Are landlords greedy like Labour says? (Greedy Landlords part 1)
Angela Rayner has attacked "greedy landlords" because the tax payer is forecast to be paying private landlords £13Bn in housing benefit by 2028. The amount paid to landlords in 2019-2020 was £9.9Bn and rose to £12.1Bn in 2022-23. However the number of claimants has increased. In 2019-20, the number of Housing Benefit claimants was 1.5m and has risen to 1.8m in 2022-23 So let's divide the spend by the number of claimants: 2019 £6,600 per claimant 2022 £6,722 per claimant So these "greedy landlords" are getting and additional £122 per year for each claimant. If I plug £6000 into the Bank of England inflation calculator, it would be £7,449 in 2022. So rent payments per claimant have not increased in line with inflation - they have dramatically fallen behind by £727! So it looks like the "greedy landlords" are not as greedy as the narrative that Labour wants you to believe. The real message from this data is not Landlords but the Benefit B...