Housing

[titbumwillypoo]

If you look at most of the problems in the country at the minute the root cause is housing. Rents are too high, wages haven't kept up, not enough houses being built and mostly a finite resource being used as a basis for our economy.
I think there's a simple solution, a two pronged system. Option 1: If you rent out one house you pay 20% on income and then for every house after that an addition 1 percent up to 80%. So couples who have got together or people who've inherited etc and have a spare house (and don't want to sell yet) can make some money but they'll not get massively rich and are more likely to want long term tenants that will look after the place. What it will do is dissuade people buying up lots of houses who then get rich off the backs of other people working without having to contribute much to society.
Option 2 is if you do have lots of houses then you can become a charity. You don't pay income tax BUT you cannot earn more than 10 times minimum wage (£216,736 a year) and you cannot charge more than 10 times minimum wage per week rent. (Say for a 2 bedroom house) Obviously there would need to be some tweaks for bigger houses and HMO's but you get the principle.
Finally, housing benefit should be reduced to a flat rate across the country (over a period of say 5 years) of 10 times minimum wage per week. The money saved could be used by councils to build more social housing under the proviso that it cannot be sold off and to pay more housing officers to inspect bad landlords.
Basically my plan allows people the freedom of choice. If you believe in unfettered capitalism that allows you to set market rates that squeeze people until the pips squeak then you can have it but in doing so you will be giving back to society. Or you can make a decent living that positively helps vast swathes of society.
YABU: Market forces and the profit motive are what makes this country great.
YANBU: Secure housing should be accessible to all for a functioning society and not a way for a minority to get rich(er) off the hard work of others.

This exactly is the issue.
British residents generally speaking have no choice but to live in the UK and will own their home. They're made to pay additional stamp duty on second property bought in the country. However, non-residents/foreigners are "exempt" as their first home is in their country but their first purchase in the UK is usually a second property. The govt makes policies that to those who don't analyse further sounds good but doesn't deal with the issue.
Just over a year ago they initiated the non'resident stamp duty surcharge but it's very little and very late.

@MyYoniSaysNoni there isn't a housing shortage anywhere. Year on year for two decades there have been thousands fewer households than there are dwellings.

There's a shortage of affordable housing. But there's no shortage of housing.

You want affordable housing? You and all the other investors in this particular asset class need to cash in your investments.

Then we'd have affordable housing.

I rent out the house I lived in before I met my husband. It’s a 3 bed house for £575 a month. I pay 40% tax on it under the current system. I’d pay less tax on your system than I do currently.

Fascinating

Housing costs are high including rent because there is a huge under supply of properties in the uk. Over regulation will just drive landlords out of the market and put prices up even more as they have in Scotland.

That is completely untrue. The market rate for rent would be lower if there were more properties and less tenants. The reason it is high is because there are few suitable properties and many tenants clamouring over the few properties. This is the case in most cities in the uk but especially in places like Edinburgh and london where it can be difficult to get a property to rent at all.

It's difficult to get a property to rent because there are lots of tenants. Owner occupancy is dropping like a stone. But there are more dwellings than households, and more dwellings being built than new households appearing. This has been the case for twenty years.

When people talk about supply and demand in the housing market they're not talking about demand being caused by people being born and needing a place to live. They're talking about investors wanting to buy housing. That's what demand is. And demand is high because demand for all asset classes is high due to printing money and, now, latterly, stagflation.

I'm not a resident of the U.K.

if you had 100 houses then you’d just break it down into 10 ltd companies

not all LL then the massive profits you think this would drive more LL to sell up making less rentals available
making rents higher and less properties to rent

Just ban second home ownership & BTL mortgages - no one needs more than one house (inheriting one is different!

BTL mortgages weren’t really a thing before the late 90’s - it was Blair that created the landlord boom- get rid of them & start focussing on safe, secure, affordable homes for all. No one needs to become a Landlord!

Landlords are already selling. So do some councils BTW because they can't hit EPC C.

There were lots of properties for sale, formel or current rentals, in my area in last 12 months. I calculated about year and half ago how much could cheaper rental make if I got one and quite frankly, not worth the hassle.

Surely making use of every empty property and second homes should be looked at first before building on even more green space

@Larner You want affordable housing? You and all the other investors in this particular asset class need to cash in your investments.

Then we'd have affordable housing.

So, you're suggesting that if all LLs sell up, we'll suddenly have affordable housing? How? LLs have been selling up in recent years and house prices aren't going down.

There are plenty of houses they just arnt where the jobs are and they arnt where you can commute to a job from

Housing Benefit is not paid at market rate. Local Housing Allowance hasn't been increased for years so not kept up with inflation or the actual cost of rent. Social housing is scarce. For those who have no choice but to rent privately the housing element of UC doesn't cover the rent.

Landlords are already selling because of government measures, hence the shortage. The UK has imported about 1 million immigrants which is one of the causes

Reducing LL will drive rent up, not down.

We need more social housing, for sure. My city had 11,500 ish homes built in the last 5 years. The number of affordable homes in that total, 350. In a growing city, outskirts of London. All I see is blocks of expensive flats being built, where a 1 bed will set you back £2k a month. They're mostly rented by businesses for short term accommodation.

We need social housing so more of our current renters and young people can get those, freeing up rental properties for the rest & driving those rents down. It'll also mean social housing stops only being able to be allocated to the top 1% of the housing list.

Absolutely. Add the benefit cap into the mix and it can be almost impossible to make up the shortfall. (And yes people who can work should work. But its not always that simple)

I just had a look, the LHA for my area, for 2 bedrooms is £946pcm.
A 2 bed house will set you back £1300 easily.

The only solution is to rebuild council homes

Low cost rent ( no profit motive ) with secure for life tenancy

They will act as a natural dampener on all other prices

And because it will take some time to rebuild stock it won't happen overnight so won't yank peoples lives if they are paying mortgages- the adjustment will be slow

Not ideal for people now but the only thing that will work

We already have a shortage of rentals due to changes making it less lucrative for landlords, that is the main reason for high rents here. We need a private short to medium term rental market for those of us relocating, getting divorced etc whilst we sort out finances for long term accommodation (buying in my case). In my opinion allowing individuals to own up to 5 or 6 properties to rent out (as part of their pension) is the answer as small landlords will be more attentive usually and it's their future too on the line. We also need a long term rental sector which I think should be council/housing association or trust run, they should be open to anyone with rents capped based on income in some way (how exactly I don't know but if you earn lots you should be paying market rate basically).

This sort of idiotic nonsense is spouted so often, people have really latched onto it.

Do you know what else changed since Blair came to power? Net immigration. Running at around 50k a year in 1997, increasing to 606k last year.

And what do regulation and tax do? Push up rent. That’s exactly what has happened since the Osborne reform to tax landlords more.

We need to build council houses. Even with the reduced rents offered they were a massive money maker for councils and provided genuinely affordable houses. Housing Association 'affordable' rents are now based on the local housing allowance rate which is supposed to reflect the bottom 20% of rents (it was 50% under Labour) but in no way actually does cover rents in most areas.

Air bnbs, second holiday homes and frankly hmos are what need to go.

To get around the loss of hmos proper buildings need to be build for those kind of place, one it stops family homes being torn apart, it solves the issues of then lack of parking and you can then have proper spaces for socialising etc not just people being crammed into anything that might class as a bedroom.

No selling to foreign investors, no selling off more social housing and none of this “affordable” housing bs that are really executive housing estates that just plonk one or two cheaper houses to pass the grade.

Rent is already taxed, at same % as other income. So either 20% or 40%