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Truss needs to bring back tax allowances for landlords: Cluttons

Gary Adams

The new government headed by Liz Truss, which will take on operations tomorrow, needs to bring back tax allowances for landlords to get them back into the market, says Cluttons head of residential James Hyman.

Reacting to today’s news, Hyman says: “The new prime minister’s priority must be to ensure that interest rates do not escalate out of control, as this, coupled with the cost of living crisis, will cause the market to crash.

“In order to alleviate the UK’s housing shortage, the government needs to look at reinstating tax allowances and incentives for private landlords to encourage them back into the market.”

He explains: “The main reason why rents have escalated so quickly over the last two years has been lack of supply, which has been driven by so many private landlords being forced to exit the market due to the government no longer making it viable to be a private landlord.”

Earlier today, a survey by Goodlord revealed that a majority of letting agents expect a number of their landlord clients to exit the market this year.

Hyman adds: “Furthermore, to help meet the country’s current housing supply requirements, the new prime minister needs to address the huge post pandemic, planning consent bottleneck within local authorities.”

Planning is a topic that comes up elsewhere. For example, a Leeds Building Society spokesperson comments: “There’s no simple fix for the housing crisis facing our country but building enough homes to meet demand is unquestionably the right place to start.

“That’s why we challenged Liz Truss, and all of the candidates vying to be prime minister, to meet their commitments by building the 300,000 homes a year our country so desperately needs, and that the Conservative 2019 manifesto promised.

“With the economy on the cusp of recession, we should be clear that building homes is good for growth. By delivering on the manifesto pledge, the new prime minister would be generating over £14bn of economic activity and creating 260,000 additional jobs.

The lender says it wants to see a long term strategy to house building, “that will give confidence to the housing industry and certainly won’t be solved by the uncertainty of stop-start reform and the revolving door of government ministers tasked with the brief.”

And Propertymark chief executive Nathan Emerson talks about housing supply too, along with energy efficiency, which he says were the two top issues in a recent online poll the body carried out.

“We congratulate Liz Truss on her successful election campaign and urge her to work with property professionals to find solutions to these major issues facing the sector,” says Emerson.

He continues: “It’s no surprise that boosting housing supply topped our poll. Our latest market insight reports show for every rental property available there are an average of 11 applicants, while home buyers are outnumbering sellers by seven to one. This is creating affordability issues, particularly in the private rented sector.

“We believe that gap can be closed through measures that bring the many tens of thousands of long-term empty properties back and the introduction of focussed targets for new homes that are based on an identified need for each tenure across the country.”

And on energy efficiency: “Propertymark is a strong advocate of making homes more energy efficient as the best solution to bringing down bills.

“However, it is unlikely that significant progress can be made until ministers better understand the current housing stock and then apply realistic targets based on properties’ individual characteristics with sustained funding for homeowners.”

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