Attacking Buy-To-Let Sector Will Worsen Housing Crisis

The UK needs one million new rental properties by 2021 to meet demand while by 2025 a quarter of households will be in the private rented sector. Faced with rising demand, the Government should be supporting investment in the sector and not, through the recent tax changes relating to buy-to-let, actively discouraging it. As the Commons’ CLG Committee rightly concluded in 2012: “The sector is, and will continue to be, dominated by small companies and individual landlords.” Yet over the last year the Treasury has embarked on a fiscal attack on those small companies and individual landlords. The reasoning is that landlords are occupying or buying up too many homes and so restricting access to affordable stock for would-be home owners and that buy-to-let investors, unlike owner-occupiers, enjoy the full tax-deductibility of interest on mortgage finance costs. Read more on the Daily Telegraph website.