Here’s a question for you: is it ever OK for a Member of Parliament to be a landlord? The scandal surrounding (now former) homelessness minister Rushanara Ali’s treatment of four tenants in east London begs us to ask the question.
Ali resigned last night after The i Paper revealed that she had told tenants she was selling their home, only to relist it weeks after they left for £700 a month more in rent.
As it stands, this is legal, but as soon as next year, under the Renters’ Rights Bill crafted by Ali’s own department, it will be banned.
And that is why advisers and ministers probably decided Ali had to go.
Until the Great Reform Act of 1832, you could only be a member of Britain’s Parliament if you were a landowner. Landlords had enormous influence over Britain’s laws until very recent history.
In Ali’s own words, this Labour Government had vowed to be the one to stop “private renters being exploited” through its rental reforms.
The i Paper revealed Ali had forced tenants to leave before raising the rental price of her east London propertyThe Tories first promised to “reform private renting” when Theresa May was prime minister. They then failed, over and over again, to get their legislation, which would have made tenancies more secure and restricted evictions, past their own backbenchers – a huge number of whom were private landlords.
Labour were then elected after pledging to get this done. As Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner told me in an interview before her party’s landslide victory, banning Section 21 no-fault evictions would be top of her agenda if she entered government.
True to her word, Rayner – along with housing minister Matthew Pennycook – pushed ahead. And, within their first year in office, they got the Renters’ Rights Bill through Parliament relatively unscathed in terms of amendments. No mean feat.
But Ali – herself a minister in the very department working hard on this contentious rebalancing of power between landlords and renters – was doing things that Labour was trying to tell private landlords they could not do.
Her actions blew the Government’s claim to be on the side of renters wide open, both politically and morally, while exposing them to serious allegations of hypocrisy.
As shadow Housing Secretary, James Cleverly, told The i Paper it looked like a case of “do as I say, don’t do as I do” for Britain’s first Labour government in 14 years.
Of course, the Tories were no strangers to claims of hypocrisy when they were in power – just look at the “Partygate” scandal.
square LABOUR PARTY ExclusiveHomelessness minister threw out her tenants - then increased rent by £700 a month
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But such hypocrisy damages public trust in politicians. It also forces the question of whether people who are close to legislation while having vested interests in its outcome and the ability to learn about loopholes, should ever be in the room when decisions are made?
Since Labour were last in office, the world has changed. The private rented sector has swelled – almost doubling in size to almost five million households. Many of them are families with children.
The problem, as Ali’s actions demonstrated, is that landlords can sell homes from underneath their tenants, raise the rent, or, even, simply change their minds. This throws renters into the chaos of having to pack up and move, sometimes with children who need to stay near schools in tow.
Perhaps the reason it has been so hard to move the dial on this issue is the sheer number of landlord MPs. There are, in fact, more landlords in this Parliament than there were in the last and, in a turn for the books, Labour has more landlord MPs than the Tories.
Can people who make money from renting out property be trusted to oversee laws which are meant to protect renters? Can they be balanced? Should they be involved when they have skin in the game?
Ali joins a long line of landlord politicians who have stirred up public discontent while her colleagues worked urgently, often against the grain of sentiment in Westminster, to try and redress one of this country’s most obvious imbalances of power.
This was electorally damaging, politically problematic and, above all, a moral problem for Labour. And, for as long as there are landlord MPs on the front benches of major political parties, these contradictions will never disappear.
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