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The housing crisis – who’s to blame and what can be done?

A personal blog by Beresford Staines – former property manager with the public service.

We have been hearing for years, we have a housing crisis.

Shortage of rental properties and shortage of affordable houses and who’s to blame?

Well, that depends on what side of the political spectrum you follow.

The truth is, we are ALL responsible, both sides.

Is it that hard to see what caused the problem and what the solutions is?

The government has recently said we need to build “36 Milton Keynes” (a large, UK city) to solve the UK housing crisis, but will it though?

Firstly, we have a lack of affordable, rental properties, that much we can agree on.

Yes, the Thatcher policy of the 80s where council houses were sold off at a discount did contribute a little to the latest housing issues, but it’s not the smoking gun.

Is it greedy landlord? Well, no, as about 80% of rental properties are actually owned by individuals and small holders who mainly have 1-2 properties, and many were accidental landlords and not necessarily “big time greedy” investors.

However as with most things, it’s the government and legislation that has killed the rental market.

Before you shake your heads, yes, it is, the truth is bitter and hard to swallow, but stick with me and I’ll explain how:

Legislation started to be introduced which regulated deposits and Houses of Multiple occupation, due to areas becoming saturated, especially when the EU started to expand a few years back.

There was, yes, some substandard housing, but then landlords got tax relief abolished.

Topped off by organisations dedicated to helping bad tenants stay in their properties, the government realised that by going after landlords, good or bad, they had an electoral platform they could now use.

However what needs to be pointed out as well was that social housing organisations were left alone, despite having far bigger budgets and in some cases taxpayers money, but only now is it starting to be addresses, when this should have been an issue ages ago.

But any way, as a result, small scale landlords (again, a massive chunk of the private rental market) sold up in vast numbers, but the laws didn’t affect student accommodations and those run for a particular reason, like Airbnb’s, immigrations/welfare rentals, so it made financial and economical sense to abandoned traditional landlord housing and focus on these growth sectors as there is less regulation and more protection from rent arrears from can’t or won’t pay or bad tenants who smash your place up.

Landlord have also had to become inexperience “social workers” to dealing with tenants with complex mental health needs that they have no experience in.

Also, people living on the streets, a good 90% of them have a dependency on alcohol and/or hard drugs, whether or not they developed the addiction before they became homeless or after, the problem is because addiction is their, it’s hard for them to be rehomed as nothing suitable is available for them.

After all, what would you have, a year of no rent, on top of having to pay a court, bailiffs etc to remove the tenant and then spending further thousands of pounds to bring the property back up to rental standards, or simply being able to chuck rouge tenants out as they are living in student or temporary rented accommodation.

But getting back to the main point, you chase away landlords by excessive, overlapping burdens and very high tax regime, what did everyone thing would happen?

Most landlords are not rolling in luxury as many still have mortgages, and need to pay insurance, taxes and costs as the result of renting a property out.

Then we move to the councils, as explained earlier, that selling stock wasn’t a good idea and it seems that all the houses and apartments being built now are going to be sold privately and out of the reach financially for most people, and if any are available for social housing, it’s far and few in between.

What we need to do is encourage people to buy properties and alleviate the housing crisis and whilst dealing with rogue landlords, make it simple and easy to evict non paying tenants and those that cause trouble.

The problem is with “no fault” evictions, no landlord wants to evict a tenant who pays up, now those that don’t or just have an entitled approach, that’s a different story.

Quick evictions, no backlog in court, no allowance for when evidence clearly exists of rouges playing the system and make it more affordable, and making sure bailiff fees are kept minimal.

As for benefits, if the local housing allowance does cover, that is great, but usually it doesn’t, so pressure needs to be applied to central government to up housing benefits.

You may or may not agree, but this is the reality in ending the housing crisis shortage.

This will stop the homeless situation for genuine in need people and families.

Support free journalism and freedom by “buying us a coffee” here. We are volunteers, not a for profit company and any donation big or small helps keep us going. If you have an article you’d like to submit or volunteer and write some articles, please feel free to email us.