Back in 2001 I was a Green Party member of the London Assembly and we initiated the setting up of the Living Wage Commission. It has helped hundreds of thousands of Londoners get paid a bit more each week as employers have voluntarily adopted it’s calculations. Now, I’m suggesting we do the same for renters across the country with Living Rent Commissions that can calculate rents in their area.

And we know that rents have continued to shoot up, even though wages have not.

Last December, a report from Zoopla found that rents for new lets are £270 per month higher than three years ago.

The salaries of most renters have not gone up by a thousand pounds a year over those three years.

That is just three years. The reality of our broken housing market is that rents have jumped for more than a decade and they will carry on jumping up in future years.

The long term answer is to build social housing by the hundreds of thousands and to end the right to buy which fuels the problem of a housing market that doesn’t work for many young people.

The short term answer is a set of locally tailored rent controls. This is an established part of private renting in 16 European countries, so why not here?

And rent controls will save the government money. Between 2021 and 2025, the government spent £70bn of taxpayers’ money on housing benefit.

Even better, if the government saves billions on housing benefit, then it could invest that money in new bricks and mortar. Building social housing reduces the long term bill for taxpayers.

Government Ministers have repeatedly cited renters can challenge rent hikes through the First-Tier Tribunal (FTT), which allows tenants to challenge rent increases where they believe the increase is higher than market rates. But less than a third of renters are aware of these tribunials, with less than 10% ‘knowing a lot’ about it.

Creating a Living Wage in London made sense because people in low income jobs spend nearly all they have on just getting by and by giving them more money you benefit the local economy. By contrast, the more money that goes to rich people and corporations, the more that money forces up the price of homes as they outbid everyone to buy more assets.

The government can break that cycle by establishing a Living Rent. When 1 in 5 private tenants are spending half their wages on rent, that is because our economy isn’t working for everyone. The government are doing their best with this legislation, but if you want real change then we need big ideas like a Living Rent.