The cost of living in the UK is now so high, rent controls – limits placed on rents or rent increases – are back in the spotlight.

Advocates include London Mayor Sadiq Khan and new Prime Minister Andy Burnham. And although Housing Minister Angela Rayner has said rent controls aren’t “a way forward at the moment”, the clamour for government intervention grows ever louder – especially as rents just hit record highs.

In July 2026, SpareRoom asked 5,607 UK renters for their views on rent controls. An overwhelming majority – 85% – were in support, while just 8% opposed them.

And it’s easy to see why when 32% of UK renters and 35% of London renters also told us they'd been forced to move in the past year because their rent had become unaffordable. Today, just 15% of UK renters spend less than 30% of their take-home pay on rent.

We asked renters who took part in our survey to share their views on rent controls. Here, we publish four of the best responses.

“Without rent controls, my generation won’t be able to have kids”

As a young professional working in the charity sector I strongly believe rent control is overdue in this country and that its absence has had significant implications for the economy, young people's mental health, and the falling birthrate.

Simply put, rent has spiralled, making the land-owning class in this country richer, whilst young working people are kept on stagnant wages that don't reflect the increases to our living costs.

If the government is serious about improving the standard of living for future generations, rent controls are critical to stop the problem from continuing to worsen. Without them, I genuinely don't see how we're supposed to even consider starting families!

To all my peers, the concept of ever having children is laughable when you're spending half your monthly income for the privilege of a four-bedroom flatshare in Zone 4 London.

Tara, 26, rents in a flatshare in south London

“The rental market is out of control. Nobody should be pushed to the edge of collapse just to keep a roof over their head.”

Earlier this year my landlord gave me notice on the flat I’d lived in for nine years. It was a proper home, a big studio with my own private garden, for which I paid £740 a month. He was a genuinely good landlord, who had never hiked the rent unfairly. But he decided to sell, and I had three months to find somewhere new.

That's when the panic set in. To live alone again, I was looking at £1,500 a month at the very least, or closer to £2,000 with bills. At the time I was earning £2,500 a month after tax, so I'd have been handing over roughly 80% of my income to keep a roof over my head, leaving £500 for absolutely everything else: food, transport, any semblance of a life.

The stress of it broke me, honestly. I had what I can only describe as a mental breakdown, I stopped sleeping properly, stopped showing up for work, struggled to even talk to people. My performance at work suffered, and I lost my job. So within a few months I'd lost both my home and my income.

After three months of searching while barely holding myself together, I found a flat half the size, no garden, on a noisy top floor above a busy high street. It costs £1,500 with bills, and even that I can't fully cover, because Universal Credit as a single person doesn't stretch to it. I'm still unemployed, still searching, and next month my savings run out completely. I may end up relying on food banks. I'm not unskilled or work shy, but the job market right now feels almost impossible to break into.

This is why I support rent controls. Nobody working full time should be pushed to the edge of collapse just to keep a roof over their head. People deserve a home they can actually live in, not just survive in. I don't think most people outside this situation realise how dire things have become. The rental market is simply out of control.

Damian, rents alone in north-west London

“Rent controls won’t fix our supply problem; we need to build more”

It's obvious to most people that the UK has a housing crisis, and rents are too expensive, but people disagree on the reasons for this. Right-wingers blame immigration. Left-wingers point to a major conspiracy from the elites, billionaires and landlords to artificially raise prices.

But housing is simply a supply and demand issue. We need to build lots more homes, and these might need to be built in areas where the need is highest, even if that's a new apartment block on your suburban street, or the green fields around your town.

There is strong public support for Green Belt policies, and regulations around the height of buildings. But I’ve lived in cities like Oxford and Cambridge that have excessively small footprints and very low building heights, and housing is very expensive because competition to live there is so high.

Housing growth is heavily restricted due to rules made in the 20th Century. In London, development is largely concentrated on a few regeneration areas, which is great, but why is there not lots of development in areas in Zones 1 and 2, which are already close to sustainable transport links, which at the moment solely consist of two-storey houses? As a city would naturally develop upwards as well as outwards if the supply was responding to demand, there must be something artificially pushing back. In the UK that's planning regulations. The tough reality is that our existing built environment must be changed.

Instead of rent controls, we need a planning system which doesn’t focus so much on local impacts, meaning every new development needs to go through such a lengthy, bureaucratic process, but that thinks of the bigger picture of rent prices. Perhaps we could have a new rule that next to transit stops, apartment blocks can be built to 10 storeys, speeding up and making local infill development cheaper.

We need to treat development in cities as inevitable in order to keep rents low. We need to increase supply to meet demand.

Bella, 19, rents in a flatshare in north-west London

“Rent controls would drive away landlords, leaving renters worse off”

Rent controls have the opposite effect of what the majority of people think would happen. They create a squeeze for an inevitable price rise in the future to balance out that controlled period.

That happens in two ways. First, those landlords that can raise rents prior to the date rent controls kick in do so. They set a higher price than they otherwise would if there were no rent controls in place, in order to compensate for lost earnings and factoring in future maintenance, inflation and other regulatory costs.

That causes rents to artificially spike before people even experience any benefit. Those in existing tenancies where the landlord cannot raise their rents before rent controls kick in will see their rent freeze. But once rent controls end, a rebalancing happens and rents start moving up, to account for landlords’ lost income in previous years.

Second, rent controls push more landlords out of the rental market which means reduced supply and higher demand for what’s left. People suffer due to a ‘20+ applicants per property’ situation (which we kind of already have, it will just become worse).

And, in order for landlords to compensate for lower rental value, many also start neglecting the properties which lowers standards of living.

For the government to revive the rental market they then have no option but to remove rent controls to incentivise new landlords to come and fill the gaps, but the recovery is painfully slow.

While all that’s happening, there are missed opportunities for tenants, landlords and the government, who could have been improving the housing market instead of wasting years to find out that rent controls do not work (Scotland being a perfect example).

Rental supply has already been hurt by the Renters’ Rights Act. To help tenants you have to make it easier, not harder, for landlords to operate and create a more competitive market.

Kamen, 35, is both tenant and landlord who rents in London

Have you ever rented in a country where rent controls were in place? We’d really like to hear from you. Tell us about your experience: press@spareroom.co.uk