In the 1970s, private landlordism in the UK was a fringe part of the market – and a dying one. With council housing plentiful and house prices within the range of those with decent, working-class jobs, we did not need private landlords. In the mid-1970s, the Conservative Policy Council had written that their decline was “quite irreversible” and that within a generation they would be “as extinct as the dinosaur”.

This prediction has proved to be among the worst ever made about the UK housing market. Since then, our reliance on private landlords has exploded. They are now the first port of call for everyone in the market who cannot afford to buy: students, graduates, families, pensioners, refugees and more. There are 2.8 million private landlords in Britain – almost twice as many people as work for NHS England and almost four times the UK’s entire workforce of teachers.

How did we go from one extreme to the other? We chose it.

In 1979 Margaret Thatcher arrived with a new vision for the country. As she defunded and sold off council housing, her plan was that the private market would take its place. A big-bang deregulation of private renting in 1988 swept away rent control and introduced short tenancies where the tenant could be evicted at the end without the landlord needing a reason.

Her expectation was big, strategic investment from the corporate world – there was demand for rented housing, so there would be supply. Competition would drive up standards. The state just needed to get out of the way and let it happen. But instead, something else happened.

In 1996, “buy-to-let” mortgages were launched, targeting everyman investors with a bit of spare cash. Previously, the only way to build up a property portfolio was to take out a commercial mortgage. This new product was available to anyone with a deposit, the repayments were interest only........

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