Briefing: Living Rent Homes

Hard-pressed renters are being badly let down by the current broken housing market. The next government urgently needs to commit to building 500,000 living rent homes to give a hand-up to working renters. Genuinely affordable living rents backed by long-term security would boost living standards to give renters breathing space for today and hope for the future.

Shelter proposes that a living rent for low-earning renters would be set at a level which is affordable to low-income households. To achieve this, rents should be benchmarked to the 30th percentile of local earnings: a genuinely affordable rent would be set at a third of this level, meaning that a typical low-income household would pay around a third of their income on rent.

Institutional landlords would be able to offer long-term stable rental contracts, ending the reliance on short-term tenancies. Shelter recommends ten-year tenancies to provide long-term security for those raising families, as well as a reasonable period in which someone may attempt to increase their earnings or savings in order to access home ownership.