Mentions Nick Bano

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the housing crisis could be solved without building any more homes? There would be no carbon emissions from construction sites, no green fields covered over, no householders upset at dwellings appearing in their view. Instead, rents would become affordable and decent homes available through changes in government policy. Such is the promise of Against Landlords by the author and barrister Nick Bano, a man who has been described as “Britain’s top Marxist housing lawyer”.

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Bano would like to return, with due allowance for the fact that public housing of the time was sometimes less than perfect, to the 1970s to complete the project of driving “landlords and house-price speculators from the face of the earth”. He wants to reinstate rent controls and end no-fault evictions. It’s not entirely clear how people currently privately renting would then be housed (though it seems likely that they would become tenants of the state), or how the transition would be effected. He acknowledges that it might be a brutal process, given the dependency of the national economy on property values, perhaps involving a monumental property crash.

Bano’s arguments have already taken a bit of a battering, both from more centrist commentators and, doubtless to his delight, from the rightwing thinktank the Institute of Economic Affairs (“an edgy Maoist rebel”, it called him). These critics question, with some reason, his basis for saying that there are enough homes, in light of the fact that studies tend to show that Britain has the smallest new-build homes in Europe.