Government promises new affordable rent measures in White Paper

The Government has pledged to put in place a new emphasis on tenants renting a property when it moves to unveil its housing strategy for England this week.

Housing Minister Gavin Barwell has promised more minimum tenancies and more homes built specifically to be rented out.

Available Housing

Mr Barwell said that the Government has not given up on making home ownership available to everybody.

However, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has noted that the rental market was, ‘incapable of giving people the security they need.’[1]

Speaking to the BBC’s Sunday Politics, Mr Barwell promised a package of measures would be included in the White Paper, which is due to be released tomorrow (7^th February).

These measures will look to encourage more investment in building affordable properties to rent. Barwell defined these homes as at least 20% under the market rate, while he also encouraged councils to be more active.

Manifesto Promises

The last Conservative election manifesto stated: ‘Everyone who works hard should be able to own a home of their own.’ Mr Barwell said the Government remained committed to reversing the home ownership decline.

He observed: ‘Whether you’re trying to buy or you’re trying to rent, housing in this country has become less and less affordable because for 30 or 40 years governments have not built enough homes and this White Paper is fundamentally trying to do something about that.’[1]

This focus on tenanted properties was welcomed by Rico Wojtulewicz of the House Builders’ Association.

Wojtulewicz noted that if small and medium enterprises were better equipped, then the correct types of properties in the correct areas would materialize.

Also speaking to the BBC, he said: ‘Concentrating too much on volume house-building, as we’ve seen in the last decade, is problematic – not just for supply, but the type of supply.’[1]

Government promises new affordable rent measures in White Paper

Embarrassing

Barwell acknowledged that the most recent figures, indicating that the number of new homes were at a 24 year low, were embarrassing. He insisted that the Government was committed to building one million new homes in England by the year 2020.

However, he said that rules on the Green Belt were likely to be unchanged: ‘This idea that we can only fix our broken housing market by taking huge swathes out of the green belt is not true.’[1]

In response, Labour said that the build-to-rent proposals are far short of what is required.

Jeremy Corbyn said: ‘The private rented market is incapable of dealing with demand, incapable of giving people the security they need, and particularly in our major cities, it is so expensive that it means many poorer, middle-income, working-class families are getting moved out.’[1]

Instead, Corbyn has called for investment in council housing and further regulation of the private rented sector.

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-38873524