Buying property to let has grown consistently over the past decade. According to Reading Estate Agents, Haslams, as much as 60-70% of new build apartments in the Borough are now sold for buy-to-let. According to Alliance and Leicester the market nationwide is set to grow by 41% in the next ten years. The trend has crossed the divides of class, race and religion, young and not so young. It has proved good business for big and small players alike. TV programmes show us how it can be done. Banks are willing to lend up to six times income on buy-to-let mortgages. People who would never in their wildest dreams have imagined becoming a landlord, including some who were ready to man the barricades against the property owning classes, now conclude that Peter Rachman wasn’t so bad after all.

Some reasons for the market trend: a shortage of rental property for people for whom councils and housing associations can no longer cater, rising property prices, the absence of rent regulation and a lack of confidence in the products peddled by the corrupt pensions industry during the 80s. Buying to let became a rational financial decision for all sorts of people. I could take you to meet couples who bought their council homes who then bought a neighbouring house as their pension (why trust the insurance companies?), ordinary families who own houses in several towns where their children went to university (why pay rent when you can collect it?), people who were made redundant and invested their pay-off in another house then bought more (better than working!).

Good luck to them, I say. But the last few years have seen the big players moving in – buying up whole blocks, snapping up streets and slowly but surely changing the face of communities. Buy-to-let, whatever its contribution to the housing market, has unwelcome side effects that pose a complex challenge for the politicians.

Buy-to-let is helping drive up prices. Reading is at the centre of a hot housing market where every study shows demand outstrips supply. If new ‘affordable’ homes are snapped up by property investment corporations then upward pressure on prices increases. I could take you to developments where homes built for family occupation were bought on block as investments partly because prices had been driven so high.

Buy-to-let is dragging down streets, entire neighbourhoods and destroying communities. When I moved to Reading nearly twenty years ago the terraced streets of much of the town were being bought, renovated and cherished by first and second time buyers. Now, in those same areas, large numbers of homes have been bought to let. Not all landlords neglect their property – but plenty do, and not all tenants fail to look after their homes – but too many do. Reading’s Victorian homes have been kept together by the tender loving care of those with a long-term interest in their home. When people have no long-term stake in their property they have little reason to care what happens in their street – they are just passing through. The remaining owner-occupiers find themselves surrounded by decaying mattresses in what were once front gardens while environmental health officers wring their hands. House to flat conversions continue to create parking and servicing problems while planners wring their hands. Meanwhile residents of otherwise desirable streets get a taste of how the other half has to live when the Tenants from Hell move into a rental property.

Buy-to-let is creating the slums of the future. In the bright new regenerated areas any chance of a real community developing disappears as the property investment company’s cheque clears. The properties themselves need not inevitably decay, but many of them will. There are plenty of examples from earlier eras of well-intentioned new flats becoming uninhabitable dumps.

These are side effects of a market that serves some important needs. Will anyone have the guts to tackle these trends? The outlook doesn’t look hopeful as it would require imposing uncomfortable conditions on those, big and small, who’ve been riding along on the crest of the buy-to-let wave. The big buy-to-let players are becoming increasingly powerful, but with power comes responsibility and for landlords that must mean responsibility to the neighbours.