The rent trap: How we fell into it and how we get out of it

The Rent Trap: How we fell into it and how we get out of it' by Samir Jeraj and Rosie Walker

Tom Chance

I've had my fair share of bad landlords. One, in Reading, hid his drugs under our kitchen floorboards. When a leak caused the boards to rot, he took two months to fix it, leaving us to climb through a window into the garden and go through the back door to reach our toilet. My first London landlord tried to evict us after we refused to let his unqualified mate fix our boiler.

Even Grainger, the UK's largest landlord, which is even listed on the stock exchange, refused myself and my wife a tenancy any longer than 12 months.

Just about anybody my age or younger will be primed by similar experiences to nod along with every page turn of this book.

The authors skilfully weave together stories and statistics, giving you human depth of anecdotes backed up with evidence.

The core of the book is a convincing critique of our current private rented system, with some useful history explaining how we got here.

But the most interesting sections are based on dozens of interviews. You get a rare insight into behind-the-scenes lobbying by landlords and housing charities, and the attitudes of rather nice, reluctant landlords who twist and squirm when asked how they justify the darker side of landlordism.

You learn that it's not just tenants who are ignorant of their rights. Most landlords interviewed, including senior lobbyists, don't understand the basics either.

The book would be stronger if the authors paid some attention to the flaws of other countries' systems, which they imply are a panacea compared to ours. They note how poorly enforced our own regulations are, and how difficult that job is. But black markets, backhanders, dodgy subletting and the exclusion of the poor from city centres are well known problems in cities like New York, Stockholm and Berlin, and show that you need very good enforcement and a host of other housing and social security policies if stronger protections for private tenants are to really work.