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
We need to talk about short term lets
You’ve probably heard of Airbnb. But you might not have heard of Flipkey, HomeAway, HomeStay or Hostmaker. The concept stays the same – property owners rent out their house or flat for ‚Äòshort-term lets’, also known as holiday homes. They can be a great solution for covering your rent or mortgage bills for a few weeks whilst you’re away or utilising that spare room in your home.
But the problem is that local communities are finding more and more entire properties becoming permanent holiday homes. It’s eating up the market of houses that families can call home, and pushing up local rents.
Government consults on ending Section 21
It’s finally here! After announcing in April its intention to abolish Section 21, the government has published its proposals for making this happen.
We’ve been through the consultation document, which is open for responses until 12 October, and here’s a quickish summary of what’s in it.
We’ll be preparing our own response, but we also want to hear what you think. And most importantly, we’re looking at how to make it easy for renters to respond and make sure the government does this right.
Time for a landlord tax
In an age of austerity landlords have made £177 billion in capital gain alone over the past five years. On top of this they have received £30-40 billion in rent a year, including about £9 billion a year in Housing Benefit.
It’s December…Rising Rents & Increased Homeless
Rising Rents & Increased Homelessness
Today there have been a range of statistics released on the private rented sector, mortgage lending and homelessness which confirm a fairly gloomy picture for those stuck privately renting.
What happens to rents if landlords exit the market? Nothing.
Today we publish new research looking at the relationship between the size of the private rental market and rents, in light of the credit crunch, landlord tax changes, and proposals for tenancy reform.
We demonstrate that:
- A fall in rental supply is matched by a fall in demand as renters become home owners
- There is no impact on inflation-adjusted rents – in fact they’ve been falling
- The experience of the past 14 years suggests rents are most closely linked to wages – i.e. what renters can afford to pay
- This should give the government confidence to press on with substantial reform to tenancies
Six reasons why today’s renters pay more than previous generations
The harsh reality of the UK’s sometimes savage housing market is that more people are renting their homes until later in life but paying more for the privilege of doing so than their parents did.
In England the number of private renters has increased from two million to 4.5 million between 1999 and 2015 while renting a home has been eating up a steadily increasing proportion of renters’ income, rising from 8% during the late 1960s to over 27% today, on average. Here we look at the key trends driving up rents across the nation in recent years.
London’s housing costs are driving families away
Today we have called on the Mayor of London to adopt a set of policies that will speed up his efforts to end the capital’s housing crisis.
To remind him what’s at stake, we have uncovered another startling trend that is hurting the city and its people.
Every year the Office for National Statistics releases figures on internal migration – how many people move from one part of the UK to another – and people are moving out of London at an alarming rate.
Renters pay £30 a week for government housing failure
Inflation is one of those annoying things that you just have to accept and deal with – the official target is, after all, 2%. But that gives the government no excuse to allow rents to go up the way they have.
Since 1998-99, when the government started collecting data on housing costs in the Family Resources Survey, the Consumer Price Index (CPI), the measure they currently use for inflation, has risen by 38%. In the same period, the median weekly rent (according to the FRS) has gone up by 80%. If rents had just matched inflation, renters would be an average of £30 better off a week.
