The National Housing March - We're Marching on 18 April. Here's Why.
We're Marching on 18 April. Here's Why.
On 18 April, thousands of people from more than 40 organisations will march through Central London to demand rent controls, a freeze on service charges, and council homes not luxury flats. Food & Solidarity will be there. We want you to come with us whoever you are, whatever your situation.
Our Three Demands
- Demand 1Rent controls now
- Demand 2Freeze on service charges
- Demand 3Council homes, not luxury flats
The Housing Crisis Is Destroying Our Communities
When rents rise, whole neighbourhoods change. The people who built communities who know their neighbours, who use the local school, the local shop, the food bank get pushed out. The housing crisis doesn't just affect renters. It hollows out the places we all live in.
Sky-high rents are forcing people to cut back on essentials like food and heating. Families are being pushed out of their homes altogether, cut off from family, friends, and community. Homelessness has reached record levels. There are an ever-increasing number of homeless deaths. Disabled renters face discrimination and cannot secure accessible homes. Institutionally racist housing associations and council landlords neglect and mismanage estates damaging our health and letting children like Awaab Ishak die.
This is not bad luck or mismanagement. It is the result of decades of political choices. For too long, successive governments have prioritised the desire of private developers and corporate landlords to make a profit over our need for affordable, secure, accessible homes. This can't go on. It's time to fight back.
Why Rent Controls And Why They Matter to You
Rent controls aren't an abstract political demand. They have a direct material impact on how much money you have to live on, what you can feed your children, and whether your wages or benefits actually reach you.
The JRF UK Poverty 2026 report the most authoritative poverty research in Britain shows that 37% of private renters and 40% of social renters are in poverty after housing costs. Many households are only pushed into poverty once rent is paid. The problem isn't income. It's what rent takes from that income before anything else gets a look in.
of their income goes on rent for the average London renter. In the 1980s, with rent controls in place, that figure was 10%.
If you're a worker rents have risen faster than wages. In the 1980s, when the UK had robust rent controls and significant council housing, the average person spent 10% of their income on rent. Today that figure is 33% nationally rising to 45% in Manchester and 57% in London. Without rent controls, any pay rise you win can simply be absorbed by a landlord raising your rent. Your wages don't reach you. They flow straight upward.
If you're on benefits either working or not Local Housing Allowance has been frozen while real rents continue to climb. The gap you are expected to cover from an already stretched income keeps widening. And between 2021 and 2026, up to £70 billion of government money will flow directly to private landlords through housing benefit public money that should be building social housing, instead being captured as private profit by corporate landlords and investment firms like BlackRock.
If you're a social housing tenant the system that was supposed to protect you has been run down. Social rents are rising. Service charges for maintenance, cleaning, administration are rising faster still, with no regulation and no cap. In some buildings, service charges have doubled in three years, hitting elderly and disabled residents on fixed incomes hardest. Waiting lists are growing. Nearly 40% of social renters are in poverty after housing costs. Rent controls and a freeze on service charges are not separate demands they are two sides of the same fight for homes that are genuinely affordable to live in.
If you're young and locked out of the housing market this is why. Towns and cities are full of HMOs occupied by people who can't save a deposit because rent takes everything. You are not failing at saving. You are being locked out deliberately by a system that treats your housing costs as someone else's investment return.
If you're a parent food insecurity rose by 2.8 million people 60% between 2021 and 2024. Housing costs are a primary driver. Money that should go on food, heating, and your children is being funnelled upward through rent. We see this every week at Food & Solidarity. People who come to us for food parcels are not struggling because they can't manage money. They are struggling because rent has taken what there is to manage.
Are you children going to leave home soon? are you worried how they will afford to make a life for themselves, to get their own place?
If you're a community member who owns your home, rising rents are pushing your neighbours out. The people who have lived on your street for decades, who volunteer at the food bank, who know the kids on your road they are being displaced. Rent controls don't just protect renters. They protect the communities we all live in.
What Institutional Racism in Housing Looks Like in Practice
Awaab's Law was the direct result of a child dying from black mould in social housing while his family's complaints were ignored. But the law means nothing if the same neglect continues under different management.
One of our members, Hanan Abdulla, is a mother of five who reported black mould, rotting fixtures, and damp so severe it short-circuited her shower to her council landlord, again and again, for eight years. Eight years. Her children grew up in those conditions. The council ignored her until we forced their hand.
One person complaining is easy to ignore. Five hundred people standing together are not. That is what Food & Solidarity exists to do.
Hanan's family are not unusual. They are what institutional racism in housing looks like in practice. The black mould crisis in Newcastle affects households across the city. Residents of Breamish House lived with collapsing ceilings and spreading damp while the council processed their complaints and took photographs and did nothing. These are not individual failures of individual officers. They are a systemic pattern and systemic patterns require collective power to change.
The connection between disrepair and poverty runs in both directions. Rent that consumes 33%, 45%, or 57% of income doesn't just leave you unable to afford food and heating it leaves you unable to afford to be a difficult tenant. The threat of a rent increase or eviction keeps people silent about conditions that are making their children sick. Rent is an engine of poverty, and that poverty is enforced through the same power imbalance that keeps damp on the walls.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation's annual UK Poverty Report is the most widely cited poverty research in Britain it sets the terms of the national debate. At this year's launch, JRF invited a small number of frontline organisations to stand alongside the data and connect it to lived reality. Food & Solidarity a volunteer-run community group from Newcastle was one of them. One of our members spoke directly at that event about how rent extraction drives poverty in their own life skip to 34 minutes to hear it.
JRF UK Poverty 2026 Webinar
What We're Demanding And Who We're Targeting
We are part of the national Homes for Us alliance. Our demands are specific. Our targets are named.
Nationally: Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook has the power to act. The Homes for Us alliance is demanding two things from him above all else: rent controls so that landlords cannot raise rents beyond what people can afford and a freeze on service charges, which are currently unregulated, uncapped, and rising faster than rents in many buildings, hitting social housing tenants hardest. He has not acted on either. On 18 April we are going to London to make sure he knows the cost of continued inaction.
Regionally, we have two mayors and they tell very different stories.
Kim McGuinness, North East Mayor, has spoken publicly about the housing emergency facing our region, set up the country's first Child Poverty Reduction Unit, and chairs the Great North the pan-regional group of northern mayors with direct access to the government that could act on rent controls. She cannot implement rent controls herself. But she can use her platform and her relationships in Whitehall to demand that Pennycook acts. We are calling on her to do exactly that publicly, specifically, and now. We will be making that demand alongside our partners across the North East. Watch this space.
Ben Houchen, Tees Valley Mayor, presides over a region where nearly 50,000 children live in poverty and where Middlesbrough has one of the highest Universal Credit claimant rates in the country. He was the only northern mayor to refuse to sign the letter calling for the two-child benefit cap to be removed the same cap that pushed thousands of his own residents deeper into poverty. His Teesworks development handed £500m of public money and a 90% stake in a publicly-owned regeneration site to two private developers without a public tender and as a direct consequence, his region missed out on £7bn of housing funding that went to every other major combined authority in England. He now sits in the House of Lords on a Boris Johnson peerage.
The housing crisis is not an accident. It is the result of political choices made by people like Ben Houchen, in rooms most of us are not invited into, with money that belongs to all of us. That is what we are marching against on 18 April. And because he holds a national platform in the Lords, we will be making clear that his choices and his record are part of this national story.
Locally: Newcastle City Council is the largest social landlord in Newcastle. It has nearly 2,000 unresolved damp cases. Breamish House residents organised, documented their conditions, and refused to be ignored and as a result, we have won a meeting with senior housing officers. We are going into that room with residents, with specific demands, and with a deadline. If the council does not deliver, the story on 18 April is: Newcastle City Council had 2,000 unresolved damp cases. Residents came to a meeting. Nothing changed. We will be saying that on a national platform, in front of 40+ organisations, to the Housing Minister who funds this council's housing programme.
That is the pressure that moves institutions. Not a petition. Not a polite letter. Organised people with documented evidence, a specific ask, and a national platform to escalate from if they don't act.
We've Been Building to This
Food & Solidarity's 500 members are part of a growing national alliance. Alongside organisations like Acorn Manchester and groups from across the country, the Homes for Us alliance has been building the kind of power that forces politicians to the table.
Last week, our rent control campaign was featured at Organising 4 Power the global organising training programme co-founded by the late Jane McAlevey and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, which has trained more than 40,000 organisers from 1,800+ organisations across 115 countries. Our work was held up as an example of how community organisations outside of labour can identify strategic targets and build real power to win measurable change. A volunteer-run community group from Newcastle, on an international platform. That is what collective power looks like.
We hosted the first Northern regional meetup right here in Newcastle, bringing housing groups across the region together. We marched in Manchester and won a meeting with Andy Burnham on rent controls. We sat at the national alliance summit and planned the next steps. In January we travelled to Sheffield with Northern housing groups to sharpen our organising ahead of April. And we've been doing the quieter work too building tenant power neighbour by neighbour because that is where all of this begins.
18 April is where all of that leads.
Come With Us
On 18 April, join private renters, social housing tenants, people locked out of renting entirely, people in temporary or emergency accommodation whatever your status workers, Disabled people, people of colour and migrants and everyone who believes housing should be a right, not a commodity on the streets of London. Say no more. Another housing system is possible but only if we stand together and fight for it.
Book your coach place at housingdemo.org or if you're not sure yet, join F&S below and we'll keep you updated as the date gets closer.
Coach travel will be accessible. If you have mobility or access needs, get in touch and we'll make sure you can be part of the day.
Can't make it to London? The NCC meeting and the regional campaign are happening right here. The national demo is the escalation but the local fight is just as real, and it needs you too. Every person who joins Food & Solidarity adds to the collective power that makes institutions move.
This march is for everyone, regardless of your immigration status, your housing situation, or whether you've ever been to a demonstration before. If you're in Newcastle, you won't be going alone.
Join Food & Solidarity and we'll keep you updated on the NCC meeting, the regional campaign, coach travel, and everything you need before the day. no commitments, no judgement just add your name to ours.
You don't have to be a renter to join this fight. You just have to believe that where people live and what it costs them matters.
Frequently Asked Questions
Everything you need to know about the march, the demands, and the housing crisis.
The march takes place on 18 April at 1pm through Central London. Thousands of people from more than 40 organisations will be marching to demand rent controls, a freeze on service charges, and council homes instead of luxury flats. Food & Solidarity will be there book your coach place at housingdemo.org.
The march calls for: (1) rent controls specifically demanding Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook act to stop rents rising beyond what people can afford; (2) a freeze on service charges in social housing, which are currently unregulated and have doubled in some buildings within three years; and (3) council homes built to meet housing need, not luxury flats built for developer profit.
Matthew Pennycook (Housing Minister) who has the power to implement rent controls and freeze service charges nationally but has not acted.
Kim McGuinness (North East Mayor) who chairs the Great North group of northern mayors and can use her access to government to publicly demand Pennycook acts on rent controls.
Ben Houchen (Tees Valley Mayor, now in the Lords) whose region missed out on £7bn of housing funding after the Teesworks deal handed public assets to private developers without a public tender.
Newcastle City Council which has nearly 2,000 unresolved damp cases and faces a deadline from residents and Food & Solidarity ahead of the march.
According to the JRF UK Poverty 2026 report, 37% of private renters and 40% of social renters are in poverty after housing costs are paid. Many households are only pushed into poverty once rent is deducted from their income.
In the 1980s, when rent controls and significant council housing were in place, the average person spent around 10% of their income on rent. Today the national average is 33%, rising to 45% in Manchester and 57% in London. Any pay rise workers win can be absorbed immediately by a landlord raising the rent.
After rent is paid, many households have too little left for food, heating, and basic essentials. Food insecurity in the UK rose by 2.8 million people 60% between 2021 and 2024, with housing costs among the primary drivers. Food & Solidarity sees this every week: people who come to us for food parcels are not struggling because they can't manage money they're struggling because rent has taken what there is to manage.
Between 2021 and 2026, an estimated £70 billion in public housing benefit will flow directly to private landlords, including large investment firms like BlackRock. Local Housing Allowance has been frozen while real rents keep climbing. That is public money which could instead fund the construction of social housing but instead is captured as private profit.
Awaab's Law was passed after a child died from black mould in social housing while his family's complaints went unanswered. It places new duties on landlords to address damp and mould. However, without proper enforcement, the same institutional neglect continues as with our member Hanan Abdulla, ignored for eight years, and the residents of Breamish House who lived with collapsing ceilings while the council took photographs and did nothing.
Yes. Coach travel from Newcastle will be accessible. If you have mobility or access needs, get in touch and Food & Solidarity will make sure you can be part of the day. Book your place at housingdemo.org or join Food & Solidarity to be kept updated on travel arrangements.
Yes to both. The march is open to everyone regardless of housing situation homeowners, renters, and everyone in between. Rising rents hollow out communities for all of us. And if you can't get to London, the local fight in Newcastle is just as real: the NCC meeting, the regional campaign, and Food & Solidarity's organising all need people too. Join us here no commitments.
