"Promises of new social housing will do nothing to help renters struggling today"
The National Residential Landlords Association (NRLA) has hit out at the Labour Party’s social housing plan, calling it “a charter for rent dodgers and nightmare tenants.”
The NRLA was responding to proposals expected to be included in a new charter for renters should the Labour Party win the next election.
Lisa Nandy, a member of the Labour Party and State secretary for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, was quoted as saying that the party will “tilt the balance of power back to private renters through a powerful new renters’ charter and a new decent homes standard written into law.”
The landlords’ association believes that Nandy and the Labour Party want the social rented sector to overtake the private rented sector as the second largest housing tenure in the country by implementing several plans limiting the latter.
The NRLA said that Labour’s plan to end automatic repossessions for rent arrears would send a dangerous signal that paying rent was somehow an optional extra and begs the question where it ends.
“For example, would mortgage lenders no longer be able to regain possession of properties if homeowners can’t pay their mortgages?” the NRLA asked. “Labour should be focussed instead on preventing rent arrears in the first place by unfreezing housing benefit rates and addressing the supply crisis in the private rented sector which is the biggest driver of rents.”
Read more: Next PM must end government ‘hostility’ to landlords – NRLA.
The Labour Party’s new charter is also expected to include a right for renters to have pets. To this plan, the NRLA said landlords should also be able to require tenants to have suitable insurance to reflect the greater risk of pets damaging properties.
It added that introducing a four-month notice period for repossessions by landlords would make the new charter favourable “for anti-social tenants causing misery for fellow tenants and neighbours alike, knowing that they could stay put for four months as well as those purposefully not paying their rent in the knowledge that they have a four-month period in which nothing can happen.”
“It is depressing that the Labour Party is once again demonising all landlords,” Ben Beadle, chief executive at the National Residential Landlords Association said. “The vast majority do a good job, providing a fifth of all housing in the country. That is why private tenants are more likely to be satisfied with their accommodation than those in the social rented sector.
“The combined effects of what Labour is proposing, in particular essentially making rent payments an optional extra, will seriously damage confidence and, with it, the supply of homes to rent when demand is already high.”
Beadle stressed that the proposals will only leave tenants suffering in the long run.
“The reality is that promises of new social housing at some distant point in the future will do nothing to help renters struggling today,” he said.
