Now that the baffling, elongated, hyperreal coronation has occurred—no, not that one—and Liz Truss has become Prime Minister, a degree of intervention and action on energy bills has emerged, ahead of the looming socioeconomic catastrophe facing the country this winter. Months of Baudrillardian performance art behind us—The Cost of Living Crisis Is Not Taking Place, or so it seemed, amidst the frenzied backdrop of the Conservative leadership election—cold reality has begun to be addressed.

For half a century, household expenditure on gas and electricity has, in real terms, hovered around the £1,000 mark. On current projections, absent government action, it would have been rapidly heading towards £6,000. Even a Liz ‘no to handouts, yes to tax cuts’ Truss ministry, whether willingly or otherwise, has been forced to cover a serious chunk of this difference. To paraphrase her hero—in a manner which even the Laffer Curve-loving subsections of her party would in private admit—at this juncture, there really was no alternative.

And against this backdrop, and with swathes of the media seeming more apoplectic about the comedian Joe Lycett puncturing the cosy consensus than the government consciously sleepwalking through a crisis so as to benefit from action upon Truss’ accession, there is a danger that Truss’ interventions will be treated as the be-all and end-all in terms of the cost of living crisis. Not least in our immediate moment, as normal life is plunged into an extended period of national mourning.

A brief interregnum—as the Conservative Party membership decided who should run the country—followed by a secondary interregnum—as matters monarchical are attended to—may well precipitate a fallacious sense that all is well and rosy in Albion. Amid all this, having as it does such a decisive impact on the UK economy, time should be spent looking at the way the cost of living crisis interacts with, and is exacerbated by, the political economy of housing in the contemporary UK.

In part this is because the deleterious situation surrounding housing in the UK—a common feature of these columns—plays such a large, oversized role in economic and social life. Yes, the feted rise in energy bills—now partially offset by belated, albeit welcome, government intervention—would have represented a cataclysmic economic shock. But in a broader sense, even were we absent this phenomenon entirely, the ongoing crisis of housing afflicting the UK should be seen in a similar light.

As has been pointed out elsewhere, the cost of rent is considerably greater than even the spiralling cost of energy bills. All of this amid falling pay: the most recent labour market statistics show the average weekly wage is £25 less this year than it was last year, while staggeringly, real weekly wages are still below the levels of 2008.

A quick survey of the terrain regarding housing shows the seriousness of the situation. The most recent figures point to close to 500,000 households falling behind on rent, the highest numbers in over a decade. To put this into perspective, this is almost 100,000 households more than fell into arrears during the first year of the pandemic. Amidst this backdrop the house price unaffordability bonanza continues: as Ed Conway of Sky News recently noted, where the average individual was paid £32,000 over the last year, the average house increased in value by £39,000. Those over 65 now own almost 50% of housing wealth; rents, as I discussed in a previous column, hover around 40% of income.

As is often the case, when assessing political economic phenomena affecting and afflicting the UK, particularly in the sphere of housing, one doesn’t have to venture too far to find alternative approaches. Portugal has announced rent caps—landlords can increase rent by only 2% in the coming year. In Denmark, the government, alongside supporting parties, has announced a cap on rent increases in the private rented sector of 4% over the coming two years. And in France, too, government action is limiting the ability of landlords to raise rents—in this case, capping any increases to 3.5%.

Scotland, too, has now joined the ranks of nations intervening in the private rented sector, announcing a rent freeze and moratorium on evictions, due to run through March 2023. Though the devil is in the detail—as campaigners from Living Rent have been vigilant in stressing—this represents a hugely positive development.

The likelihood of anything similar occurring in England presently seems slim. Where Denmark, Portugal, and France respectively are capping private rent increases at 4, 2, and 3.5%, the UK government thus far has only commented on increases in the social rented sector—and here, they are proposing a 5% increase as their preferred solution. With over half of social housing residents relying on credit or buy-now, pay-later services to cover their monthly essential needs, such an increase will no doubt bring greater hardship to a group whose incomes are already 40% below that of the median.

What all this indicates is how far from such a model of renting, still relatively widespread across much of Europe, the English private rented sector has moved. Here, existing government guidance, laughably, merely notes that rent increases must be ‘fair and realistic’.

All of this reflects the political economy of housing—the political economy of renting, and of rentiers—that so shapes the contemporary UK economy: particularly so in England. As an excellent recent Tribune column from Florence Wildblood shows, tenants are finding themselves caught between a rock and a hard place: ‘either trying to find somewhere to live, competing with dozens of interested parties, or clinging on to what they have, swallowing hefty rent increases and putting up with substandard living conditions’.

The cost of living crisis is exacerbated by our long-running, ever-worsening cost of renting crisis—but this has not arisen newly in the way the energy crisis relatively has. The constituent parts—a lack of tenant protections, absence of rent controls, a dismantling of social housing provision—predate this current crisis and are not accidents of history but foundational pieces in the deliberate building of a housing regime conducive to maximum rent extraction. Unravelling this Thatcherite model of housing—neither YIMBY fantasies nor ever-growing varieties of nominally ‘affordable’ housing are serious responses—is the prerequisite to meaningful change in this sphere of economic and social life.