The Green Party candidate for London Mayor says protests outside the MIPIM property conference have her backing as they highlight that London’s rental market is out of control.

Sian Berry says “the cost of private rent is out of control” and that she herself – the only Mayoral candidate who does not own her home – risks being priced out of the capital. 

“With rents averaging half of Londoners’ take-home pay, I have faced the steep increases every time I have needed to move, and often feel like I’m one rent rise away from being pushed out of London altogether” she claims.

She says successive governments are wrongly using public finances. 

“In 2013 the government subsidised landlords with £23.8 billion of housing benefit but spent less than £4 billion on supporting new affordable housing. Instead of providing homes for people at rents we can pay, our taxes are subsidising extortionate rents on a massive scale” says Berry.

She says cosy deals between councils and developers, producing what she considers to be too few affordable homes to let, should be stopped. 

“Londoners need more than the derisory quota of 11 per cent affordable homes as promised by the monster development at Earls Court – a scheme I have already pledged to cancel if I am elected mayor next May” she says.