BUDGET 2023: Hunt ignores pressing needs of landlords and tenants

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The government failed to offer long-term support for energy efficiency improvements or increase the Local Housing Allowance in a Budget which instead focused on getting the country back to work.

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt extended support for energy bills at current levels of £2,500 for a further three months and brought the charges of the four million people on pre-payment meters in line with comparable direct debit charges.

However, he made no mention of the hoped-for incentives for landlords and homeowners to make properties greener in the run-up to changing EPC rules.

Housing groups will also be disappointed that he made no announcement about helping renters meet a shortfall in their payments through unfreezing LHA.

As part of its reform of the welfare system, the Chancellor pledged to fund a new Universal Support Programme to help disabled people get into work.

Hunt also promised that for those on Universal Credit – two million job seekers – sanctions would be applied more rigorously to those who refuse to look for work. The earnings threshold would increase from 15 hours per week to 18 hours.

Universal credit

Parents on Universal Credit will now receive up to £951 for one child and £1,630 for two children per month which would be paid upfront.

The government’s childcare reform plans should help those tenants with children under five who will get 30 hours of free childcare a week from the end of maternity leave.

As previously announced, corporation tax will rise from 19% to 25% on 1st April, affecting portfolio landlords and those with limited companies.

However, no tax burden relief was offered to the sector, but neither was the rumoured increase in Stamp Duty.

For those landlords looking to the future, Hunt announced an increase in the pensions annual tax-free allowance from £40,000 to £60,000 while he also abolished the Lifetime Allowance – previously set at £1.07m.

Read the HMRC full briefing notes in full.

View Full Article: BUDGET 2023: Hunt ignores pressing needs of landlords and tenants

Budget 2023 – Despite intensive lobbying, landlords miss out

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The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, let landlords sink or swim on their own with no direct assistance for landlords in his Budget announced today. Unlike £63 million of funds for swimming pools, but excluding the PM’s that required an upgrade for the local grid.

View Full Article: Budget 2023 – Despite intensive lobbying, landlords miss out

Awaab’s Law ‘must be extended to private rented sector’, says Generation Rent

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Generation Rent is calling on the government to extend Awaab’s Law to the PRS after its survey found 1,106 private rented homes in England with dangerous levels of damp and mould.

A Freedom of Information request by the campaign group found that the 65 councils which reported a breakdown of complaints had received 60,849 about standards in private rented housing in 2021-22, including 8,048 complaints about damp and mould (13%).

The 69 councils which reported a breakdown of hazards found 7,695 Category 1 hazards, including 1,106 cases of damp and mould (14%). However, this is a very small proportion of the 4.6 million homes in the PRS.

As Parliament debates Awaab’s Law, which would set strict timescales for social landlords to respond to complaints about damp and mould – part of the Social Housing (Regulation) Bill – Generation Rent believes its research also provides new evidence of the need for an end to Section 21 evictions, which can discourage tenants from complaining.

When councils found unsafe conditions in private rented homes, they took action to protect the tenant from retaliatory eviction in only 24% of cases.

improvement notices

It reports that while 81 councils identified a total of 9,033 Category 1 hazards, they issued just 2,179 improvement notices, meaning that private tenants had a 24% chance of getting formal protection if their home was found to be unsafe.

Generation Rent Director Alicia Kennedy says: “Landlords, whether they are huge housing associations or an individual letting out their former home, have one job: to provide their tenants with a safe home.

“Too many try to dodge their responsibilities by blaming tenants or serving a no-fault eviction notice.”

In January, the government announced plans to tackle mould within the private and social housing sectors through updated guidance and initiatives and confirmed that the PRS’s new housing ombudsman would lead the battle against mould.

View Full Article: Awaab’s Law ‘must be extended to private rented sector’, says Generation Rent

Tenant won’t move after section 21?

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Hello – my tenant was served a section 21 and has now decided to defend it to gain time even though our grounds for serving the notice are to sell the property. We cannot remortgage because the rent is so low and the property has decreased in value and we cannot sell with the tenant in

View Full Article: Tenant won’t move after section 21?

Gap between renting and home ownership cost narrows as mortgage payments rise

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First time buyers remain better off owning than renting an equivalent home, Lloyds Bank says, but the gap is narrowing.

Its latest Owning vs Renting Review reveals that owning a first home now costs £971 a month, four percent less than renting at £1,013.

Historically, home ownership on a monthly basis has always been cheaper and particularly so in recent years when mortgage rates have been at rock bottom.

The latest research is based on a three-bedroom property, but Lloyds Bank points out that the gap is narrowing – seven years ago first time buyers were £156 a month better off compared to their renting counterparts. The current gap is £42.

The report uses average rents and compares it to average mortgage size, deposits and house prices nationally and regionally.

These figures are for the national picture, but regional variations are considerable with Scots home owners enjoying the biggest gap (£60 a month) while in the East of England renters are £90 a month better off than home owners.

The biggest gap is in London, where first time buyers are some £250 a month better off than renters every month.

Difficult

“Of course, making the move from renting to home ownership can be difficult for many, as raising a sufficient deposit and then finding the right property can be challenging,” says Kim Kinnaird, Mortgages Director, Halifax (pictured).

“While a predicted fall in house prices this year will be welcome news for those looking to buy their first home, it doesn’t change the fact that getting on the property ladder remains expensive – a problem that is compounded when rents are high, impacting the ability to save.”

As Kinnaird suggests, renting is a much cheaper housing sector to enter – renters need a £1,244 deposit on average to secure a tenancy, whereas first time buyers need to scrape £60,000 together to pay the average 24% deposit.

Read the full report.

View Full Article: Gap between renting and home ownership cost narrows as mortgage payments rise

Property Investor Awards Winner Xuan Meng

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From finance to the property world, Xuan Meng’s journey has seen her build a £10 million property portfolio since 2018.

Her company, Cozy Hauz, buys run-down properties and then pushes up the value through renovation, refurbishment and extension to release the initial investment.

View Full Article: Property Investor Awards Winner Xuan Meng

Generation Rent claims 14% of private rented homes have dangerous mould

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Generation Rent, the tenants’ activist group, says that plans for ‘Awaab’s Law’ to clamp down on poor living conditions in social housing should be extended to the private sector.

The organisation says it has used Freedom of Information requests to ask 115 councils in England –

View Full Article: Generation Rent claims 14% of private rented homes have dangerous mould

Don’t miss out on Capital Allowances

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After the previous article published on Property 118 regarding Capital Allowances (LINK HERE), it has become apparent that many property owners are currently missing out on significant tax savings, by failing to claim capital allowances on embedded items within their commercial properties

View Full Article: Don’t miss out on Capital Allowances

BUDGET: Charities call for LHA to be raised to relieve pressure on benefits tenants

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Increasing the Local Housing Allowance would be the quickest way for the government to improve access to affordable homes, say housing charities.

According to analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), in 37 local authorities, the gap between market rents for three-bedroom homes in the cheapest 30% of the market and the actual local housing allowance rates is £100 or more.

Housing benefits or universal credit payments are capped by LHA rates which were last updated in March 2020 to cover the rent for the cheapest 30% of properties in each local authority.

With increasingly higher rents during the last two years, more than half (54%) of renters claiming housing benefits have to cover a shortfall in their payments, according to Shelter.

Cost of living

The cost of raising the allowance in line with 2022 rents would be £650m and would help 1.1m households, the IFS calculates. It warns that if the government does not step in to ease the housing crisis, an additional 73,000 families will become homeless in 2023, bringing the total to 300,000.

Hunt’s budget

Shelter hopes Chancellor Jeremy Hunt will bring some relief by removing the freeze on LHA tomorrow.

“Housing benefit isn’t even doing the job it was designed to do,” Polly Neate, chief executive of Shelter, tells The Telegraph.

“Private rents are rocketing and it’s almost impossible to find a home within the local housing benefit rate. Thousands of families are at risk of falling into homelessness as they desperately try to plug the gap between housing benefit and the cost of real rents.”

“In many parts of the country, the private rental sector is really the only place these families can go. That is hard for landlords to manage.

“Even if they want to help, they can’t make the numbers work. This is putting pressure on the rental sector that shouldn’t be there,” adds Jasmine Basran, head of policy and campaigns at Crisis. 

View Full Article: BUDGET: Charities call for LHA to be raised to relieve pressure on benefits tenants

Landlords warned over using unregulated solicitors to fill in eviction claim forms

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A tenancy mediator has warned landlords that they – or the ‘experts’ they hire – risk being jailed for contempt of court by not using a regulated solicitor to fill in possession notice claim forms.

PRS Mediation’s Julie Ford (pictured) says that under the Legal Services Act, while landlords and letting agents can complete a Section 21 and Section 8, they aren’t qualified to fill in the claim form.

It follows an application in the High Court over a committal for contempt of court for provision of legal services by a person not entitled to do so.

In the case of Baxter v Doble, Sarah Doble Associates Ltd completed a Section 21 as well as the claim form for a Devon landlord and acted as his representative throughout the proceedings.

“She got things double checked by the landlord but the judge said what she was doing was litigation – she shouldn’t have been doing it as a paralegal,” Ford explains.

Careful

“This demonstrates that there are lots of people out there who claim to be eviction specialists who aren’t regulated solicitors. Landlords need to be really careful about who they’re using as eviction specialists. Solicitors are expensive for a reason – they’re protecting you.”

Giles Peaker, property solicitor at Anthony Gold, says the full-service assistance offered by many ‘Evictions R Us’ type set ups are now to be clearly understood as conducting litigation.

He adds: “Apart from giving advice and service of a section 21 or section 8 notice, it is hard to see what more such a ‘paralegal law firm’ could do in relation to proceedings without running a grave risk of conducting proceedings and committing an offence.”

However, despite this, the possession claim was successful and the High Court declined to make a finding of contempt.

Watch Julie’s video

Read more: Why it's time to police the unregulated evictions firms. 

View Full Article: Landlords warned over using unregulated solicitors to fill in eviction claim forms