The government unveiled its housing white paper last week in a climate of political uncertainty and predictable cynicism.
The long-awaited policy statement comes at a time of increasingly unaffordable house prices, with the majority of UK households set to rely on the rental sector in the future. Ministers must be credited, though, with changing the course of the ship of state on housing. They have listened to us on expanding supply, not just pumping demand, and on giving institutionalised PRS property much greater priority alongside owner occupation.
Considering the previous government’s penalising of the buy-to-let sector, and small landlords in particular, it is unsurprising that the most recent sentiment survey by chartered surveyors revealed that 26% more contributors expected landlords to scale back their portfolios. What’s more, respondents predicted that new landlord instructions in the lettings market would fail to improve for a fourth consecutive quarter, with the issue anticipated to worsen in the future.
As many become more reliant on the private rented sector and the government’s rhetoric shifts away from home ownership, it is imperative that urgent action is taken. We warned the housing minister that the nation faced a 1.8m shortfall of rental homes by 2025, if building rates stayed as they were.
With this in mind, it is key that we stop punitive measures against our bedrock small landlords. The detail on the ban on letting agent fees is yet to come and, along with any overt requirements for longer tenancies, could dampen investment in buy-to-let overall. The government must be careful about signalling both stop and go at the same time.
Our survey demonstrates how vital more supply is in this sector; we really need to turbo-boost build-to-rent. The consultation on how to do this must be regarded as a defining moment.
While the focus on build-to-rent looks set to overcome many of the shortfalls of previous administrations, the housing crisis will not be solved by building new homes alone – we must make use of our existing properties. We have repeatedly told government that getting empty homes back into use and encouraging Britain’s ageing population to downsize could be the key to unlocking more than 2.8m homes.
Clearly, it is an emotive issue and one that needs to be treated with sensitivity, but we would like to see central and local government provide older people with the information and the practical and financial support they need to downsize if that is their choice. Almost a third of over-55s have considered downsizing in the past five years, yet we know that only 7% actually did.
Time and time again, we are being told that planning delays are the greatest barrier to the delivery of new homes. There is a dire shortage of staff within planning departments and this is causing projects to be delayed by years. We called for local councils to be allowed to pool resources to create planning flying squads – crack teams of planners who will be drafted in to support ailing authorities and break down one of our biggest planning barriers – and the White Paper opens the door to that.
The public sector must also start to release land more quickly and on a greater scale. For all the good intentions, too little has been done to date. We are talking about hundreds of acres of publicly owned land that is now going to waste. And given the work on direct commissioning, as well as development corporations for garden cities and villages, the PM’s comments on the positive role of government should mean that the state retains a role in the projects built on public land.
And we must unleash the potential of councils and housing associations to encourage them to invest in new housebuilding schemes, even if that jars with political ideology, because they are the best-fit deliverers of affordable housing.
The fact is that although it is positive to see the government listening to industry and addressing the key issues, we still have much to do. Grit, determination and urgency will be needed to bridge not just our annual supply shortfall, but the cumulative housing deficit we have built up over decades.
We must get far better at delivering more houses at pace and consciously providing a range of tenures and affordable options. As the Brexit process starts in earnest, with a dialogue about an industrial strategy, the housing white paper must be the vehicle for building the affordable homes that “just about managing” households need.
Jeremy Blackburn is head of policy at RICS
