Tenant demand grows as landlord instructions decline

I have worked in the Corporation of London, Westminster Council and dozens of other Councils for over 40 years and to be honest I am at a loss as to what the Chancellor and Michael Goves affordable housing strategy and end game is and whether they have sought objective advice on policy outcomes?

I listened to an interview with Angela Rayner on the Today podcast and Labour hasn't thought its policies through either. Her approach is bull in a china shop for the PRS and social sector, with landlords and developers always eternally Bad, and councils and housing associations presumably always Good. She basically wants to force through banning S21 and every other pro-tenant policy going, and call landlords' bluff. No sign that Labour has even considered what to do if landlords respond by continuing to flee the sector and rents and homelessness accelerate even more. She would just blame landlords for supposedly causing the crisis and perhaps take the catastrophic SNP approach of rent controls.

On the new-build side Labour's policy is all about Having A Plan, this time neighbourhood plans and New Towns, which will be divvied up to the big builders in exchange for non-negotiable S106 and CIL taxes, irrespective of economic viability. Nimbys will be steamrollered via planning appeals or easily bribed (she thinks) with loads of free infrastructure paid for by Big Bad Developers, Public Enemy Number 1.

All other development outside the "Plan" agreed by the "Community" is in her eyes merely speculative and irredeemable, so there's no hint of encouragement for small developer-builders (whose numbers and build rates have collapsed since the GFC), to help create a more competitive market and greater overall investment and build rates. Ditto no mention of self-builders, who could really boom in numbers if only they were given a sniff of a chance in the planning system, or sites for them were made into a compulsory part of larger planning applications. So, what will Labour do if they keep playing chicken solely with the Big Developers, and the latter say "fine, impose your S106 and CILs and expect us to pay for roads, schools, shops, everything, but we've decided to back out of building new towns X, Y and Z - there's insufficient margin for our shareholders and development financiers, so we are going to cherry pick and drop our build rates"?

Yes Anthony, there is little thought or consideration given should the government's housing policies fail. The proposed new RRB will be no exception to a litany of previous failures e.g. the bedroom tax introduced to make small families in big houses move to smaller ones - the idea'scgood but the executed failed; as did the poll tax, rent caps in Scotland failed; and most spectacularly the hypocritical Right to Buy fiasco where millions of rental homes have been lost and slowly sold to the middle classes leaving none for the poor while successive governments benefitted by £47billion. So housing policy failures are common and the present day decline in landlord instructions are a clear sign that muddled, inconsistent long drawn out housing policies are leading to a tipping point where imminently millions of landlords will sell as they can achieve a higher income by just leaving their money in a high street bank. The government's notion that all sold rental properties will be snapped up, improved to EPC C standards and rented out a cheaper rate by other private or corporate landlords is an optimistic assumption that simply will not happen.