Generation Rent

GUARDIAN'S TOP BOOK ON THE UK HOUSING CRISIS

'An essential read about a broken housing market.' – Peter Apps, Inside Housing


If paying rent feels like a second tax — and saving for a deposit feels impossible — you’re not imagining it. Across the UK housing market, millions of people are stuck in the rent trap: high rents that can exceed mortgage payments, tiny and poorly maintained flats, insecure tenancies, deposit battles, and the constant stress of being forced to move with little notice.

Generation Rent is Chloe Timperley’s razor-sharp, eye-opening investigation into Britain’s housing crisis and the death of the homeownership dream. It shows how we went from a post-war era of affordable council housing and rising ownership to an economy where homes became financial assets, property investment vehicles, pension pots and “wealth machines” — while a whole generation haemorrhages cash to landlords.

This book tackles the big questions renters, first-time buyers, parents and policymakers keep asking:
Why are house prices so high? Why is renting so expensive? Why can’t a reliable tenant get a mortgage? Who benefits from the current system — banks, developers, buy-to-let investors, letting agents, freeholders — and who is being squeezed out?

Inside you’ll uncover:
• The real mechanics behind runaway house prices: land scarcity, planning permission politics, mortgage credit, money creation, low interest rates and quantitative easing
• How Right to Buy, the sell-off of council homes, and the shrinkage of social housing reshaped affordability and security
• The rise of buy-to-let and the “House of Landlords” — and why renters and investors end up bidding on the same starter homes
• The hidden pitfalls of modern “solutions”: Help to Buy, shared ownership, leasehold flats and leasehold houses, ground rent clauses, service charges and the “mortgaged tenant” reality
• The lived experience of private renting: poor standards, repairs ignored, overcrowding, homelessness pressure, housing benefit gaps, and the fear of no-fault eviction

Most importantly, Generation Rent doesn’t stop at diagnosis. It sets out realistic, radical action to restore common sense and decency: stronger tenant rights, better regulation of the rental market, genuine affordable housing at scale, a...