BOOK REVIEW
Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britains Housing Emergency
by Vicky Spratt 2023
About the Author
Vicky Spratt is a housing journalist and documentary maker. Her 2016 campaign Make Renting Fair highlighted the plight of ‘generation rent’ and succeeded in getting letting fees for tenants in England banned. She speaks at political conferences about the need for security in renting.
Spratt attended Oxford University. She later wrote an article for iNews about her experience as a student from a low-income background, and how she got into debt after graduating. Between 2013 and 2015 Spratt worked as a freelance journalist, writing opinion, features and news and reporting for publications including The Telegraph, BBC Magazine, The Debrief and Broadly.
About the Book
Becoming a renter is fast approaching a kind of ritual humiliation. Click by click, you surrender to a stranger details so personal you would not tell them to your closest friends. Some tenancy agreements ask you to submit your “facial biometrics”. The one I signed last year required me to give a website access to the full transaction history of my bank account. Why are we expected to make these increasingly sinister prostrations to landlords without the slightest concession from the other side? How the hell did it come to this?
Vicky Spratt’s excoriating new book Tenants reminds us that the power dynamic between renters and their landlords was not always so skewed.
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