Housing White Paper: key rental policies revealed

The Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government Sajid Javid (pictured, right) presented the government’s housing White Paper to the Commons today with the aim of fixing the UK’s ‘broken housing market’. During the run-up to Javid’s statement to parliament several ministers including housing minister Gavin Barwell had suggested that the government was keen to break its historical fixation on home ownership and focus instead on the rental market. His preamble to parliament sounded promising. During it he warned that even renting a decent home had become a “distant dream” for many, and that this was the “biggest bar to social progress this country faces”. But there is less evidence of this in the White Paper than many within the industry were expecting, and Javid only referred once to the rental sector in his statement, saying he wanted to “improve safeguards in the private rented sector”. You have to scroll down to page 50 in the White Paper before key measures designed to achieve this aim are found, not quite the seismic change of direction many were expecting. Build to rent The first measure is to encourage more institutional investors to get into in Built to Rent, which is not new,…

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