ROOF Blog

A Communities and Local Government select committee has reported that if the government is to meet its house building targets it must bring in new measures to support the mortgage market. The committee warned that the Treasury’s asset-backed guarantee scheme was not enough to kick start the housing market, and was ‘doomed to fail’. It also criticised the government for focusing on owner occupiers at the expense of the private and social rented sector.

Shelter has published a report promoting different ways to increase the development of affordable housing. A range of contributors cover a number of subjects including how to attract development finance to the industry, flexible tenure and the private rented sector.

Gordon Brown is expected to announce a proposal that will require councils to take account of applicants’ connections to the area when allocating homes, as part of a multi-million pound plan to build more affordable homes. The prime minister hopes the move will increase stock in both council housing and affordable private homes in the coming two years, while creating thousands of new jobs in the process. Funds will be made available to the HomeBuy Direct scheme which helps first-time buyers into the market, while councils will be given discretion to provide social housing to local people even if they are not considered priority cases.

Stirling council has become the first local authority in Scotland to ban the practice of evicting tenants who fall behind on their rent payments. Latest figures show the authority had evicted 23 such tenants in 2008, in moves the councillors called ‘draconian’. Shelter Scotland said it was delighted with the move and called on other councils to follow Stirling’s lead, stating that more than 97 per cent of the 3,577 evictions by councils and housing associations in 2007 and 2008 were for tenants who had fallen into arrears.

The National Landlords’ Association is warning landlords on the dangers of cannabis factories in their rental properties, adding they have a responsibility to make sure they are aware of what is going on inside their property. The NLA says the damage caused to a property used as a cannabis farm can be ‘catastrophic’ with internal walls removed, and repairs running into tens of thousands of pounds.

Fewer young people are living independently than ten years ago, and more households in the private rented sector are headed by young people aged 16-24 than in owner occupation and social housing combined, according to a study by the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH). Young people say that they are excluded from home ownership and shared ownership because the costs are too high for them to meet.

A fully licensed national register for private rented sector landlords would cost the English government £2.5 billion. Local authorities who would be in charge of implementing the scheme would face start up costs of around £50,000 each, an assessment report has found.

A report looking at how asbestos is managed and removed from people’s homes has revealed major differences in how local authorities and registered social landlords notify tenants of the likely risks. The report, from construction union UCATT, recommends that all social landlords maintain an asbestos register of properties, and conduct up-to-date house surveys.

The Association of Residential Letting Agents (ARLA) says that landlords need incentives to drive improvements in the private rented sector as thousands of tenants were living in homes that are sub-standard and in need of modernisation. ARLA wants the government to introduce incentives such as tax relief, to encourage landlords to improve their properties, arguing that 61 per cent of their members claimed they would upgrade their properties in some way if immediate tax relief was available.

Private tenants are routinely being ‘conned’ by letting agents imposing unjustified fees for providing a poor or nonexistent service, a report from the Citizens Advice said today. It said that it was dealing with 6,000 tenants’ complaints a year regarding letting agents, and that the behaviour of some is ‘out of control’. The report has found that 94 per cent of agents imposed up to seven additional charges on tenants, not counting the deposit and rent in advance, costing up to £600, and some agents were caught billing tenant and landlord for the same service. Citizens Advice wants the government to extend the recent regulation to include a ban on additional charges.