BLOG: Could Spain’s housing pain soon reign in Britain too?

I recently enjoyed a few weeks cycling in Spain and to my surprise, one day in a café, I spied a discarded newspaper – El Periódico de Catalunya – which had a big property story splashed across its front page.

This regional paper, like its national counterparts, had been busy reporting on Spain’s housing crisis and the incumbent left-leaning Government’s attempts to fix it.

This has included several decrees, one bringing in sweeping regulation of holiday lets and the other a ban on evictions of vulnerable people until 2030.

Unfortunately for prime minister Pedro Sánchez, his minority Government could not persuade the country’s other (mostly right-wing and pro landlord) parties to back these measures and in the face of defeat has called an general election to settle the matter.

This is important for the British property market because Spain could be a bellwether of what will happen here if, after our next general election in 2029, we are governed by a minority Labour Government. Given Reform’s popularity and Tory’s disastrous polling, this is a distinct possibility.

Evictions

Housing charity Shelter alongside lobby groups like Generation Rent and the London Renters’ Union have managed to help make the Renters’ Rights Act a reality, but so far both the Tories and Labour have shrugged off calls for rent controls or an outright ban on evictions.

But in Spain, if Sanchez’s party wins next month’s snap election, the latter will become reality, helped to a large extent by Spain’s version of Shelter (The Confederation of Tenants’ Unions) which has successfully turned Spain’s housing problems into a ‘crisis’. This has included a campaign to highlight the eviction of an 87-year-old woman from the home she had rented for decades after an investment firm bought her block and hiked her rent.

As well as regulating holiday/short lets and bringing in a Covid-style evictions ban for vulnerable tenants like her, Sanchez also hopes to stop investment funds buying up private rental blocks and to also roll forward all tenancy contracts to 2030 that were due to expire in 2028.

Could all this happen in Britain? Now, no! Andy Burnham’s speech last week made scant mention of regulating the rental market more harshly than the Renters’ Rights Act already does.

But if Reform manages to split the Tory vote at the 2029 general election and/or the Green Party weakens support for Labour, then the left-leaning parties will be under greater pressure from their younger voting bases to do something radical about the high cost of renting property in England, in the same way that is happening in Spain now.

Read more about evictions.