To think we should ban private renting?

Exactly this. There's a whole cross section of young and not-so-young professionals who move every few years and who want decent furnished rented accommodation. Who's going to furnish the Housing Association houses? Or give short term lets?

We don't have anything like enough houses. Vacancy rates for residential housing sit at 5%. That's far too little for a functioning housing market to give people what they need.

The solution has to be both region led and be integrated with industries and business needs.

There's no point Cornwall County Council acquiring all the second homes and privately rented property - and all the expense the maintenance of those properties require if there's no work for all the new social housing renters, in addition to losing huge amounts of tax revenue.

So government grants don't fund housing associations at all?

People will bend themselves out of shape to deny the contribution that tax payers make to social housing and HAs. Madness.

We have also needed short term rents for work, not everyone wants to live longer term in one place. We need more flexibility than that.

Ok so my questions for you

1. how will housing associations/councils afford to buy these properties from the current landlords there are currently approx 5million rental properties in England. So you are talking literally billions of £
2. would HA/councils allow you to have a house larger than they say you need? So you currently rent privately a 3 bed, but the HA says you only need a one bed as you are in your own. Why should your choice be taken away from you? And no HAs won’t allow you to rent larger properties than they think you need
3. then there’s all the income people rely on lots of rental properties are accidental landlords or one or two properties. Ok they may get some funds when they sell, but what about all the people linked, so trades doings work, painters decorators, new carpets etc, all dealt with by private landlords but won’t be required by HA ( who expect you to carpet properties)
4. how would it work if you could only rent from HA/councils if you want to live somewhere for a few months either for work or perhaps to help family out?

A friend works in social housing for the council. Her department try to buy empty homes due to the owner going into a nursing home or dying.

Very few inheritors want to sell. They've got it in their head that it will be a nice place to visit or it will continue to appreciate until they want the money in retirement.

If in a nursing home with Alzheimer's they haven't got the mental capacity to sell and there's no POA in place so the property sits there empty. That can go on for years.

New build well you have to find the land which must be within the LDP you can't build anywhere. Then highways, waterboard, gas, electric companies must be consulted. Planning need to look at flood plain risk. Thats two years gone.

Btw housing association must make a profit to enable them to continue to buy/build property for other families.

Families that separate/divorce suddenly need two properties with extra bedrooms in each property for stays. Perhaps we should ban people from divorcing, ban single parenting.

My DS paid £155 PW for one room, shower, shared kitchen for seven students back in 2019. That same room this year is £280 PW. The landlord? Unite Union. DS calculated his halls and the one next door brought in £8 million in 2019. Imagine the unions income this year. There's no way Unite can hand over the halls for HMOs. The money raised is for union coffers for union members.

A terrible idea, for the simple reason that there are many thousands - possibly millions - of people for whom private renting is the only option - not just university and college students but also vast numbers of people who move about for work and are either not in a position to buy or don't want to buy, because in two, three or four years time, they'll be moving again and will have to sell up. The days of finding or even wanting a job in the factory along the road are long gone. Single or divorced people. People without children. People on temporary contracts. The constraints on who would qualify for social housing - of which I agree there should be much more for the people who do want it - mean that single people wanting reasonably short term accommodation would be out on the streets. Lots of EU countries manage this (like so much else) better than we do.

When lived abroad for a while we rented out our house, I'm not sure what the advantages of it standing empty for two years would have been?
Also what the advantages of switching more private landlords from longer term renters to airb&bs are meant to be?

This is the dumbest idea I’ve heard for a long time.

Ugh. Do you demand to know that about everything or just when poor folks would benefit?

And why is it always 'all this' and 'all these' with people like you. Just gross.

I totally disagree.

Housing Associations are not run for profit, unlike private renting landlords, that’s why HA rents are cheaper so there would be no need for rent subsidies. Not all social housing is government owned, there are plenty of housing associations that are not council run.

https://www.housing.org.uk/about-housing-associations/what-housing-associations-do/

We didn’t have the safety regulations in the 70s that are in place now. The extra maintenance fees would cripple the HAs if they increased their stock (and were prohibited from making too much profit). The HAs would need to pay for additional staff to deal with the assessments and lettings. I can’t think of a business model to make this work at all.

And if owned by local authorities? They can still end up at risk of insolvency due to deficits….

The answer would be have much more social housing.
But there'd never be enough.

exactly - many professionals need to move around for work purposes and can’t wait for months to be allocated a house. This sounds lovely if you want to be given a house in the neighbourhood you grew up in and never want to move/never need a bigger house because you decide to have children. Leaving out the significant question of how to pay to purchase all these houses.

When I lived somewhere effectively without private rental it was an absolute nightmare - very little opportunity to find somewhere to live, zero flexibility, lots of stress. Prices were fine but doesn't help if you don't actually have anywhere to rent and can't afford to buy/not staying long enough to make buying sensible

I just did the maths. There are roughly 5 million private rentals in the UK. At 250k each, the total value is 1.25 TRILLION pounds.

Just where is this money going to magically appear from?

A lot of people rent because they don’t want to buy. In the village where I grew up there’s a couple of 6-bedroom houses with huge gardens and multiple reception rooms for rent and they’re usually taken by folk doing short-term work for just a couple of years in the nearby city, who don’t want to buy somewhere if they’re not going to be there long. It happens all over. I don’t see that banning ALL private renting and thus forcing people to buy houses they don’t want to own is helping anyone.

These are people our society failed. We probably owe them castles.

I don't think you can actually ban it as there are some limited circumstances where a person may legitimately want to keep their house but not live in it, for example trialling living with a partner or while temporarily working away, and it would be a pity to have homes standing empty.
What you could do was prevent landlords charging any more than the social housing rent for a comparable property. That would take the incentive away from people seeing it as a business opportunity, while allowing for temporary accidental landlords.

Just for starters - explain Bristol's housing issue.

I'll wait.

So no private renting but you’d still be able to book a hotel room, a multi bedroomed suite?

Hotel chains will be able to buy up all this cheap housing stock in cities - create lots of those long stay apartment hotel rooms, stick a bit of hotel branding on the front of the building, and basically ‘rent’ the flats out.

So Jane who inherited her parent’s house, sells it and decides to buy the apartment next door as an investment and a small income isn’t allowed to.

But big commercial chains will be able to effectively rent out long stay places under the banner of hotels?

I work with families who can’t live by the rules of social housing. They struggle to keep noise down, behave appropriately with neighbours, pay the rent, maintain the interior and exterior of their property (often due to mental health needs, traumatic childhoods, addiction etc.). Social housing won’t take them only private landlords. Where will they be housed?

This. It would cause a massive shock to the system, probably on the scale of the financial crisis if not worse.

It would inevitably devalue property. Landlords can’t pay off their mortgages. There isn’t enough equity to repay the mortgage on sale of the property. Banks are at risk of collapse.

Pension funds are huge property owners and tend to hold property long term to let. If they had to sell it all off at below its current value, they would likely collapse.

It’s fundamental to our economy that the government respects property rights. If you interfere too much with that, trust is lost and people stop spending and investing in the UK. It’s why the government offers full compensation for compulsory purchase etc. rather than just confiscating privately owned assets.