Faced with crippling borrowing costs, inflation on the up, growth almost non-existent and the world edging closer to full-blown recession, rarely has a Chancellor of the Exchequer been under greater pressure to produce some answers.
Yet the best that Rachel Reeves could pull from the hat this week was the moth-eaten ‘rent controls’, a failed old favourite of the comrades.
Desperate for any answers to an economy now at risk of serious collapse, the Chancellor let it be known she was prepared to strong-arm private landlords and cap rents to ease the cost of living.
Whereupon the inevitable happened: shares in property and housebuilding companies slid – and the Treasury issued a denial of what it had been encouraging us to believe in the first place. There would be no rent controls after all.
This tawdry episode was brief but instructive: final proof that Reeves has no clue how to manage the economy. And that, worse, in thrashing around for answers, she has been reduced to the sort of Left-wing populism certain to please Labour backbenchers but guaranteed to cripple the wealth creators upon whom we rely.
All those brave promises of fiscal rectitude made in the run-up to the 2024 general election have proved hollow. Since Reeves and Prime Minister Keir Starmer arrived in Downing Street, hard- workers and wealth producers have been hammered, while the welfare budget grows ever more bloated. Only this month it emerged that Government spending on hand-outs has surpassed income tax receipts, an astonishing state of affairs.
Ten million working-age Britons claim benefits. Yet, instead of taking an axe to a swelling army of freeloaders, this Labour Government demands the better off take all the pain, never mind the dire consequences for the shops, services, businesses and industries that depend on them.
The timing of the ill-fated rent control leak from the Treasury was no accident. The local elections take place on May 7, and ministers are braced for a drubbing.
The Chancellor has let it be known she is prepared to strong-arm private landlords and cap rents
Labour is in deep difficulty thanks to its gross mishandling of the economy and the surging cost of living. In particular, the party is being outgunned from the Left by Zack Polanski’s Greens, a bunch of Corbynites who also advocate rent controls and want to impose punishing taxes on those wealthy Britons yet to flee the country.
Yet in seeking to control private sector rents, the Left mixes lazy, knee-jerk thinking with plain incompetence. Rent caps will only serve to reduce the supply of housing at a time when Britain is badly short of places to live.
Rent controls would be deeply unfair, too. They ignore the fact that most of today’s landlords are not the exploitative Rachman-types of the post-war decades. They are ordinary working people who chose in the 1990s and 2000s to invest in property to preserve savings for retirement and were encouraged to do so.
Landlords and property owners are already under assault from Labour. The Renters’ Rights Act, which comes into full force on Friday, turns our rental market – so successfully reformed by Margaret Thatcher – on its head by clamping down on owners’ ability to evict tenants and by imposing stricter compliance rules.
The results have been calamitous for tenants including colleagues here at the Daily Mail. They have been told they must leave their current homes because landlords have decided that the best choice is to sell their properties now rather than submit to the new regime.
Thanks in no small part to Labour, the housing market is moribund. In London, the nation’s most economically dynamic region, just 5,547 new house-builds were reported in 2025 against a Government target of 88,000. Labour’s manifesto promise to build 1.5million new homes in its first parliament lies in tatters.
The latest attack on private property ownership comes as Reeves’ ‘mansion tax’ on homes worth more than £2million takes effect. Some argue that wealthier homeowners are a privileged group who can afford to pay up. But that ignores the fact that the burden of this scheme falls largely on people living in the capital and the South East, including older citizens in retirement who struggle to make ends meet.
Reeves’ flirtation with rent controls was all the more breathtaking given that she had once been firmly against them. Indeed, the hypocrisy of Labour ministers and former ministers when it comes to landlords and property owners knows no bounds.
Labour’s former minister for homelessness Rushanara Ali resigned in August 2025 when it was disclosed that, as a private landlord, she gave four tenants in her east London townhouse four months’ notice that their lease would not be renewed – before relisting the property and increasing the rent by 20 per cent!
Labour leadership contender and former Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, who came to office pledging to build homes, is still living under the shadow of an HMRC investigation into an alleged underpayment of £40,000 of stamp duty on a sea view apartment at Hove in East Sussex.
The Chancellor herself is a private sector landlord who neglected the rules. After moving into 11 Downing Street, she and her husband, a former senior civil servant, put their four-bed, detached home in Dulwich, south-east London, up for rent at a market price of £3,200 per month. But the family ‘inadvertently’ failed to obtain a renter’s licence from Southwark Council at a cost of £945.
The carelessness of Labour ministers when it comes to their personal housing investments suggests a belief in one rule for them and another for everyone else involved in residential property.
Predictably, Labour is seeking to blame our economic struggles and the high cost of living on America’s war with Iran. Yet Britain’s wrong-headed domestic tax and energy policies left us in a far worse position than most of our allies even before the bombing started.
The inflation bombshell can be laid firmly at the door of Reeves. Labour’s decision to impose an additional £75billion of taxes since taking office, the rise in minimum wages and new employment rights, have forced businesses into raising prices to survive. The ban on new drilling in the North Sea –only just now being lifted –has made Britain dependent on costly imported energy.
Talk of rent controls is of a piece with an ever-growing list of attacks on savers, enterprise and aspiration.
Capital gains and inheritance taxes have been raised, for example, placing family farming and many smaller businesses, the lifeblood of Britain’s resilient economy, in danger. VAT on private education has strangled 105 schools so far.
The abolition of non-domiciled status and a clamp on the tax privileges enjoyed by private equity investors have helped cause an exodus of wealthy residents to Monaco, Milan and Lisbon.
We are seeing this Government wage class war on Britain’s wealth creators, an approach some voters believed was banished by Tony Blair’s New Labour Government of two decades ago. Now, they know better.
A Government which came to office promising a ‘growth mission’ is failing miserably. Its high tax and spend policies have wrought havoc on commerce, while attacks on property owners, even dressed up as part of a noble battle against inflation, are mere socialist dogma.
The sad truth is that Reeves is powerless to help those suffering most from the squeeze on the cost of living. Like the Government she is supposed to serve, the Chancellor is incapable of making a difference when it matters.