A new report has called for the creation of community letting agencies and local rent controls to help younger people cope with housing costs.
The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) has made a series of recommendations based on a poll and interviews with 18 to 34-year-olds living in Manchester.
The research, conducted with social housing provider One Manchester, found that 41% of respondents felt they were just about managing, or not managing to get by each month, and a third of young renters have had to cut back on food, drink or other activities to cover their housing costs.
To counter this, the report suggests creating a network of community letting agencies that would be run on a not-for-profit basis according to locally agreed standards.
It also proposes creating a register of landlords for low income tenants as well as launching local rent pressure zones that provide a form of rent control by limit the level of increases in defined areas.
Another proposal suggests housing associations could create a rent to buy-style scheme where tenants pay a reduced rent for a fixed number of years and then get the option to buy the home.
Hannah Webster, senior research at the RSA, said: “Young people’s housing needs are not being met by the current system.
“Unaffordable deposits, outdated mortgage criteria and volatile incomes are preventing young people from owning their own homes, whilst the rental market provides equally inadequate prospects.
“While there has been a sharp increase in the size of the private rental market, alongside a shrinking social rented sector, not enough has been done to ensure young people have a secure alternative to ownership.
“Where older generations were once able to chart their route to owning a home, young people today have few guarantees that they will be able to achieve their housing aspirations.”
https://www.thersa.org/globalassets/images/blogs/2019/10/rsa-making-home.pdf
So everything but actual investment in building more homes and in particular providing social housing or raising earnings of young people to increase their ability to buy.
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The PRS was always intended to be for the employed market who could afford to rent. It was never intended to be used for Social Housing. Successive governments have failed to provide SH, relying on PRS and slowly by underhand legislation nationalising PRS. If government want to fix the broken wheel, they need to start providing their own housing and leave PRS alone.
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Woodentop I could not agree more. It is noteworthy those who shout loudest do not invest any funding.
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Fees have literally been banned, so tenants have just had a massive boost to their ability to afford the moving in costs of PRS property…
Also, their cited reasoning (outdated mortgage criteria and seemingly ‘inadequate’ rental prospects) would not be addressed by this community letting agency suggestion…mortgage providers will be unaffected by this and the ‘inadequate’ rental prospects will still be ‘inadequate’.
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Maybe the Housing Minister should be looking at money provided by the Government to local councils, being use to build and rent PRS Homes at open market rents and very few affordable homes.
Telford and Wrekin Council are doing this and claiming the profit then goes back into their coffers.
So how is this helping the young homeless and social housing market?
Well just leave it to the Private Landlords and then hit them hard.
This needs exposing now!
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Tenants aren’t managing, that’s acknowledged, BUT, that’s because of Austerity ( you know, the years that nobody [ other than M.P’s ] were allowed a pay increase, and the LHA Freeze for 4 years.
House prices and costs did not ” obey the austerity rules, ” hence rents and other natural business costs across ALL sectors increased.
The public are now suffering the fall-out of austerity. and the PRS is taking the blame.
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