How a bohemian £250-a-month housing solution became a nightmare

How do we fix the housing crisis? Welcome to The i Paper’s opinion series, in which our writers share their experiences of the UK’s dysfunctional housing system and examine how we can fix it. I’m an 82-year-old economist – here’s why I’ll never downsizeThe homes that should never be soldThe UK’s new rental scandal that no one is talking about In the summer of 2011, I lived in what’s generally known as a property guardian scheme, nestled between Great Eastern Street and the City of London. It was a three-storey red-brick office block with a litter-strewn loading bay and a vast basement, housing artists, hospitality workers and others on unreliable incomes. While the facilities were wanting, to say the least (the hanging wires, the windowless rooms, the shower unit in an entirely different building), it cost me £250 a month and fulfilled its role as a cheap, bohemian kind of living situation – a flawed solution to London’s burgeoning housing crisis. The only hurdle was the raves that would occasionally take place in the basement. But a decade and a half later, property guardianships are a very different prospect. While chaos and neglect are generally considered par for the course in such an arrangement, monthly payments for guardian schemes are now creeping closer towards rental prices in many areas. Property guardians sign licence agreements instead of tenancies, which means they have fewer rights than renters, have no guarantees on length of stay, and can be evicted with just 28 days’ notice. The properties they live in are often non-residential buildings, from empty GP surgeries to disused schools, so the standard of accommodation can be much lower. But the ongoing housing crisis brings more and more people to guardian living, while the companies behind these schemes are running something of a perfect business – charging guardians rent, and the building owners a fee, whilst running minimal overheads. Trying to ascertain exactly how many property guardians there are in the UK is surprisingly difficult, with a 2022 report from the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities going as far as to say: “Very little is known about property guardianship in the UK. There are no national statistics.” The Property Guardian Providers Association (PGPA) estimates the number of property guardians in the UK at between 10,000 and 15,000. But what is true is that there are more companies than ever popping up and taking over sizeable locations in city centres. While property guardian schemes were primarily a London thing when they first arrived in 2002, you’ll now find them all over the country – even in locations like Winchester and Sussex. All of which suggests a thriving demand, and a kind of grey market culture which few understand. Timmy, a 39-year-old graphic designer, has been a property guardian in London for 16 years now. As a veteran, he recalls how the clientele has shifted in his time: “It used to be more collegiate, in the way you would be living amongst other creatives; at first I met sculptors, writers, people in music. It was seen as a hack for artists to be able to continue their practice. But now the profile of the tenant has completely changed. I’ve met cleaners, people in waste management and cyber security. The wider world seems to have come into guardian schemes.” “The price has also changed,” he continues. “I’m probably paying five times more than when I started – and that really hiked in the last four or five years.” For Timmy, what started as a rough and ready, cheap and cheerful setup has now become increasingly corporate and close to the private market. “They’re so litigious now,” he adds. “Once upon a time they didn’t need your passport and biometric data. To sign up to my latest place, they had an AI bot scan over my finances. In terms of stewardship and duty of care, I’d say it’s probably gotten worse. A lot of these places are glorified HMO’s [houses in multiple occupation] – they might put four guys and a girl in the same building. They don’t really care.” This lack of diligence and the pass-the-parcel game of responsibility is something I saw in my time as a guardian, and second-hand more recently. A friend has moved into an old council block in South London. This place is a one-bed, in a fine location, but it costs her around £1,000 a month, with council tax and bills not included. It wouldn’t be a bad deal, had the due-to-be-demolished building not been practically abandoned by the local authority, which means that one of the main entrance doors is open all the time, which in turn has let squatters and drug users discover the building’s semi-habited state. Every morning there is urine on the steps, sometimes McDonald’s wrappers, cans and drug paraphernalia. This is not the kind of thing Londoners would expect for a significant chunk of their wages, but the clamour to save any money you can on rent, or the lure of not dealing with housemates, keeps guardian schemes afloat. Graham, an art handler, has a similar horror story. “I was a guardian for six months, but not anymore,” he explains. “It was an old school in Camberwell: my room was an old classroom and there were 27 people living there [in total]. My rent was £900 a month, and that was the same for all the rooms. But not all the rooms were made equal. Some of them had taps and some of them had sinks. Some were clean, some were dirty. Some of them were really far from the shared toilets, and some were really close. But they were all just a flat £900. “The building was in a state when we moved in. The room had black mould behind a vent which I eventually discovered. I got progressively more ill living there. I spent loads of money painting the walls and trying to clean it; I got a dehumidifier too. Eventually I moved rooms and [they] waived the fee for that, but they didn’t take heed of what I said, despite me sending them a lengthy document.” There are some huge upsides to this kind of living. Even with the rising costs and continued negligence, most of the guardians I spoke to were after one thing: space. “I would never be able to get the place I’m in on the private market,” says Timmy. But many guardians feel as if their voices are never really heard, their existence hardly registered by the companies housing them. And criticism is mounting in more official forms. Even in the midst of a brutal housing crisis, the Government says it “does not endorse or encourage the use of property guardianship schemes as a form of housing tenure”. As major housing reforms such as the Renters’ Rights Act come into play, it prompts the question: how long can these companies get away with this? Guardian schemes are in no way a bad idea – in fact, they are a smart use of space in a difficult living climate. But guardian schemes have been in a Wild West of regulation for too long.