The London Assembly's housing and regeneration committee, a left-leaning sub-group, has recently called on Mayor Boris Johnson to adopt a London based pilot scheme for rent control.

This is not the first time and will no doubt not be the last time this is called for: Ken Livingstone and Jeremy Corbyn (MP for Islington North) have both been advocating the move for some time.

If rents keep on rising, pressure on politicians will increase as struggling tenants get more public support for the idea. There are still far more voting tenants than there are property investor-landlords.

The move is very unlikely under the current administration, and perhaps in the next, but a Labour government in two years' time could conceivably be a different matter. Ed Miliband has already been calling on local authorities to reduce the rents they pay to private landlords to enable emergency housing for more 'social tenants', and there's some that believe it could become Labour party policy if he were to become prime minister in 2015.

For those who have not experienced rent control in their lifetimes, those not old enough to remember life in England under the Rent Act, or know about the experience of this in other countries, rent control might appear to be a logical step towards a fair way of solving the housing problems in London. After all, isn't it about time those 'greedy' buy-to-let landlords got their comeuppance?