During the opening of the new Parliament in London several policy suggestions from the Housing White Paper were confirmed, including the ban on letting fees.
The Queen’s Speech announced work on a new Housing Bill with the aim to promote fairness and transparency in the country’s property market and allow more homes to be built.
The ban on letting fees is going to progress in the next Parliamentary Session, which will cover the next two years as the Queen’s Speech for 2018 has been cancelled in order to give the Government the possibility to focus on Brexit.
The speech reveals that the Government hopes to create lower costs and better rights for renters by increasing competition in the private rental sector.
The new law will see both landlords and tenants banned from asking tenants to pay letting fees in order to secure a rental property. On top of that, the bill will also include ways for tenants to be able to recover fees they have been charged unrightfully.
According to Government figures the average tenant fee currently lies at £223 and Philip Hammond explained not too long ago that 4.3m British households have to pay these fees every year.
Housing charity Shelter, however, says that some of its research suggest at least 14% of tenants pay £500 or more in fees, with renters in the capital complaining about fees of up to £2,000.
Promises made during the speech, such as addressing unfair tenant fees and promoting fairness, transparency and prosperity in the housing market while also building more homes are music to most investors’ ears, but it’s the follow-through where the Government tends to stumble slightly.
https://www.buyassociationgroup.com/en-gb/2017/05/05/public-opinion-divided-tenant-fees/
From a property perspective overall, the Queen’s Speech only touched the surface and lacked some direct and active messages and guidance for the sector, like helping smaller developers to access public land and appropriate finance.
Britain’s property market, in its fundamentals, remains in very good shape. But the country is still not building enough houses to meet the ever growing demand.
