Renting must stop failing renters in England
Parting words from our outgoing Head of Campaigns Conor O’Shea
Six things renters need from the Chancellor tomorrow
Rachel Reeves has an opportunity to announce measures around tax, benefits and investment that would make renting more affordable
A win on deposits and one step closer to regulating landlords
The letting fees ban is great and all, but now fees are out of the way, you still have to scrape together a large deposit before you can move home.
Well, we thought about that – last year we proposed a system where you could transfer part of your deposit to your next tenancy, once you’d done responsible things like pay your final month’s rent. We called this deposit passporting.
We couldn’t get it into the Tenant Fees Act (which came into force this month), but the government has been looking at it and today announced its support for deposit passporting!
Sadiq Khan publishes vision for London’s rental market
The Mayor of London has come out firmly in favour of our campaign to end unfair evictions – and has pushed the government to give him powers to bring in rent controls in the capital.
He was elected in 2016 on a pledge to shake up London’s private rented sector, and now, after a long consultation period, Sadiq Khan has unveiled his proposals.
We need a national register of landlords – here’s why
Right now, the private rented sector is a wild west which at best costs a fortune for somewhere you can’t call a home and at its worst is dangerously unsafe. In fact, it’s so unregulated that right now the government doesn’t actually know how many landlords are out there.
Is your landlord safe?
A new national database, naming private landlords who have been convicted of safety breaches has been created by our friends over at Environmental Health News, the magazine of the Chartered Institute for Environmental Health’s magazine. This follows a ruling by the information commissioner that the Ministry of Justice must release its list of property firm convicted under the Housing Act 2004 – initially the MOJ refused.
Criminal landlord database shows what protections we still need
Environmental Health News (EHN) has done us all a huge service by publishing a list of landlords with convictions for housing offences.
For the first time we know the 2,006 companies and individuals who have been successfully prosecuted, but this figure is dwarfed by the 740,000 private rented households estimated to have hazards dangerous to human health. And the landlords in question get away with fines that hardly make a dent on the income they get from rents.
This has to stop.
Taxing times for private landlords?
The Let Property Campaign, HMRC’s initiative on tax in the private rented sector, is stepping up its work to ensure private landlords pay the full tax on their rental income.
Landlord licensing works – yet the government is delaying renewal of the most successful scheme
Since the east London borough of Newham introduced mandatory borough-wide licensing of all private landlords in 2013, improvements in the sector have been indisputable. Criminal landlords are being driven out of the borough, standards and safety in the sector have improved and enforcement has dramatically increased.
Yet with the scheme due to expire on 31 December 2017, government is now more than four weeks overdue in making a decision on approval of a new, five-year scheme, to start in the new year.
Are banks behind your latest rent rise?
This morning, Mortgage Strategy magazine and the Daily Telegraph reported that Santander is requiring its buy-to-let borrowers to raise the rent on their tenants as high as possible.
The bank even demands that landlords get a valuation of the market rent every time the tenancy is up for renewal and then “take all steps to ensure that the review [with the tenant] takes place and leads to the maximum increase in the rent which can reasonably be achieved.”