Admittedly, the recent Scottish experience also shows that the re-introduction of rent controls can be difficult. It can lead to urgent rack-renting, as landlords exploit the last of the sunshine to make their hay. Structural changes in the economy are often painful to implement.
But the question that faces us is whether the disease is worse than the cure.
This is a question that we ought to put to the UK’s world-beating homeless population, to the tenants paying increasingly unaffordable rents, to the taxpayers and employers who are sponsoring those payments, and to the homebuyers who are forced to compete with the money-printing system of buy-to-let landlordism.
Rent controls may have their disadvantages, but their absence is intolerable.
An aversion to free-market landlordism is not nearly as bizarre or outrageous as it sounds. Calls to increase the numbers of first-time buyers or to boost the amount of social housing are, by definition, demands for a smaller private rented sector, as the households concerned move from one form of tenure to another.
And we have come startlingly close to abolishing the private rented sector altogether. In the mid-1970s, there was a broad consensus that private landlordism was shrinking so quickly that it would soon reach the point of collapse. Conservatives responded with a mixture of enthusiasm and indifference, as private renting gave way to the other, better, forms of tenure.
Past experience shows that a decline in the private rented sector does not amount to a decline in the number of homes, but instead to the retooling of those homes as owner-occupied or social housing. When land markets are not dominated by uncontrolled rent-seeking, it also becomes much easier for local authorities to acquire sites for new affordable homes.
Indeed, it is remarkable that the Conservatives have become so convinced that private landlordism is such a good, necessary thing, given the horrifying realities of the present housing situation.
Anyone who rents today will have come to see the annual rent-gouging ritual as an inevitable and natural fact of life. But it needn’t be, and those soaring housing costs have broad and drastic implications for everyone.
It is within our ability to put a stop to this, and to return to the sensible, popular mechanism that so successfully dominated twentieth century housing policy. We know from experience that it worked – that it was (to use the words of Conservative ministers) “fair to both landlords and tenants”.
It is time to admit that the experiment in abolishing rent controls has failed.
