Yet another ridiculous piece of potential legislation the government want to impose on landlords is for them to acquire planning permission to rent out flats with more than 3 sharers.

Current rules state the level is five people before a HMO license is needed. But planning permission!? Seriously!? What a totally nonsensical idea.

Consider this, In London an estimated 20% of households rent from private landlords. That’s 20% folks. Housing and Planning Minister John Healey MP has unveiled plans which will require planning permission for properties that haven’t previously been let to flatsharers where 3 or more unrelated people live together. ( How do these ministers get jobs in a sector they clearly do NOT understand?)

Important Market

Flatsharers are an important market for buy to let landlords. Young people starting work and students make up a significant proportion of the private residential letting market. It also help people who are on a lower wage to find good standard accommodation. Registering a property with the local authority as an HMO can be an expensive business requiring the landlord to pay a fee of anything up to £1,000 per property, and in some instances modify the accommodation.  These costs will inevitably feed through as higher rents to prospective tenants.

Ian Fletcher, director of policy at the British Property Federation, the largest residential landlord in the UK thinks it’s “frankly crazy” to expect a landlord to pay a large fee and spend time attempting to get planning permission ( which is never a quick process) just so they can rent it to 3 students or a few nurses etc. I completely agree with him.

The National Landlords Association thinks it’s an ‘extreme response’ which ‘local authorities are ill-equipped to handle.’ Absolutely. What planet are housing ministers on? The the NLA went on to say  ‘These plans will do nothing to improve housing or increase choice for tenants but are more about placating local protest groups in certain parts of the country.” I would go farther and suggest they might just make the rental sector situation a whole lot worse.

Critics

Critics point out that the order is being driven through by the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, John Denham MP, because so called ‘studentification’ affects his Southampton constituency.  A heavy population of students in an area can lead to noise nuisance and other complaints.  The recent Rugg Review found that just 59 council wards out of 8,000 had more than 10% of houses let to student sharers. So that argument is dead in the water.

Final Comment

This government is regulation crazy. Wherever there is a problem the attitude is ‘regulate it more’. What this means in reality is another flood of property on to the market for sale if this is enforced. It means probably that they want to connect the dots between landlords and the tax man, as the govt feel there are too many smaller landlords avoiding tax. It also means less landlords in the market place as many will not bother to pay the fee, and finally, in my own opinion, it means there is a potential to drive the smaller landlord to doing business in an underhand manner.

This is about raising funds – again- for the cash strapped govt -wrapped up as ‘ we are getting rid of slum landlords”. What total rot. They are trying to force small landlords out of the market to enable their own govt based central big business landlords as we commented in this blog post a few days ago.

< climbs down off soap box!>

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