A city in financial straits: Leipzig has no financial leeway to hire more staff to tackle rent gouging

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At the council meeting on 1 July, Dr Martina Münch, the councillor responsible for social affairs, made some clear statements: just one member of staff at the social services department is handling the cases of rent gouging reported to the city. There are hundreds of them. And even that is only a fraction of the more than 6,000 cases identified by the Left Party’s rent gouging app for Leipzig. Shouldn’t the city be increasing its staff to tackle rent gouging? A perfectly legitimate question from a resident.

Yet the response from the Social Services Department

, which has now been made public, is sobering. “No, there are no plans to increase staffing levels.”

But as Dr Martina Münch had already made clear at the council meeting on 1 July

that even retaining the one existing post is a balancing act, the next question was entirely justified: “If not, why not?”

Local authorities paralysed

And then came the statement from the social services department, which once again highlighted how local authorities such as Leipzig are being driven into a state of paralysis by a federal policy that burdens them with mandatory tasks but fails to provide adequate funding for them. This is another way of cobbling together a ‘lean’ federal budget, even if the Finance Minister still fails to reduce the federal government’s debt.

Instead, he is plunging local authorities across Germany into debt one after the other. In Leipzig alone, the unfunded portion of mandatory tasks will ultimately amount to 1 billion euros, even though Torsten Bonew, the mayor responsible for finance, noted on 1 July that he would not be able to present a complete breakdown of the unfunded statutory duties – as the Left Party parliamentary group has been demanding for a year – until the autumn. After all, no local authority in Germany has ever done anything of the sort.

Not a priority

However, on the subject of tackling rent gouging in Leipzig, the Social Services Department’s statement simply reads: “Due to the strained budgetary situation, the City of Leipzig faces considerable challenges. As part of budgetary consolidation, it is necessary to prioritise tasks and weigh up the allocation of staff resources. Despite the planned job cuts within the city administration, the task of investigating suspected cases of excessive rents and rent gouging is being taken seriously, and one post has therefore been reallocated to this task.

To clear the existing backlog of cases, the city administration is focusing on optimising processing procedures and is trialling the use of digital assistance systems and artificial intelligence. The aim is to automatically pre-screen incoming documents, cross-check relevant key data and relieve case officers of manual routine tasks. This is also a possibility for the area in question in the long term.

Regardless of this, the consistent handling of individual cases can already have a preventative effect and help to raise awareness amongst landlords and tenants.”

On 1 July, Martina Münch explained in considerable detail just how difficult and bureaucratic it nevertheless is to pursue reported cases of rent gouging.