Jasper de Groot, Founder of Pararius and Treehouse
“Britain is walking a path the Netherlands walked first, and Britain should pay attention to where it leads. Two Dutch laws together produced the damage we now measure every quarter: the abolition of fixed-term tenancies in July 2024 removed the landlord’s ability to plan around a contractual end date, and the Affordable Rent Act capped rents in the mid-market segment through a points system. The Renters’ Rights Act bundles the same two mechanisms into one statute. Open-ended periodic tenancies and the abolition of Section 21 mirror our fixed-term ban. A First-tier Tribunal that can only revise rents downward, never upward, is the structural twin of our points- based rent test: asymmetric, and therefore one-directional in its effect on supply. The Dutch result is on the record. More than 80,000 of the Netherlands’ 640,000 private rental homes, representing roughly 12.5% of the sector, have already been sold off and removed from the rental market. A net outflow from the private rental sector four times higher in Q1 2026 than a year earlier. Institutional investors now following private landlords out the door. Milton Friedman warned in 1946 that price ceilings produce ‘still worse evils’. Britain is about to find out what he meant.”
