It's a serious improvement, because it prevents drip pricing, which exploits human psychology to charge people more than they would have paid had they been allowed to judge the price from the beginning.

It still leads to price uncertainty which is inefficient for renters.

In spite of that, it will bring rents down, because advertising a massive rent will put a lot of people off - especially those who are primarily looking on rightmove and filtering. So landlords who do this will have a smaller pool of potential tenants, and so won't be able to charge quite as much.

At the end of the day, the rental property market is still a market. The point of it is that landlords try to get the highest price and renters try to pay the lowest price for something they accept. We need to realise while criticising the rental market or measures aimed at making it work better that this legislation was never intended to dismantle it and replace it with Soviet-style social housing for everyone, and how big of a change it would be to prevent landlords from charging what they think they can get away with one way or another.

Even if you think that the country would be improved by a change on that scale, I think it's good to acknowledge the very significant improvement the Labour government made to renters with this sorely-needed change to the rules. It puts on the path to being a country more like our peers where renters aren't second-class citizens and, even though renting may be expensive, at least it provides a more secure home.

Sometimes you can hate both the player and the game.