A second member of the Green Party’s deputy leadership has been shown to have links to the private rental market, according to reporting by The Telegraph, just days after a similar revelation about her co-deputy leader, raising fresh questions about the party’s commitment to its own flagship housing policy.
According to the Telegraph’s findings, Rachel Millward, who was elected deputy leader on an “abolish landlords” platform, takes in around £5,000 a year from a lodger renting rooms in her family’s six-bedroom Edwardian home in East Sussex, a property she and her husband bought for over £1.6 million in 2021, complete with a swimming pool and large gardens.
The arrangement sits awkwardly alongside a statement the party gave earlier this week insisting Ms Millward was “not a landlord in any other capacity” beyond her husband’s separate ownership of a rental flat. That claim only unravelled after further questioning, when the party admitted the lodger arrangement existed. Under official government guidance, anyone taking in a lodger counts as a landlord, and the Greens’ current housing policy carries no carve-out for arrangements of that kind, unlike some of the party’s older policy documents.
The disclosure follows separate Telegraph reporting last week that Mothin Ali, the party’s other deputy leader, owns two rental properties in Leeds through a limited company, both bought using buy-to-let mortgages, the very financial instrument the Greens have pledged to abolish.
The Telegraph’s further digging uncovered that Ms Millward benefited for two decades from rental income generated by a house in Oxford originally bought by her late father so she could live in it as a student, later let out once she graduated. She also received a £114,500 lump sum tied to the property in 2022, the paper found. Since her father’s death earlier this year, rent from the house, now let to students for over £2,300 a month, has been flowing into his estate, from which she stands to inherit. A separate Lake District holiday cottage owned by the estate, which she has used rent-free, brings in income from holidaymakers, though she has not personally drawn from it.
The party’s official position, adopted last year, goes well beyond simply favouring more social housing. It brands the landlord-tenant relationship as inherently exploitative, argues landlords contribute nothing of value to society, and has set out a five-point plan involving rent controls, National Insurance on rental income, and the removal of buy-to-let finance altogether, all under the banner of “de-commodifying” housing. The party sells “Abolish Landlords” caps for £10 at its conferences.
As the Telegraph notes, when pressed directly on BBC Politics Live earlier this week about whether she was a landlord herself, Ms Millward declined to answer, saying only that renting out property isn’t inherently wrong, provided one isn’t “making loads of money” at tenants’ expense.
The timing is awkward for the party, which is fighting to make housing costs its central pitch in the upcoming Holborn and St Pancras by-election, called after Sir Keir Starmer’s resignation, where leader Zack Polanski has vowed to help people “stay in the places they call home.”
The Green Party’s response
Asked by the Telegraph to respond, the Green Party said it was “proud and fully supportive” of both deputy leaders, and rejected any suggestion it had been less than transparent about Ms Millward’s circumstances. A spokesman argued that backing reform of the housing system doesn’t require individuals to divest themselves of every asset acquired under it, adding that Ms Millward has always acknowledged her own good fortune and that it is “not hypocritical to advocate for people with different levels of privilege to one’s own.”
The party also pointed to earlier comments from former co-leader Carla Denyer, who said the abolition policy was always intended to shrink the private rental sector and grow social housing rather than eliminate landlords outright. Mr Ali, for his part, has said he does not personally profit from his rental properties, and his company’s latest accounts show it owed more than it owned.
Source: The Telegraph, 12 September 2026.
