To think we should ban private renting?

We're all caught in a vicious circle. LA don't have money so can't cope with the demand for social housing. The answer from the gov: make it very hard for private landlords to evict so any problem become the problem of the landlord. Landlords either sell up because there is no more benefit to be a landlord or hack the price up to cope with the additional costs that come with the regular new legislations that always penalises them. When they sell, the gov gets less tax revenue. When the landlords increase rent, it cost the gov more in benefits. Either way, it's more pressure on the budget, less allocation to LA, and rinse and repeat....

No government wants to truly tackle the problem because it requires a long term solution...and as we know, governments never last long enough to have and implement any sort of medium term, let alone long term plans.

Private landlords need to be valued in our society so that they can value their tenants. Legislations should focus on punishment for bad landlords and bad tenants, no punish everyone indistinctly.

This is where everything has gone a bit bonkers. Houses which owner occupiers live in quite happily are not good enough by council criteria. I’m all for improving standards but when you have an EPC system that classifies large swathes of the uk housing stock as not good enough, something is very wrong.

Lots of people profit from need for housing - the architects, builders, mortgage lenders, investors amongst many more. It’s how society works - people do things to make a profit.

perhaps they’re the very small numbers the producers could find to appear on the show.

Why should anyone bother to own property then? If I can sell my house to the state and then be housed myself at a fraction of the cost of owning and maintaining a home why would I not do that? Then I can quit my stressful job and do 16 hours a week somewhere and claim benefits to top me up. Why not? I mean I wouldn’t because it’s not in my nature but if there is no personal benefit to work and sacrifice why bother? Some magical person will pay for it after all

I am a private landlord
tenants have just left owing me over 30 k and trashed the place

its cost me 9 k to fix it up and fallow months

its now in the hands of a local authority thanks to a great company called elliotleigh who take flats iff you and do all the admin legal and repairs

I’m not animated particularly - but I’m delighted you think that!
Since you ask my housing situation is secure thanks to years of hard work and saving.
My daughter however is 23. Has recently graduated (degree apprentice). Works in London - £29k a year - she rents a room in a house share. In order to afford to do that, pay rent, buy her Oyster card etc and try save towards a deposit she works in a bar at weekends. She saves every spare penny she has to try and secure her own future rather than rely on others.

Why would I need to know them intricacies of Bristol to know there are thousands if not millions of empty properties in the UK?

No need to get so animated. My view is we need more affordable housing. That there should be a choice. Might not be for everyone. No more, no less and I’m assuming your own housing situation is secure otherwise you’d be more understanding how difficult it is for those with high rents and no security of tenure. They can’t achieve aspirations if they’re crippled every month paying high costs. That’s a catch 22.

They aren't. They are "not for profits" and many of them are charities.

Your whole argument is based around the fact that you think your affordable rent covers all the costs of your housing.

It doesn't.

I agree with you, we need a massive increase in social housing.

How on earth do you actually believe this?
What about those people who don’t want to be reliant on the state?
How is the government going to buy all these properties (I assume you’d put taxes up?)?
What about those between properties that just need short term let’s?
What about encouraging aspiration rather than just ‘let’s rely on the State’!

There are countries that have tried this.

usually as part of a communist or socialist system.

china is the one I’m most familiar with so I’ll talk about that.

so in China all property was state owned. Housing went with your job, pretty much. Each unit of production (company in western terms) would have a factory or area of land of agricultural and would have some housing alongside that - flats in cities or urban areas, houses in villages or rural areas.

at birth and growing up you’d live with your parents in “company” housing. Think like army housing today in the uk. You’d go to the local school. You could apply to go away for university and if you got accepted you’d be given a place in a dorm a bit like student halls in the uk.

on graduation, you’d apply for jobs with various units that you wanted to work with. Everyone would be given a job so you would get one. It would come with housing, but when I say housing for new grads and single people it would be a bed in a dormitory and the dorm would have maybe 10 or 20 people in It.

singapore’s social housing runs on a very similar model - only families get flats, single people uny recently were not even allowed to apply, now they can apply but they’ll get a bed in a shared room with 12 people. Singapore’s biggest housing complexes sleep over sixteen thousand people and you aren’t allowed to cook or do laundry yourself because there just isn’t space.

going back to China,
if you applied to get married and it was accepted you’d get better housing in the sense that you’d get a private room for the two of you.

but in all the systems where this has been done, the sons and daughters of the people running the system get much much better housing and jobs than anyone else. There’s one system for the masses and another for the elites.

I agree in principle, I think people should own only the property they live in. People "investing" in property to rent out as private landlords take away some of the most affordable houses, preventing a lot of first time buyers from being able to get on the property ladder, and ultimately meaning more people are stuck renting longer term and filling their (landlords') greedy pockets.

But, in practice banning it entirely would be complicated. And there is cause for rental properties that isn't social housing, not everyone wants to buy. I think in reality, private renting should be much more heavily regulated than it is, and it shouldn't be as easy as 'rich person has a bundle of spare cash, rich person buys lots of houses and rents them out to get richer' which it quite often seems to be.

Homes under the hammer is very illuminating. The number of young people buying run down property to flip or rent out is surprisingly high.

I can’t see how that would work. But it’s been really corrosive as capital has become trapped in rising property values rather than flowing into businesses, innovation, or wages.

I would support measures to dampen speculative demand for housing. Things like:

Higher taxes on vacant properties.
• Restrict land banking.
• Remove tax advantages that favour property speculation over productive investment.
• Tighten lending rules when credit growth is driving house-price inflation rather than new construction.
Build more council homes and the taxpayer gets to benefit from the more modest profit made.

And also, for those investing in BTL as a pension, make pensions and savings reforms to make incentives to invest in the productive economy more attractive.

Also make a “residents first” policy where people with a genuine connection to the country are favoured over overseas investors and speculative buyers. Denmark has this and it helps.

This is my son and his partner who met at university. After paying through the nose they found a lovely two bed flat outside Leeds which was hundreds cheaper a month than halls. They commute by train for £6 a day. Now son has finished his masters they plan to stay another couple of years, save money, do some travelling. Then move to Cheshire and probably work in Manchester. They're hoping to have enough money saved for a deposit in the next few years. Until then private rental suits them.

There will never be enough social housing to meet demand, closing the gap and having more available for those who need/want it is no bad aspiration. Moreover it would be cheaper for the taxpayer given UC housing element costs.

In principal it is not the worst idea ever (as long as the rents were set at a level that the state could cover the repairs and make a very small profit to spend on other services).

However the challenge is...

There are (according to google) 4.71m private renters in the UK and average house prices are 270k (rounded and also according to google).

To buy the houses would cost the state £1.2 Trillion....
Where do you think we are getting the money to do that?

So would all private rental housing be bought or would the government confiscate them?

Is the government also going to compulsorily purchase or confiscate all empty housing / second houses / houses owned by those ordinarily resident abroad?

Do you not think that rental controls might be an easier sell and a faster fix?

Don’t be ridiculous. I private rented for 20 years. I would not have wanted a blood council house. I had lovely landlords who looked after us very well and would not have wanted to deal with the council every time something happened. Social housing is great for people who need it. I didn’t need it. I much preferred private rentals.

The government currently pay lots of money to private landlords in rent assistance. Landlords up their rent to whatever the maximum threshold is. so they just have the government paying their mortgage anyway. This will just cut out the grubby bludger of a middle man.

Google says this would cost £1.2 Trillion. So your tax bill would go up significantly.
Or perhaps you don’t pay taxes, OP, and you are on benefits? Don't worry, I’ll keep paying.

@JahanaraBegum I agree easier to buy is really important. Some countries have experimented with a 100 year mortgage, where several generations pay the mortgage off and it is much more affordable.

Our council threw in the towel years ago handing their entire housing stock over to a private company to run. This company has done very well. They have the clout to buy land and build whatever they want. The council are rent collectors now.

And how would the government find the money to pay for all these houses, well not the government, tax payers? That's a huge amount of money that would be needed. It would be fairer to put social houses rent up a bit and use additional money to buy more housing stock to rent out. And stop Right to Buy.
Also social housing renters should understand that it's not their house / flat and as their needs change they should move out. For example if their income improves or they have less children at home and allow the bedrooms to be filled with those who need the space. It seems really unfair that some people get the cheap rents and some don't.