle over access by those who simply want to grow their own crops.

The debate goes back to the English Civil War, when the King wanted to secure control of the land he had gained, while Cromwell claimed to speak for the farmers. In truth, it was the Diggers who were the real revolutionaries. They wanted land to be in common ownership.

Despite the restoration of the monarchy, huge areas of land were known as the Commons and survived for almost another two centuries. That is, until the greed of big landowners won out once again.
Jeremy Corbyn on his allotment with his son Tommy

The Enclosure Acts, one of the most grotesque abuses of power by Parliament, took away the growing and grazing rights of the rural poor. A monstrous attack on working-class life, the enclosures represented the widespread theft of public land, sanctioned by a parliament that was dominated by landowners.

The rural poor, left with nothing and facing starvation, were forced to migrate to industrial cities. It was in these rapidly growing industrial cities notably in Birmingham that allotments started to grow. Allotments, then, grew out of opposition to enclosures and the privatisation of common land.
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Allotments were regulated in the late 19th and 20th century and, even though numbers have since fallen, there are about 330,000 allotment plots. At least 100,000 people are on waiting lists.

Once lost, they never return

Allotments have been crucial in times of national stress. Many came out of the Second World War. Indeed, many that were established in the First World War, such as the one I enjoy in north London, have survived to this day.

Once lost, they never return. Their loss makes us all poorer, as we become more and more detached from how food is grown and how nature interacts with us.

Allotments provide a vital space for community cohesion, biodiversity and social solidarity. These parcels of land, that cannot be individually fenced, provide growing space for many people.

Many people have no access to their own garden, and an allotment gives them the opportunity to grow vegetables and fruit and observe nature.

Allotments are particularly important for people who experience stress and mental health problems. I speak to many people who would love access to them for this very reason.
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Property developers have always had their eyes on these parcels of land. Together with local authorities, they construct various arguments for building over them. Instead of contemplating sales of these wonderful spaces, the Government should be encouraging the growth of allotments, or where there is insufficient land, the growth of community and school gardens.

In my own borough of Islington, community gardens have played a vital role in bringing the community together and encouraging sustainable food production.

Of course, social housing is desperately needed, but we need not sacrifice these vital green spaces to build it. We can build on ex-industrial land and take over empty properties. Even then, we should ensure social housing is accompanied by community gardens and adequate growing space.

Is this Government going to put the nail in the coffin of the joy of digging ground for potatoes on a cold, wet February Sunday afternoon? The battle for the grass roots is on!

Jeremy Corbyn is the independent MP for Islington North

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