Campaign group urges even more regulation of holiday lets

Holiday lets landlords may be facing higher tax bills following Jeremy Hunt’s ‘mini budget’ yesterday but campaign group Generation Rent wants the Government to go further and force all properties to be licenced.

This would be on top of Michael Gove’s existing promise to force all new holiday lets to get planning permission before they can be rented out, and the introduction of a national register.

But Generation Rent says it’s concerned that the government isn’t going far enough to regulate holiday lets.

The Chancellor abolished the Furnished Holiday Lettings tax regime in his Spring statement, which Generation Rent believes will persuade landlords back into the traditional lettings sector, increase supply and bring rents down.

lost homes

But the group, which is traditionally hostile to landlords, says it has been keeping track of the loss of homes to the holiday market by looking at the number registered as second homes for council tax, and the number of homes registered as commercial holiday lets for business rates.

The latter must meet a minimum criterion to qualify, but get another tax break, Small Business Rate Relief, if the rental income is lower than a pre-agreed amount.

Generation Rent found that there are 263,000 second homes in England, up from 245,000 in 2015 and 253,000 in 2019, and 77,000 commercial holiday lets, up from 39,000 in 2015 and 53,000 in 2019.

In total, the increase has been 57,000 since 2015 and 36,000 since 2019.

But the National Residential Landlords Association disagrees with Generation Rent’s points and Chief Executive Ben Beadle says increasing taxes for holiday let property owners will “make no meaningful difference to the supply of long-term rental properties”.