Glasgow landlords announced rent rises of about 25% in February 1915 as munitions workers crowded into the city; by November roughly 20,000 households were on rent strike, led by Mary Barbour and the tenants' committees. The Bill was introduced on 25 November and passed on 27 November 1915, pegging rents and mortgage interest on working-class dwellings at their August 1914 level unless the landlord could prove improvements. Presented as a wartime emergency measure, it was renewed and re-enacted repeatedly and rent regulation survived in Britain, in changing form, into the 1980s.
This was the first modern rent control, and it permanently altered the economics of the private landlord: with returns capped, private renting began the long retreat that opened the political space for subsidised council housing from the 1919 Addison Act onwards. Almost every European housing system afterwards combined rent regulation with public or non-profit supply, making 1915 the hinge between the landlord city and the welfare-state city.
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