Onwards we forge into the breach of the ever-changing market of 2025. Positivity has not been plentiful, although the language has really changed in recent weeks. I’m more hopeful than I was for an acceptable economic outcome, and some house price progress too, in relatively short order (not necessarily before the end of 2025, but - right now - 2026 looks OK).

What do we know for sure? The poisonous pill of the Renters’ Rights Bill - sounding like a special edition of the Socialist Worker, or similar - which really, in truth, is a bunch of Government appointees deciding what’s best for renters and what to spend their money on. Hold on - I thought this was about putting more onerous obligations on landlords? Well, it is. But only a fool doesn’t understand the argument that this simply passes extra costs on to the tenant. The well-researched will know that the academic studies pitch the percentage of pass-through at between 60% and 80% of the cost increase - rental property is inelastic.

At a time of a shortage of stock, with high demand from migration - you’d be pushed to believe it would be at the lower end of that range. If only the debate was framed like that at a parliamentary level, I genuinely believe that the participants would think a lot more carefully. But it isn’t, and they aren’t. Four legs good, two legs bad as the great George Orwell writes in Animal Farm. Landlords must be inherently evil, and are being treated as such.

Let’s also just remember what’s alongside. We are actually four years away, now, from genuine ZIRP. The Zero-Interest-Rate Policy. It wasn’t until December 2021 that we started to move the base rate back upwards - but it was Summer ‘21 when Andy Haldane - chief economist at the Bank of England at the time - was shouting about inflation in the pipe (and earlier in 2021 when some of us, ahem, were making exactly that point). We moved off zero on the gilt yields in around March 2021. It was comparatively slow progress until “The Lettuce” (Ms L. Truss) was upon us, and then it was a very fast and uncomfortable progress indeed until the Bank of England intervened.