Against Landlords, How to Solve the Housing Crisis, With Nick Bano

Britain has become a nation of renters and landlords. Building more housing is not the solution. Housing crisis lawyer Nick Bano proposes that it is rent not house prices that is at the core of the problem. Despite economic boom and bust, why has the cost of housing continued to skyrocket since the 1970s? Bano argues that rents have also continued to rise – supported by housing benefit payments and weakening housing laws on evictions. The state has colluded with the market as social housing provision has been replaced by payments, spiralling ever higher.

Against Landlords shows that a permanent crisis is not a happenstance of global economics or political incompetence, but has been engineered on purpose. Such a crisis has resulted in the fire at Grenfell and widespread precarity for renters.

Bano’s radical diagnosis show why the solutions proscribed by diverse experts have gone wrong, and what we should do about. It is firstly a problem of the law, and this demands immediate reform to questions of property and land values. Then, policy: the laws concerning renting and landlordism. Finally, it is question of supply: where to build and who for.

Nick Bano is an author and Barrister who specialises in representing homeless people, residential occupiers, and destitute and migrant households.

His book – Against Landlords – will be discounted at the event

Refreshments included