There's a lot of muttering right now from the landlord lobby that they'll be putting up rents because of changes to the tax regime and expected increases in interest rates. 

The threats would sound scarier if rents weren't already going up faster than inflation. The fact is many landlords will use any excuse to put up the rent when they get the chance. Many others value their tenants, and won't. 

If you face a rent hike, you don't need to accept it. We've put together a 3 minute video on what to do to avoid paying too much.

Today the government announced a raft of measures that will be in the Housing Bill that being is being prepared for Parliament later this year.

Sadly much of the focus was on the extension of the duty to all landlords to check the immigration status of their tenants. We’ve already expressed our opposition to this policy elsewhere, but it is particularly galling that this is being taken forward when there has been no public analysis of the West Midlands ‘pilot scheme’, and other groups have seen cases of it increasing discrimination in lettings.

Despite this policy dominating the headlines, though, the Department for Communities and Local Government has also announced more welcome plans to improve the systems for tackling rogue landlords.

Environmental Health News (EHN) has done us all a huge service by publishing a list of landlords with convictions for housing offences.

For the first time we know the 2,006 companies and individuals who have been successfully prosecuted, but this figure is dwarfed by the 740,000 private rented households estimated to have hazards dangerous to human health. And the landlords in question get away with fines that hardly make a dent on the income they get from rents.

This has to stop.

A blog from guest writer Zeph Auerbach asks - how much personal responsibility do we have for the housing crisis?

Now that the election is over, and Eurovision is a distant memory, London turns back to its favourite moan: the housing crisis.  I frequently share this moan with my mixed group of friends: some renters, some homeowners, some letting out the odd room or flat.  This conversation always seems to have an 'in it together' atmosphere, as we berate the property speculators, the oligarchs with vacant mansions, and most of all our government, which clearly sees its role as sustaining the rise in house prices (Help to Buy, pension reforms, reductions in stamp duty and so on). 

But we ignore the elephant in the over-valued and under-sized room.  This is an elephant which you'd see, if you looked hard enough, lurking in the corner of almost every Independent or Guardian article decrying the housing crisis. The elephant in the room is simply this: we find ourselves on opposing sides of this ‘crisis’ and for some of us this ‘crisis’ is something we profit from and sustain.

Having won the election, George Osborne used his first Budget of the parliament to rifle through the pockets of his vanquished political rivals. He abolished non-dom status for permanent UK residents and announced an increase in the minimum wage, dubbing it the Living Wage in the process - both more or less Labour election policies. 

And he nicked a Green Party policy by cutting tax relief for landlords. 

The first Register of MPs' Interests of the new parliament was published last week. A comb through the data reveals that there are 126 residential landlords in Parliament. Landlords make up only 3% of the population but they are represented by 19% of the House of Commons (the same proportion of the UK population who rent privately).

The buy-to-let ‘boom’ that has occurred over the last twenty years, coinciding with the huge growth of the private rented sector more generally, has meant this kind of mortgage has been normalised within the British psyche, but without perhaps enough analysis of what it means for the economy and wider society.

At least six renters in London have been ripped off to the tune of £30,000 since April by a fraudster posing as a landlord. 

The Met Police have issued an alert today for information to catch the suspect, pictured below, and have asked members of the public to call 101 and quote reference 1217609/15.

Although the main housing elements of today’s Queen’s Speech were reported in the week leading up to the announcement, it’s still very disappointing to have a housing bill outlined today that does nothing for the 11 million (and growing) private renters in this country.

It's great that Labour is looking at cutting tax breaks for bad private sector landlords, but they should be targeting them all.