He said the way to get rents down in the longer run was to build more properties. 'About 40% of private renters are on housing benefit so you are talking about quite a large number of people all competing for a relatively small number of properties,' he said. Speaking to Sky News on the latest findings, co-author of the IFS report Tom Waters said there have been 'substantial increases' in rent across the board. Rising mortgage rates are also likely to feed through into the rents being asked as they push up landlords' costs. Its report said: 'This means that the support available for private rents is steadily declining in real terms - something that is especially important at the moment as rents are rising very rapidly.' Local housing allowance (LHA) rates - which govern the maximum amount of support for their rent that low-income private renters can get - have been frozen in cash terms since April 2020, the IFS noted. It defined rents as being affordable if they could potentially be completely covered by benefits. In its report, the IFS, whose research was funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), said that on average, housing costs amounted to 11.4% of UK households' incomes. Only one in 20 (5%) newly listed private rental properties on Zoopla in the first quarter of 2023 were affordable for people receiving housing benefit or Universal Credit, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS).

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