Is there the stomach for a fresh battle on upward-only rents?

Irish retailers, and particularly the high-profile campaigners on Dublin’s Grafton Street, have been celebrating the country’s ban on upward-only rent reviews. Inevitably it has led to the a debate about whether it’s time for the same step in the UK.

There is something fundamentally unfair about the universal use of upward-only rent reviews. After all, they allow for rents to go up at review if the market moves in the landlords favour, but prevents them from moving down if the market moves in the tenants’ direction.

In the first half of this decade, the Government was - quite rightly - making serious noises about legislating against the practice. But the property industry said it would clean up its act and the Government backed down. Now I don’t get the sense the reviews are such a big issue to retailers.

Don’t get me wrong, retailers still need greater flexibility from their landlords, and we still need proof that the property industry won’t revert to the bad old ways when the market turns back in the landlords’ favour.

But times have changed and upward-only reviews are no longer such a concern. That’s partly because leases are shorter now, meaning there are fewer reviews during the term of a lease, and also because retailers have laid down the law and are insisting on caps and collars on how much rents can increase by, or alternatively indexation.

Upward only rent reviews have no place in today’s market, but savvy retailers already know that.

And there are bigger issues - monthly rents and service charges to name but too - which also need tackling. For now though, the collaborative approach is working pretty well, and the UK retail industry doesn’t need more legislation to tackle a problem which is disappearing naturally.