78% of the UK supports rent controls. But why control a scam when you can abolish it?

YouGov polling from February 2026 shows 78% of the UK public support rent controls. But why regulate a scam when you can get rid of it? That’s what the Green Party is proposing.

The Green Party position

The Green Party has rent nailed in their “Abolish Landlords” policy, which was successfully voted on at their conference in 2025. The motion read:

The Private Rental Sector has failed, it is a vehicle for wealth extraction, funnelling money from Renters to the Landlord Class. This motion makes it clear Green Party policy is to seek the effective abolition of Private Landlordism.

The Green Party believes that secure, affordable Housing is a Human Right, and that a core goal for a Green Government and Green MPs is to create a fairer housing market.

The Green Party believes the existence of Private Landlords adds no positive value to the economy or society, that the relationship between Landlord and Tenant is inherently and intrinsically extractive and exploitative. That the Private Rented Sector exists to transfer wealth from the working classes to Landlords.

The Green Party believes that the Private Sector has fundamentally failed, and is continuing to fail to provide secure and affordable housing fit for working people.

The thing is, the Green Party wants to move towards social housing, which is essentially state landlordism. While it provides money for the government, people already pay council tax. Social rent is like an additional tax on housing.

Instead, home ownership should be provided through affordable monthly payments for the baseline cost of the resources and expertise that it took for the house to be built. ‘Cost price’ housing should be the aim, not just rent controls or social housing.

Housing bubble

Currently, there is a housing bubble propped up by the super rich buying properties as ‘assets’ while supply is starved off through a lack of building. The governing party is doing even worse than the Green Party’s plans through pledging to provide 1.2% of their housebuilding programme as social or ‘affordable’.

Plus, Common Wealth warned in February 2025 that Labour’s housebuilding programme risks being dominated by private equity firms charging eye-watering rents in the Build to Rent sector.

The thinktank pointed out that Build to Rent properties in the UK have increased to 20% of all new builds in recent years.

As the Green Party rightly points out, the relationship between landlords and tenants is “inherently… exploitative”. But we can do better than state landlordism and rent controls.

Featured image via the Canary