Life during lockdown

I'm a single working professional who - like many others in my position - has previously been happy to pay the rental premium to live in London and be closer to my workplace (which for me is within walking distance in Zone 1). However, a huge majority of my workplace, and many others, are now of course working from home. The normalisation of remote working for so many of us is causing us to question whether we'll stay in London. If we only have to visit the office two or three days a week in future - which really does look like it's going to become the norm for a lot of office-based businesses - lots of us would be happy to commute from further out on just those days, whereas we would never have been able to tolerate commuting five days a week.

We can have much better quality of life, more living space for less money, and luxuries like living rooms (!) or outdoor space (!) if we just don't live in London. (And yes, if enough of us do this, it'll affect rental markets in whichever places we're living. But we'd still be paying less for more than we are now.) We don't need to live in London for work any more. And with physical distancing measures being necessary for a long time yet, we won't even be able to benefit from the other good things about London like the great museums, galleries, restaurants, bars, and other attractions.

The current crisis is a paradigm shift, and lots of us are re-evaluating what that means for our lives ...

Apparently the Mayor is asking the Government to "call on landlords to offer flexibility to tenants whose ability to pay their rent is affected by COVID-19"  What about landlords who rely on rental income as their main source of income?

The Mayor also wants the Government to require landlords in receipt of mortgage holidays to notify their tenants and to enable tenants to be exempt of rental payments for the duration of the holiday. My understanding of "mortgage holiday" is that the mortgagee does not need to make mortgage payments during the holiday but still owes the money and will need to make higher payments when the holiday ends (or increase the term of the mortgage). Is the Mayor's intention then that rents will increase such that rent not paid during the landlord's mortgage holiday are paid once the holiday ends?

Additionally, the landlord is likely to still have expenses such as insurance and maintenance, for which income via rents is needed.

My wife and I have two properties in London that we let. Both tenants have indicated potential difficulties and one has decided to move out, the other will stay but with the possibility of being unable to afford the rent - and employment issue. We are both over 70 and rely on the income from rental properties, which are completely unencumbered. How can we cope with reduced rental income? What is available to those who believed that they had secured their future in old age only to be confronted with dramatic reduction in income?

During the crisis rent and bills should be frozen. Not everyone is eligible for help, by freezing rent and bills everyone would feel a positive impact. People are concerned about money and worried if they will receive their full pay cheque, this would ease stress and help with mental well-being tied to our finances.

We need more properties to be let and an end to the policy of forcing councils and housing associations to sell their properties.  Landlords should be controlled in terms of fair market rents. An end to no-fault eviction  is a reasonable objective, but legislators must recognise that some tenants are bad and deserve to be evicted because of annoyance to neighbours, damage to property or non-payment.  It should be made easier to evict such bad tenants, while at the same time it should be difficult to evict good tenants.

I do not believe touching the rental market directly will help anybody in the long run or even the short run. To really enable renting to be more affordable the government needs to ensure that it is more efficient, predominantly in the planning process, in getting more properties built that meet the current demands. If you actually compare the cost of rent in central London to the cost of buying the property, renting is actually very good value. To really make it more affordable for renting, we need to ensure that we increase the supply of housing which under a basic supply and demand curve would lead to a fall in price of buying, and then also renting. As a city, London has not physically had much of an increase in physical households in over 20 years when you compare it to: 1. The average household size, & 2. The increase in population. The average household size falling has lead to a massive increase in demand for housing followed by the increase in population also doing the same. Governments have consistently failed to provide laws, regulations, & tax systems that encourage more properties to be built to meet this increase demand. They need to be looked at all together and the laws need to be changed to ensure that the planning process is not a cash cow for local councils that prevent anybody wanting to invest in residential property development. To help renters you need to encourage an increase in supply of properties not make more laws even if that means knocking down some of our iconic rows of town houses to increase the density in London. Just ensure their is communal space as a requirement for blocks of flats.

I am a full time student with 4 children 

my inky income is the student grant and loan , housing benefit award is less than 50% and when the crisis started my expenses went more than the double however the rent only increased by £80 a month and two on the other hand the child rax credit went down by £50 so the help i got is only £30 increase a month. I am not sure if i will be able to survive any longer !even with announcements of the extra £150 discount on council tax for those who already receive reductions I didn't get that .