Politics
New Green Party deputy mayor wants to ban landlords from profiting
The Green Party outperformed its best ever results in the 2026 local elections. As a result, there are many more Green councillors now, and with that comes interesting new ideas you won’t hear from status quo politicians:
Based. https://t.co/RvrJljCufx
— Curtis Daly (@CurtisDaly_) May 10, 2026
Oh, and when we say the Greens outperformed their best ever result, they actually more than doubled it:
The Green Party got 1.95 million votes at the local elections (excluding mayoral!)
Approx 1 million more people (!!!) than best record in 2023.https://t.co/0qbagSvIYp — Zack Polanski (@ZackPolanski) May 10, 2026
Green Party surge: Dylan Law
Dylan Law is now Hackney’s 19-year-old deputy mayor. His bio reads:
Dylan Law is a Hackney-born organiser, youth leader and campaigner standing to be Deputy Mayor alongside Zoë Garbett. At just 19, Dylan brings a rare mix of lived experience, local knowledge and political courage.
Dylan spent five years on Hackney Youth Parliament, where he championed excluded young people and helped lead campaigns on education, housing and safety. As Head Boy at City Academy Hackney, he secured welfare reforms and built cross-community youth initiatives. He’s also volunteered with Hackney Quest, Booth House, and Outrunners, supporting residents facing hardship and crisis.
He knows first-hand how badly council services can fail families, and it’s this experience that drives him. From housing issues to school exclusions, Dylan has seen the gaps in the system and is determined to fix them.
He also founded his own small business, showing the initiative, creativity and leadership Hackney’s future demands.
Like many in Britain, Law’s experience has given him the impression that we pay too much on rent. And his solution to that problem is really boiling the piss of Britain’s landlord class.
Piss boiling
In the video at the top, Law says:
I don’t see why any landlord is making profit off rent or off housing, right? If I pay rent to my house, it’s for a human right. I’m paying just to maintain a home. I think that should be the basis. So if it has to be a thing where a two bedroom flat is literally £600 maximum, then it is what it has to be. And for all the landlords who complain about that, tough luck.
In the system we live under, there is one key reason why we couldn’t suddenly implement this system, and it’s that owners would immediately start selling off their properties. This would be chaos, with house prices crashing as a result of the sudden influx of stock, and renters at risk of having their homes sold out from under them.
Such a situation would potentially necessitate the government seizing properties to prevent total bedlam. While we’re not opposed to the government acquiring several million more council homes, we do acknowledge that all this happening overnight could potentially destabilise the country and strain our international relationships.
All that said, this isn’t necessarily a criticism of Law. Firstly, we should all want to get to a place in which shelter isn’t a commodity for the wealthy to exploit. Secondly, it’s crucial that politicians say things which scare the shit out of landlords.
The situation right now is that the wealthy assume they’re always going to get their own way; the reason they think this is because they almost always do. Ideally, we want to push the balance of power in the favour of ordinary people. And to get there, we need the rich to understand they’re a minority in this country, and that they don’t get to enforce a situation in which the majority of us live in relative poverty.
Oh, and thirdly, we want politicians to operate by thinking: ‘this is what we want – how do we get as close to that as possible‘. The alternative is what Labour offers, which is: ‘nothing can change – how do we sell endless decline to the public?‘
Before we move away from this, however, we should note it is official Green Party policy to “Abolish Landlords”.
Abolish Landlords
Firstly, as the Green Party have freely admitted, the ‘Abolish Landlords‘ policy isn’t exactly what it seems. After they passed the motion in 2025, the party’s housing spokesperson Carla Denyer said:
While the motion to conference had an eye-catching name, it does not actually ‘abolish’ landlords’
It does, however, address the housing crisis, empowers tenants and improves their wellbeing. It contains a range of policies which, over time, would reduce the proportion of the housing market that is privately rented, and increase the proportion of socially rented homes.
Councillor Paul Ainscough wrote:
the “Abolish Landlords” title is deliberately provocative. We want to get people talking about this issue and question why having somewhere to live is seen as an opportunity to make money instead of a basic human right?
We can all see that the housing situation in this country is a mess. People with spare money are being advised to buy up properties as an investment, while people who are struggling to get by are seeing their rent go up faster than their wages. The number of empty properties is going up at the same time as the number of homeless people is going up. London Councils have lost half of their council houses, and the rent they used to bring in, and are now paying a fortune for temporary accommodation for families with nowhere to live. We do need drastic change.
Ainscough also went into further detail, writing:
We would start by ending the right-to-buy scam. We would also end the financial incentives and tax-breaks that were set up to encourage private landlords. We would end buy-to-let mortgages and bring back rent controls to stop landlords exploiting renters. We would introduce a land value tax to shift tax from tenants to landlords; increase taxes on empty properties to incentivise bringing them back into use; and introduce national insurance on rental income so landlords pay the same tax on their earnings as everyone else.
When it comes to housing supply, instead of just building more and more houses, the sensible thing is to start by making better use of the properties we already have. A Green Government would finance the purchase of empty properties; properties being sold by landlords; and those properties that aren’t being maintained properly by landlords. All of this would increase the supply of healthy, affordable homes without having to build so many more.
When we do build new housing, the Green Party wouldn’t follow the Labour and Conservative model of just letting private developers do whatever they want. We don’t want more of the luxury investment properties that make the biggest profits for developers. We should be building the types of properties we really need in the places where they are really needed. We would not only tighten up planning regulations, we would also create a Government run national housebuilding programme.
Greens rising
Law will serve under the new mayor Zoë Garbett, who has considerable experience in London. Her bio reads:
At City Hall, Zoë leads for the Greens on Policing, Housing, and Planning – three of the most urgent areas affecting Londoners today. She has taken on the Met over racist and unethical policing practices, pushed for investment in harm reduction and action to reduce drug-related deaths, and fought estate demolitions that displace communities without delivering the housing we actually need. She is also a leading voice for renters’ rights, calling for stronger protections, rent controls, and enforcement. She has championed the rights of disabled Londoners to accessible homes, and defended street markets and community spaces across the capital from destructive development. From challenging power to putting forward tangible recommendations to the Mayor of London, Zoë has worked hard to help build a London that works for the many, not just the wealthy few.
In Hackney, Zoë has built deep roots through years of local organising and activism. Elected as a Green Councillor in Dalston in 2022 with the highest Green vote in London, she helped organise the Save Ridley Road Market campaign, has supported Dalston’s independent night-time economy, fought school closures, and stood shoulder to shoulder with trade unionists and tenants.
Clearly, Garbett is someone with a track record of fighting for London’s everyday residents, workers, and businesses. Going forwards, we’re sure it won’t hurt for landlords and developers to be a little terrified of Garbett and her team.
You can see more of Garbett in this video from Novara:
Featured image via Politics Joe
By Willem Moore
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