Lettings fees ban WILL go ahead, says DCLG

The lettings fee ban is set to go ahead. The Government has announced its intention to introduce a total ban ands agents across the UK will not be able to charge any fees to tenants for their services, if the Government’s proposals are implemented. This isn’t a case of rattling cages to get the message through to agents that their fees may be disappearing, if they do not receive suitable responses from the consultation – today’s publication of the Consultation Paper leaves us in no doubt that there will be a total ban on lettings fees, as stated by Baroness Hayter (right) last week at the arla|propertymark Conference, it is just a matter of when and how it is implemented. Within the document, the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) says, “DCLG officials undertook some market research of letting agent fees. We randomly chose 50 agents of differing sizes and models (i.e. franchises, independents and national branches) across the country and searched their website for a list of letting fees charged to tenants. This exercise reinforced how difficult it is for tenants to both find and compare agent fees since it was not always simple to either find the fees…

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