It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the Government does not want to solve the housing crisis, and that it is serving the interests of people who profit from it. The worse it gets, the more those people profit. Why do I say that? The consequence of the changes around the rents in resetting them and allowing rent increases up to market levels has been an absolute disaster. For example, in my experience, one thing that was allowed and has started to happen, which I warned would happen when the legislation came in, is that as well as people being evicted on the ground of sale, which of course has been happening on a massive scale - it is the major reason people get evicted - they are being evicted on the ground that they are overcrowded. It is a very sick development in an already disastrous housing crisis with record levels of homelessness and eviction that landlords are evicting people in order to get up to the market level, on the ground that their tenants are overcrowded because those tenants may have another child or there are too many kids in a bedroom or whatever. That is now a ground to evict people. Landlords are evicting people on that basis, and I am having to deal with them. It is disgraceful, but it was an entirely predictable consequence of what the Government did. The Government could not but know that the consequence of what it did by allowing the reset of rents on the basis of market levels was going to make an already dire situation worse. However, there are beneficiaries from this, and they are precisely the 50,000 or so people who own between three and ten properties, another few thousand who own between ten and 20 and a few hundred who own hundreds of properties. These people are making an absolute fortune. The worse the housing crisis is, the more homeless people there are. The more desperate people are, the more valuable their property assets are. The more they can charge, the more profit they make. It is difficult not to conclude that this is the interest the Government is serving. It is absolutely shameful that this is the case but I cannot see any other explanation for what it is doing when we are seeing the acceleration of the number of people who are homeless and the children and families being traumatised by it. Serious, lasting damage is being done to children and families who are particularly badly hit by this homelessness and eviction crisis. The Government should be ashamed of itself.

Sentiment score: -0.23