Photograph: Kirsty McLaren/Alamy

Bleak Houses, the new London Assembly planning and housing committee report on improving London’s private rented sector (PRS), contains nine recommendations and an array of suitably Dickensian facts.

The recommendations, listed on pages 36 and 37, include urging the mayor to develop a London-wide kitemark or accreditation badge to be awarded to homes that meet minimum standards, government tax incentives for landlords to improve the standards of properties and a number of ideas for encouraging them to offer longer tenancies.

The Dickensian facts are that about a third of the capital’s roughly 850,000 privately rented homes don’t meet the “decent homes” standard that applies in the social rented sector, and that the same proportion of its landlords are considered “rogue.” This is at a time when the PRS, which already provides for one in four London households is, as committee chair Jenny Jones AM puts it in her Foreword, “increasingly taking on taking on the functions of the social rented sector.”

At the same time the PRS is more and more providing accommodation for the sorts of people who in the fairly recent past would have been looking to buy their own homes in London (people like me) but these days cannot begin to afford to (people like my children). It may soon cease to be unusual for Londoner couples with average household incomes to start families in privately rented homes and to have, at most, low and distant expectations of becoming homeowners in the capital.

The Bleak Houses report says the PRS in London grew by 83% in the first ten years of this century and is now “the only growing housing tenure in London.” It is, in other words, the housing future of this city for more and more of its people, ranging from the very vulnerable to the reasonably affluent.

The challenge presented in the report for London’s mayors and London’s boroughs is to act to eliminate low standards without risking reducing the supply of PRS homes when social rented accommodation is drying up and homes for sale are priced out of sight.

Some combination of constructive regulation and conditional encouragement is the answer sought here, with tenants and a critical mass of good landlords locating a shared interest in long-term security at the heart of it, though suppressing current soaring rent levels – the other theme of Ken Livingstone’s recent policy speech – is, of course, another huge part of the picture and beyond the scope of Bleak Houses.

The report seems to chime with the findings of a recent study of the PRS in other countries by the London School of Economics, which you can read about here.