Savid Javid
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Latest property news
Budget announced for March 11th but will Javid deliver on stamp duty?
Chancellor of the Exchequer says he wants to deliver on election tax promises, which included removing duty on sales under £500k.
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Latest property news
Should there only be one property ombudsman to handle complaints?
That's one of the questions Ombudsman Katrine Sporle will face when she goes live on Wednesday on Rightmove's Webinar platform.
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Latest property news
Nottingham gets green light to restrict To Let boards again after ‘crime reduction’
The City of Nottingham has been given the green light to continue severely restricting the use of To Let boards by agents for a further five years, after it was claimed that a previous control order led to a reduction in crime. Originally introduced by the council in 2012 via a five-year Regulation 7 Direction order, Nottingham has now successfully applied for a second order from Savid Javid’s Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government The extended scheme will come into operation on 19th February. Boards must follow strict design guidelines and can only be erected from January to September each year. Also, only one board per building is allowed, and agents can only erect one board in a street. Nine roads in a mainly student area of the city will now continue to be policed by the new regime, and any agent wishing to put up such a board outside of its rules will require the permission of the council to do so on a case-by-case basis. The decision follows a site visit by a planning inspector to the area affected by ‘board blight’ who agreed with the council that a further five-year control order was needed. The council…
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Exclusive: Opposition to fees ban strongest in rural, Conservative constituencies
SIGN THE PETITION AGAINST THE LETTINGS FEE BAN HERE Opposition among agents to the government’s tenant fees ban is strongest in rural, Conservative-voting area of the country, The Negotiator can reveal. Analysis of the 8,500 people who have so far signed an e-petition calling on the government to do a U-turn on the policy and instead bring in a fees cap reveals that the areas with the most signatures are all rural and semi-urban areas with Conservative MPs. The only exceptions to this rule are Coventry, six of London’s inner boroughs including Battersea, Bermondsey, Limehouse, West Ham, Ealing and Finchley, plus, Brighton and Hove, Bournemouth and Bristol West. The areas where most people have signed the petition are in parts of Hampshire, Somerset, Wiltshire, East Sussex, Kent, Essex, East Anglia, Oxfordshire, Northamptonshire and Lincolnshire. Opposition to a ban is weaker in the north although there are hotspots of people signing the petition in North Lincolnshire and Lancashire. Within housing minister Dominic Raab’s constituency of Esher & Walton in Surrey, 17 people have signed the petition, while in Sajid Javid’s constituency of Bromsgrove in the West Midlands, 15 people have. The constituency with the highest number of signatures is in Kettering,…
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Latest property news
Letting fees ban will NOT become law until at least Spring 2019
The recently-renamed Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government (MHCLG ) does not expect the letting fees ban to come into force until Spring 2019, it has confirmed. In written evidence made this week to both the Select Committee hearings that scrutinised the draft legislation, and to the National Approved Letting Scheme (NALS), MHCLG has revealed that it will be at least 15 months before letting agents and landlords will no longer be able to charge fees to tenants. Introduced by Sajid Javid in November last year, the draft legislation was given a thorough savaging by experts during the hearing on Monday and will now go to a third reading in the House of Commons before moving to the Lords. letting fees ban MPs were told at the hearing by experts from Shelter and the University of York’s Centre for Housing Policy that a letting fees ban could easily lead to higher rents as banned fees were added by landlords to the rent over the length of each tenancy, and also reduce the quality of rented accommodation as landlords tightened their purse strings. “We’re pleased to see more clarity on the timetable for implementation of the ban – it’s much…
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Gazumping to be outlawed? Government to consider buyer lock-ins
Communities Secretary Sajid Javid has launched another call for evidence, this time as part of a government push to reform the buying process which could see gazumping outlawed. Just days after revealing he wanted to make life fairer for leaseholders, Sajid says he wants to hear from estate agents, solicitors and mortgage lenders about how to stop gazumping, reduce time wasting and ensuring buyers commit to a sale. In his call for evidence, the Communities Secretary says mistrust between parties is one of the biggest issues faced by the industry and wants to introduce lock-in agreement to improve it, highlighting how a quarter of house purchases fall through each year. Other measures include ‘encouraging’ sellers to provide more information before they put their property on the market – which sounds like a ‘lite’ version of Labour’s Home Information Packs – and encourage more digital innovation to help speed up the buying process by making more data available online. This refers to more recent innovations such as the blockchain technology developed by Bitcoin that enables processes to move forward automatically without the need for huge amounts of paperwork and human intervention. The first property in the UK – a retail unit –…
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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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Latest property news
Housing White Paper: Is this the week when everything changes?
The Government’s much-anticipated housing White Paper is due out this week and already several government sources including housing minister Gavin Barwell have indicated that a radical shift in policy is to take place. After nearly forty years of preferring and supporting home ownership over renting, several Whitehall sources as well as ministers have indicated they intend to tackle the rental market to make it a more secure housing option. Communities secretary Sajid Javid (pictured, left) said he wanted housing to be more affordable and that the rental market must offer more choice. He described both the rental and ownership markets as ‘broken’. The main thrust of the White Paper is likely to include three-year long family-friendly tenancies, tougher action against rogue landlords, more ‘affordable rent’ properties within new-build developments, as well as more detail on the letting agent fees ban consultation. Gavin Barwell (pictured, right) appeared on BBC1’s Sunday Politics TV programme and, during a grilling by presenter Andrew Neill, admitted that the government’s track record on building affordable homes was ‘embarassing’ and that wanted that to stop that in the future. “Whether you are trying to buy or to rent, housing in this country has become less and less…
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