Rent is an Engine of Poverty in The UK
Rent is an Engine of Poverty in The UK
The JRF UK Poverty 2026 report, widely recognised as the authority on poverty in the UK, shows us that:
- 37% of private renters
- around 40% of social renters
are in poverty after housing costs and that many households are only pushed into poverty once rent is paid.
Why Housing Costs Matter
After housing costs matter because it shows what people have left to live on, not what they earn.
Freezing Local Housing Allowance while rents rise is deepening hardship. We see this every week in the lives of our members. But increasing this allowance in a housing system without rent regulation does not solve the problem. The same would go for increasing pay, a point it would serve unions to take on board if wage gains are not to be swallowed up by landlords. It just syphons money into the private rental sector, allowing landlords to raise rents to meet higher benefit ceilings and potentially wage increases. Without rent controls, public money intended to prevent poverty and to build and maintain a social housing infrastructure is instead captured as private profit: increasingly by large corporate landlords and investment firms like BlackRock.
The Impact on Communities
Towns and cities in the UK are full of HMOs of young single people excluded from the housing market, locked into perpetual renting and unable to save for even a one-bed flat. The persistence of HMOs in urban areas removes potential family homes from places where jobs, schools, and services actually are.
At the launch event, JRF has invited a small number of frontline organisations, including Food & Solidarity, to help connect the data to lived reality.
In other words, poverty is being created at the point where income meets housing costs. Increasingly it is rent, not a lack of budgeting or income, that pushes people into hardship.
Rents have risen faster than wages and faster than benefits. Local Housing Allowance has been frozen while real rents continue to climb, widening the gap people are expected to cover from already stretched incomes. The result is predictable: arrears, debt, hunger, and the constant risk of eviction. Eviction itself is a costly process both for individuals and the local authorities required to prevent homelessness, and the growing pressure on homelessness prevention budgets is already forcing councils to raise council tax to the maximum allowed or cut prevention services altogether.
Poverty by Extraction
This is poverty by extraction. Money that could be spent on food, heating, clothes, or children is instead funnelled upwards through rent.
At Food & Solidarity, we see the knock-on effects every week. Because housing pressure shows up everywhere else. Rent pressure doesn't stay neatly contained as a "housing issue". It spills over into everything else: empty cupboards, unpaid bills, stress, and crisis.
That's why we organise around housing. If our members need food parcels they will also need improvements in housing... Housing, food, and income are inseparable and treating them as separate problems guarantees failure.
Building Collective Power
People don't need more lectures about budgeting. They need collective power to push back against a system where keeping a roof over your head costs more than you can afford.
Poverty isn't a mystery.
It is created and perpetuated by the system in which we live.
