Mum's rent petition signed by more than 40,000 people
"This is nearly a 20% increase. As a single parent living with my two children, with one income to live on, the impact will ripple through my life. I feel broken down by this system."
The petition, which can be signed here, is still growing.
This isn't the first issue Bridget has had with rented homes, after extreme damp in a previous home led to a hospital trip after she developed pneumonia.
"I hoped this new home would be better, but once again, I've suffered a huge blow to my security," she says. "Rents in my local area in County Durham are high, and I cannot simply jump to another more affordable option."
She - like many others - is also facing increased bills and food costs.
"I was already struggling to cover my essentials; this shock rent rise will put even more of a strain on me," she says. "My mental health has been badly affected, and I worry about the long-term impact this will have on myself and my family."
Important reforms in the Renters' Rights Bill are currently passing through Parliament. These will help to make renting fairer in England, including ending Section 21 evictions, which currently allow landlords to evict tenants without needing a reason.
"But they do nothing to stop shock rent rises like the one my family has faced," says Bridget.
"While the government says tenants will be able to challenge 'unreasonable' rent rises at tribunal, decisions will be based on what the rent would be if your home was re-let – not what you can afford.
"As long as landlords can price their tenants out of their own homes with unaffordable rent rises, renters will still effectively face unfair evictions and be threatened with homelessness."
Private renters are being HIT with relentless rent hikes.
The impact? Thousands are being pushed into debt and homelessness.
It's time for change. Sign our petition and demand better⤵️https://t.co/AOy1ytWmCv https://t.co/ZxBJ8UbnxQ — Generation Rent (@genrentuk) May 12, 2025
Research from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation showing more than a third of private renters are living in poverty after housing costs. Meanwhile, Generation Rent's research has shown 9/10 renters say the experience of renting has negatively impacted their mental health.
Generation Rent's winter 2024 survey found that the majority of renters (61%) reported that their landlord had asked them to pay a higher rent in the past 12 months with almost a quarter (24%) reported an increase over £100. This compares to just 9% reporting hikes of this size in July 2022, almost a threefold increase.
Meanwhile, the 2024 English Private Landlord survey found one in five landlords hiked the rent by 15% or more the last time they renewed or extended a tenancy.
The most common reason that renters reported they had been given for their rent increases, was not because their landlord faced increased costs, or was struggling more, it was simply because of the rising rewards of the market.
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Almost a third (31%) of landlords had blamed higher market rents, while a further 7% stated that the increase was because of letting agent advice.
The petition adds: "This is indefensible. If renters are to finally feel secure in our own homes, we need protections from shock rent rises.
"Private landlords should not be able to raise the rent higher than inflation or wages. The Government can and must act to change this."
Sign my petition, which has the full backing of Generation Rent, to demand the government introduces a cap on how much landlords can raise the rent.
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Daily Mirror
2 hours ago
- Daily Mirror
Queen Camilla makes history as she's handed yet another prestigious title
While attending a ceremony at Devonport naval base, Queen Camilla has been awarded an esteemed title in a historic move, making her the first royal family member and first woman to hold the designation Queen Camilla has become the first member of the royal family and first woman to be appointed Vice Admiral of the United Kingdom. The honour was given to the Queen during a ceremony at Devonport naval base in Plymouth today, where, as the sponsor of HMS Astute, she joined a ceremony to mark the end of the submarine's first commission. Gen Sir Gwyn Jenkins, First Sea Lord and Chief of Naval Staff, said Camilla's new historic title would "further enhance Her Majesty's relationship with the service" and reflected the "high regard" she commands with sailors and other Naval officers. Arriving at the naval base, Queen Camilla inspected a Guard of Honour consisting of submariners before the ship's company performed a traditional "Cheer Ship" salute, as the Queen descended onto the submarine's deck. As Lady Sponsor of the HMS Astute submarine, the Queen has maintained close ties with the vessel, and the Navy at large, since naming it in 2007. Since taking on the role of Lady Sponsor, she has been considered a key member of the submarine's ship's company and has stayed closely connected with the 135-strong crew. Camilla's support has come in the form of annual writings to the crew onboard the vessel, as well as the delivery of care packages that include English breakfast tea and shortbread, which were "really well received on board" according to naval sources. The office and esteemed title of Vice Admiral of the United Kingdom dates back to the mid-16th century, after it was created by Henry VIII in 1513. The most recent holder of the title was Admiral Lord Boyce, the former First Sea Lord and Chief of the Defence Staff, who died in 2022 aged 79. Rear Admiral Andy Perks, head of the submarine service, presented Camilla with the honour, which included the formal presentation of a burgee, or pennant, to recognise the Queen's ongoing support for the Royal Navy. Commander Christopher Bate, HMS Astute's Commanding Officer, expressed the crew's pride in the Queen's sponsorship, as he said: "Her Majesty The Queen has supported us from the very beginning. She has consistently shown a deep commitment to all aspects of our work." He added: "It is a proud and memorable moment to welcome Her Majesty to HMS Astute and for her to meet our families as we mark the end of our first commission." While at the naval base, Queen Camilla was given a very unusual gift: a roll of cling film. The Queen was presented with the roll of cling film on a wooden stand after the ceremony, which was engraved with the words: "First of class, second to none." The gift marks an inside joke between the submariners as cling film apparently kept the vessel going when they used it to wrap the engines more than two years ago. Camilla found the strange gift very amusing, exclaiming: 'The famous clingfilm!' The submariners engraved the gift with a special message: 'Clingfilm, keeping Nuclear Submarines at Sea'. General Sir Gwyn Jenkins met with Queen Camilla earlier today at another event, and expressed his joy over bestowing Camilla with the honour. He said: "We're super proud of Her Majesty's role with HMS Astute, as are the crew, it really matters a lot to us as a Navy and to them as a crew that it's the Queen's submarine." The Queen then joked to him about not wanting to serve on a submarine, with the head of the Royal Navy saying: "I think we would all recognise that being a submariner is a very special skill set, you have to be really committed to the role and what you do for the country. It can be phenomenally rewarding, it's an amazing sense of teamwork onboard, but it's not for everyone."
New Statesman
13 hours ago
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Samuel Pepy's diaries of a somebody
The creation of a national icon in this country is a many-faceted business. Sometimes it happens rapidly, in the midst of crisis – Nelson, Churchill. Sometimes it is a matter of steady, incremental reputation, a figure whose stature has grown unstoppably and is acknowledged even outside national boundaries – Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens. And sometimes it happens almost arbitrarily, when a person is recognised as embodying something that is imagined to be quintessentially British or (more usually) English. Some historical figure captures the imagination; their actual achievement may be small or great, but they somehow encourage the feeling that only here would a character like this emerge – Dr Johnson, perhaps, or Florence Nightingale; the historical equivalent of a national treasure. It is hard to deny Samuel Pepys's role as a minor national icon of this sort. A professional civil servant, holding a highly responsible position in the Admiralty under Charles II and his successor James II, he was also an enthusiastic amateur musician and a passionate collector of books, whose wonderfully eclectic library remains a jewel in the crown of his old Cambridge college, Magdalene. He might have been surprised to be remembered less for his labours as a dedicated and highly effective naval administrator than for the diary he kept between 1660 and 1669; but it is undoubtedly the latter that has established his role as 'treasurable'. What most readers know or think they know about his diary is its charm – quaint period phrases ('Up betimes', 'And so to bed', and all the rest), sparkling vignettes of 'real life' in the 17th century, what it felt like to witness the events of the textbooks as they happened – not least the Great Fire of London. Of course, there is also the rather problematic brand of charm conveyed for a certain kind of male reader in Pepys's knowing salaciousness, the rueful chuckles of a not very successful sensualist and henpecked husband. Kate Loveman's excellent book does not set out to rob Pepys of his charm – but she gives us a range of tools for interrogating it (and our responses to it), so that we can offset the effects of a long history of selective and rather superficial reading. As she shows, some of the most familiar phrases owe their frequency in the diary to the fact that they are very easy to write in the distinctive form of shorthand he employs. But mention of this is a reminder that until 1825 virtually no one had read the diary. Pepys was remembered gratefully at Magdalene; his reputation in the Navy had survived. But what made the difference, and set Pepys on the road to being an icon, was a confluence of factors in the early-19th century: a new interest in first-hand historical testimony, a desire on the part of both the college and the Pepys family to do better justice to his memory in this new climate of antiquarian enthusiasm, and the crucial decision by the Grenville family (the then master of Magdalene was a close relative) to pay for a full transcription of the diary by an expert who identified Pepys's 'code' as based on a pattern in a manual that Pepys had thoughtfully included in his library. The history of subsequent editions in the 19th century is complicated, though Loveman lays it out with great clarity. Initially the Grenville and Neville families retained close control of the publication process, with Richard Neville, Lord Braybrooke, overseeing the first published selection of material. It found a receptive audience, and demand grew for further extracts – especially as rumours began to circulate that what had been omitted in the published version included some material that might not sit too well with the editor's portrait of Pepys as a model of dutiful virtue. Eventually, Henry Wheatley in the 1890s produced nine volumes of selections, which would serve as the received text for many decades; it was an edition that provided far more space to display Pepys as a comic character, including much of the rather Pooterish material about minor domestic troubles and assorted purchases – but not the sexually explicit passages. Loveman stresses that the text from which all 19th-century editors worked was the transcript made by John Smith for the first edition; no one revisited the encoded text until the next major round of interest in the later 20th century. Robert Latham, of Magdalene, and William Matthews, an expert in shorthand, produced the definitive modern edition between 1970 and 1983, working from the originals, correcting earlier errors or amendments and restoring omissions. They decided, with the college's approval (supported, in a letter of rather acerbic common sense, by CS Lewis) that the censorship of Pepys's 'explicit' passages was indefensible; and so at last readers were able to make their own judgements on the author's morality. Loveman persuasively shows that the Pepys of popular imagination between 1825 and 1970 was, to a significant extent, a creation of his editors, who in turn depended not on the primary text but on a transcription that they at times felt free to tinker with in the cause of clarity or decency (as in Pepys's account of his almighty hangover the morning after Charles II's coronation). This is the Pepys of popular imagination, extracted in assorted books, summarised in schoolbooks, dramatised on stage (JB Fagan's And So to Bed of 1926 is still occasionally revived as a musical) and, later, television screens. And Loveman has a brilliant chapter on the popularity of Pepys, and of pastiche Pepysian diaries in the press, during the Second World War. The picture of the Ordinary Englishman – going about his business in times of upheaval and crisis, often absurd but essentially decent, brave and amusingly stoical – rang a good many bells. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe The publication of the full text did not by any means overturn this picture, but it lit a slow fuse. It is harder now to see Pepys's sexual adventures as a bit of high-spirited naughtiness. He was clearly a pest and at worst a predator. Loveman reminds us that the female servants who had to put up with his groping were what we should unequivocally call children, just on the edge of puberty. Some of his accounts of escapades with adult women amount to admissions of rape, and his willingness to grant professional favours in return for the sexual compliance of other men's spouses is a nasty strand in several bits of the text. Loveman does not demonise Pepys, but she asks us to notice what icon construction can encourage us not to see, and to remember not only a bright, lively, sometimes slightly absurd social companion, but a series of young women, bewildered, frightened, resentful, for whom their employer's 'kindness' – Pepys's own term for his unwanted attentions – was not a matter for jocularity. Predictably, Pepys's involvement with enslaved persons also comes into focus here. The number of public figures and national institutions not in some way complicit in enslavement in the late-17th century is vanishingly small. And while Pepys was not a major profiteer from the trade, the evidence makes it plain that in the 1670s he had at least one enslaved young man in his service. Loveman discusses with care and insight what Pepys has to say about such persons, noting how the 'ownership' of an enslaved person had become a very clear marker of social status. The presence in a household even of a non-enslaved black person made an unmissable statement, and Pepys was obviously very happy to make use on occasion of other people's black servants, enslaved or otherwise, to reinforce his social capital. Nothing suggests that he had any qualms at all about the trade and its effects. Loveman is not inviting us to judge and cancel, but rather to follow through consistently what she sees as explaining the popularity of the diary's earliest editions. People were beginning to do history differently in the 1820s; they were more interested than hitherto in what it had felt like to be alive in another age. And Pepys himself, in leaving his diary alongside his other literary bequests, seems, so Loveman suggests, to have anticipated this. He records things, he tells us, as evidence of what people were talking about, enjoying, or fearing. The abiding significance of what he writes turns out to be just that. Reading the diary with the challenges of Loveman's closing chapter in mind is to be forced to imagine a world and a sensibility in which a moderately generous and easy-going man could instinctively have seen the slave trade first in terms of its contribution to luxury and assured social leverage – a world in which sexual consent could be assumed or ignored by a partner of higher status. Pepys, in other words, succeeds brilliantly in doing just what he says he is doing, offering a sense of 'what it's like', the irony being that the success is in proportion to the unselfconsciousness of what is written. And we also learn what his editors were unselfconsciously assuming about what was needed in a reassuring national icon – and what they either failed to see as flaws, or did see and persuaded themselves to pretend they hadn't. The problem with the past is not that it is a foreign country. It is that it is both strange and all too recognisable. A book like Pepys's diary is significant not because it provides a consoling idyll about salt-of-the-earth Ordinary Englishmen getting on with things in much the same way as the ordinary English Reader of today; nor because it uncovers a vicious pre-modern barbarism about women and racial others that we have learned to reject. It is because it reminds us that we look at the past – of a culture or an individual – and really recognise and warm to some things, and then encounter an absolute moral brick wall with others. Pepys's geniality and gossipy vigour, the evident liking and indulgence of his contemporaries, do not remove the shadows. Shadows are what happens in a three-dimensional world – not everything is clear and continuous. Theologically speaking, icons are meant not to be three-dimensional (they have to open up to a depth that is not human). Non-theological icons are a problem because of what they encourage us not to see in terms of shadows, literal and metaphorical. If we shrink the three-dimensionality of the past for the sake of an iconic smoothness, we may shrink the present too. We are still not out of the shadows. That is why we both recognise – even like – Pepys and also worry about his blind spots. We too may still be in the process of moral maturing. If one were to read an unselfconscious diary of 2025 a century from now, it would be every bit as uncomfortable (if we are still reading by that point). Kate Loveman has written a book that knows exactly what it is about. It is written with complete clarity, it is organised intelligibly, and it keeps us turning the pages with its skilful and thorough storytelling, while leaving us with some searching unfinished business. At Magdalene College, we still drink to the Immortal Memory of Samuel Pepys once a year. I don't think Loveman would want this to stop, but she would want us to remember a rather less two-dimensional figure than we have sometimes become used to. The Strange History of Samuel Pepys's Diary Kate Loveman Cambridge University Press, 254pp, £22 Related
Spectator
a day ago
- Spectator
We've missed an important clue about The Salt Path fiasco
When the truth of Raynor Winn's The Salt Path was called into question, many commentators jumped in with both feet; as Sam Leith astutely pointed out in The Spectator, there is nothing the English like so much as a good disappointment. Winn continues to contest the allegations which have cast doubt over the truth of the 2018 memoir. She also issued a statement talking of 'the physical and spiritual journey Moth (her husband) and I shared, an experience that transformed us completely and altered the course of our lives. This is the true story of our journey'. I believe her about the essential truth of the actual journey, both in The Salt Path and in the later book Landlines that I reviewed in The Spectator. But I can also see how she might have been led to dissemble so badly about the circumstances that led to that journey. There is a clue no one has noticed in an interview she gave to Big Issue back in 2017, when she launched the first book and was completely unknown: We were regularly asked: 'How come you have enough time to walk so far?' When we told the truth, children were held closer, dogs retracted on leads, doors were closed and conversations ended very quickly. The view from the rural idyll is that losing your home and becoming homeless makes you a social pariah. So, we twisted our story [my emphasis] – we had sold our home and become homeless, and the general view then was that we were inspirational. It became a game, to observe how changing one word changed reactions. 'So, we twisted our story.' It ties in with the phenomenon of confabulation with which I've long been fascinated and had some considerable suitable personal experience of when my father developed dementia – and wrote about in One Man and a Mule – as it is often associated with that disease. Confabulation is a disturbance of memory, defined as 'the production of fabricated, distorted or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world.' And one of its most salient features is that if you repeat a story often enough, to yourself or others, you come to believe it is true because you remember telling it – even if you do not want, or are not able to remember the actual events it describes. You remember the telling of the story more than you do the actual events. I suspect Raynor may have become so adept at telling an acceptable story to those she met on the walk that, when it came to writing the book, she maintained the confabulation. The story became yet more 'twisted'. Not only may this have been fatal to her reputation – for both film and book were marketed very heavily on the veracity: 'this is what real life is like' – but it was completely unnecessary. All readers need to know is they have no money and no home, so begin walking. There was no need at all to explain the circumstances, let alone construct a false narrative in which they were the victims rather than, as it seems, allegedly the perpetrators in this messy story. The issue of whether Moth does or does not suffer from a degenerative disease and whether walking helped alleviate this seems a much more tendentious and tasteless one for the Observer – which first brought these allegations to light – to raise as a collateral claim. Medicine and therapeutic cures can behave oddly. My own father was given a prognosis of seven years for his vascular dementia. He lived for another ten years beyond that. And Moth did not write this book. I would like to remember Winn for the attention she brought to the phenomenon of rural poverty – which I tried to do myself in my books about walking across England. This is the succeeding paragraph in the Big Issue Interview: Sheltering inland away from a storm, we discovered an invisible community. A group of people, who lived and worked in a beautiful spot, but couldn't afford to rent even a room in an area of high-value holiday rentals. After work, they drifted along a wooded valley to sleep in hammocks strung in sheds, horse boxes, and grain silos. Not travellers, or dependent rough sleepers, but average people who just couldn't afford a home in the countryside where their livelihood was. This story also raises some questions about publishers' expectations of travel books; their increasing demand that there always has to be some redemptive arc, which may explain, though not excuse, why she felt she had to give a moral imperative. There was a time when a travel writer would set off with a spring in their step: Coleridge knocking the bristles from a broom in his impatience to make it a walking stick; Laurie Lee heading forth one midsummer morning; Patrick Leigh Fermor singing as he headed down a lane. To travel was an expression of freedom and exploration; to step out of the front door the beginning of a great adventure. Not any more. Today's travel writers come troubled and weary before they've even begun. A journey can no longer be a jeu d'esprit. It has to be undertaken to expiate some deep trauma. It is almost as if, in today's New Puritanism, it has to be painful. One thinks of the old nursery rhyme: 'Wednesday's child is full of woe/ Thursday's child has far to go.' Recent bestselling examples of this genre have all followed the same principle: Cheryl Strayed's Wild: From Lost to Found treated walking as necessary psychotherapy; Guy Stagg's The Crossway was billed as 'a journey to recovery'. Raynor's The Salt Path, telling of a couple escaping from eviction and illness. If anything comes out of this very sad tale, perhaps it can be that we no longer demand that all our travel books begin in tragedy; and that the journey can just be taken for its own sake.
