The Housing Crisis, Who’s to blame – Studio Interview Thursday (today) 8pm

Landlords are the scapegoats everyone loves to blame. The fact is both Tory and Labour have created this. There were 7 million social homes in the uk at its height (1980s). Under the conservatives right to buy scheme that has diminished to 3.5 million. Additionally, the Labour Party have let 3 million people into the country under uncontrolled mass immigration. You don’t have to be Carol Vorderman to work out the consequences 🙄. It’s not landlords fault, but there always has to be a scapegoat in any dysfunctional system to hide the real truth. No government will take responsibility and Shelter don’t want to blame governments which pays their fat at salaries!........enter the scapegoat landlord.

Alt News Media is the home of David Vance, an individual banned from Twitter for repeatedly violating their rules against posting racist content. Perusal of their website reveals thoroughly unpleasant content in a similar vein. Vance also likes to appear on RT, the propaganda outlet of a regime that sends its agents over here to murder people on our streets. You do not say what your theory about the cause of the housing crisis is, but given his obsessions I assume that immigration will feature heavily, and not in any sensible or thoughtful way.

You demean yourself and damage your reputation - and by extension landlords in general - by appearing on this outlet. I urge you to reconsider.

I won't be watching and I suggest nobody else does either.

Reply to the comment left by Leics Landlord at 04/03/2021 - 12:23
Is someone’s opinions only valid if they do not violate Twitter’s rules??

In any case, this is merely a platform and not the preaching of the gospel of buy-to-let according to David Vance.

I will be watching and suggest others don’t be so cancel-culture.

The housing crisis has been around in the UK for well over 50 years. Successive governments both labour and conservative have failed to address the root cause.

The cause is not landlords or tenants, rent or home ownership, It’s simply a lack of supply. The country is short of over 2 million homes. Competition for the limited number of properties for sale or for rent drives up prices. In the UK the average person spends between 50-75% of the net income on housing, by contrast the average in the USA is between 30-50%, simply because their is more housing available.

Housing activists groups like shelter are worthless, having failed for decades to improve the situation. Their government funding leads than to avoid challenging the hand that feeds them. Solving the house issue requires dealing with the root cause which is the need to build more homes. 200,000 per year over the next 10 years are needed, be they rented or owned they will all be part of the solution.

Planning regulations need to be changed to facilitate building. Large land owners need to be incentivised to build on land they have purchased for development and maybe even penalised for land banking, failing to build on development land they own.

The rental sector should also be encouraged to be part of the solution. Many people rent through choice other through need. Many rent and later become buyers, but all need a home regardless of the detail of how they pay for where they live.

Reply to the comment left by Luke P at 04/03/2021 - 13:27
No, clearly Twitter's terms of service are not determinative of the worth of people's views, and at no point did I say that they were. I include the point merely to illustrate that others are also of the opinion that the man is an unpleasant racist who we would do well to avoid.

It is not merely a platform. It is the mouthpiece of people with an axe to grind and who use it to spew bile and hate. Anyone who appears on it gives succour to them and knows it. Nobody with any knowledge of that site would appear on it. Personally, I would not wish to sully myself with any association with them.

There are plenty of people out there who would like to portray all landlords as beyond the pale, it is foolish in the extreme to pass them more ammunition.

Housing in the UK is, besides being a social disaster, a political football that all administrations use as their supposed ideological ambitions. I don`t particularly like football but all the players in UK housing, bar most landlords, are off-side, foul regularly, get no red cards, shout at the regulators (the ref.) get paid boat loads of public funds..etc etc YET there is little exposure of their terrible attitude to the UK housing nightmare .. my view is they enjoy the turmoil as it keeps them in non-jobs happily attacking landlords at will.

I constantly struggle with the "housing shortage" claim based on my own experience as a BTL investor in London. It may very well apply to social housing but it certainly doesn't apply to private London stock and this has been the status quo for a number of years. Not only is there a glut of apartment units on the market, both for rent and sale, but developers continue to add to that number every year. I have seen rentals drop, long void periods and scant interest from tenants where units languish on the market for months.
Obviously this situation has been exacerbated by the cladding fiasco but it doesn't address the problem.
A perusal of any property site will confirm my assessment.

Reply to the comment left by Luke P at 04/03/2021 - 13:27
And another thing, Luke - go on then, surprise me. Come back here after it has aired and tell me that I was wrong. Let me know that the unspeakable reason wasn't immigration after all.

Reply to the comment left by Leics Landlord at 04/03/2021 - 17:57
I’m not sure what your point is. Immigration directly impacts the number of properties required. In an already struggling domestic housing market, it’s right to discuss this. Those already here must be above incomers. It’s a matter of basic priority...like when resources are stretched, policing focus on serious crimes, leaving other ‘lesser’ (but equally illegal) crimes uninvestigated. It’s a needs-must system. Logistical pragmatism, perhaps.

Immigration matters.

Brush it off a racist, though.

Reply to the comment left by Luke P at 04/03/2021 - 18:11
Vance is not interested in housing. All he wants is to spew bile about race and immigration, posing as a serious commentator while trying to claim victim status when people call him out. Chris has not said what the unspeakable reason for the housing crisis is, but I confidently predict that it will turn out to be immigration because that is all that Vance and his ilk are interested in. All that Chris is doing is providing cover for people like Vance to advance their agenda while giving ammunition to the anti-landlord lobby. It is a terrible error of judgement.