Labour’s Housing Plans Under Fire from NLA

Labour has unveiled a number of plans in its manifesto that will affect landlords, including rent caps, tax relief restrictions for landlords who don’t look after their buy to let properties, and making it a legal requirement for landlords to tell new tenants how much rent previous tenants paid.

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Labour Plans Could Backfire
The NLA are strongly critical of these proposals. They believe Labour’s plans to reform the private housing sector will almost certainly backfire because Labour doesn’t seem to understand the economics of how it works.

“These changes will have far-reaching consequences for the private rented sector, for landlords’ willingness to put their own money into providing homes, and for mortgage lenders’ view of the risk in supporting them. If these proposals are going to be rushed into the first Queen’s Speech, less than a month away, without time to think through the consequences, Labour’s good intentions could make the housing crisis worse, not better,” says Richard Lambert, CEO of the NLA.

Unscrupulous Landlords Could Benefit from Labour’s Proposals
Housing pressure group, Generation Rent, is also concerned about the proposals. They fear that unscrupulous landlords could evict families and say that introducing rent controls won’t prevent landlords from increasing rents at the end of a three-year tenancy. They are also critical of loopholes in the proposals that allow landlords to evict tenants if they need their property back to sell it, or for another reason.

“A lot of landlords would continue being decent human beings so they and their tenants would be unaffected by these proposals. But vulnerable tenants whose landlords are exploiting them could find the Labour proposals make very little difference.”