Council crackdown on shanty town
The London Borough of Islington has fined a landlord £280,000 for defying orders to rip down insubstantial housing built without permission in an outbuilding.
It’s good to see a London council getting tough on landlords who flout planning law to the detriment of their tenants. Too often we see local authorities not taking action when there is a breach of planning law, or being thwarted by the four-year dwelling rule which exempts the landlord if the dwelling has been continuously occupied for four years.
Islington Council has shown that you can forcefully take on those who are ignoring planning regulations with the right political will. This is as much an issue of ensuring that tenants live in decent, spacious and well-kept properties as it is simply a planning dispute and Islington has recognised this in the work it is doing in the private rented sector.
And that colossal fine could go towards building some real houses.
Landlords milking two days wages a week from tenants
Private renters spend 40% of their income on rent, compared with owner occupiers whose mortgage payments average 20% of income, according to the Government’s English Housing Survey published this morning.
That means that renters spend two days a week working to pay off their landlords mortgage – most would prefer to be paying off their own, but house prices are far too expensive. It’s hard to see how this could be characterised as anything other than exploitation.
An initial set of figures for 2012-13 was published in February – today’s more detailed look reveals that:
- Only half of private renters agree that living in their sector is a good way to occupy a home, rather lower than in the other two main tenure groups.
- 73% of private renters were aged under 45 compared with 37% of social renters and just one quarter (27%) of owner occupiers
- A fifth of private renters last year were couples with children – up from 12% in 2008-09
- Over half (55%) of private renters said they anticipated owning their own home in the longer-term. Around a quarter (27%) reported that they expected to still be renting from a private landlord in the longer-term.
This graph makes it clear just how inadequate the private rented sector is – we have proposed a number of policies to fix it in our Renters Manifesto – and sign up here!
Half of renters feel ripped off
Nearly half of private renters feel they have been ripped off by their landlord or letting agent, according to a poll commissioned by Ocean Finance (reported by Mortgage Introducer).
The biggest problem, cited by around half of unhappy renters, was the delay – or, indeed, complete failure – to get repairs carried out. This was followed by withholding of the deposit at the end of the tenancy (37%), or making unreasonable deductions from it (25%). Unreasonable rent rises and rip-off admin fees at the start of the tenancy affected around 23% of respondents.
These findings support work Generation Rent is already doing to improve the lives of renters. Only yesterday we published a consultation on new ways to help tenants recover their deposits.
We are also calling on politicians to strengthen tenants’ rights when requesting repairs by protecting them from revenge evictions. Our proposals for a long term tenancy would ensure that landlords couldn’t impose inflation-busting rent increases, while we argue that letting agents – who work for landlords – should not be able to pass on fees to tenants. Further information is in our Renters Manifesto.
Government offers guidance on how to rent
In June, the Department for Communities and Local Government launched a new guide for private rented sector tenants titled How to rent: the checklist for renting in England. With this guide the government want to give the country’s 9 million tenants access to understandable information for renting property in England.
“Taxpayers get a great deal from landlord regulation”
Alex Hilton from Generation Rent supporting the All Party Parliamentary Group on the Private Rented Sector in calling for tougher landlord regulation
You can see the BBC News item here
A response to Labour’s Lyons report on housing
For almost a year Labour has been touting its Lyons Housing Review as the central plank of its offer for the 2015 manifesto. But its publication today, after so much foreplay, has left me disappointingly unsatisfied.
24 hours to win £40,000 (and help renters)
Tomorrow lunchtime is deadline for the Housing Open Data Challenge. http://www.nesta.org.uk/housing-open-data-challenge
The process for entering the challenge is
- Sign up to Collabfinder (this requires having a facebook account) http://collabfinder.com/groups/housing-open-data-challenge
- Create a project in Collabfinder
3 finalist teams get £5,000 to build a proof of concept. The winning team gets £40,000 to build it.
Entrants don’t originally have to be in a team – they can enter as an individual – and if they lack any tech skills for example, we’ll help network them with potentially useful team members. This report has some free ideas in it too if anyone wants to take them forward.
Do you know who might be interested into applying? Incidentally, I’m neither a judge nor entrant in this competition – I’m a sort of cheerleader.
Many thanks
Alex Hilton
Director, Generation Rent
Beyond the bubble
I’m very pleased to be delivering the MSc Sustainable Urban Development public lecture for Oxford University and the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors on 7th November.
I’ll be exploring the failure of the housing market, the threat it poses to the economy and how a secondary, cost price housing market can fix the problem.
Not only is everyone welcome but it’s also free to attend. I hoe you will come along and heckle wittily. But please do rsvp to David Howard at [email protected]
Many thanks,
Alex
Landlords waver on national register
Landlord representatives this week signalled they are ready to back down on their long standing opposition to the creation of a national register of landlords.
Buying out of the bubble
This week we published our renters’ manifesto, a portfolio of reforms that will end the exploitation of tenants while ensuring a fair and sustainable market for landlords.
But the cause of the problems in the private rented sector often track back to the limited supply compared to the demand for homes and the effect this has on rental prices.