Local councils will be able to insist that new homes must not be sold to buy-to-let landlords and also to stipulate that a proportion must be reserved for first-time buyers, if Labour wins the next election.
Ed Miliband yesterday spoke of Labour’s plans to deliver 200,000 homes a year and to double the number of first-time buyers over a decade.
At the launch of the Lyons Review into housing, commissioned by Labour, Miliband said: “There has been a systematic failure to build the homes our country needs.
“Too much development land is held as a speculative investment when local people need homes.
“Too often the trickle of new developments that get completed are snapped up before people from the area can benefit, undermining support for much needed further development.
“And for too many young families, the dream of home ownership is fading fast.”
Labour is likely to put proposals from the Lyons Review into its manifesto.
- If local authorities do not have a Local Plan that meets the community’s housing needs, the planning inspectorate can step in.
- Local authorities will be able to designate new Housing Growth Areas, with powers to assemble land and ensure that building goes ahead.
- A proportion, for example half, of homes built in Housing Growth Areas will be able to be reserved for first-time buyers for two months.
- Local authorities will be able to restrict sales to buy-to-let landlords and buyers who will leave the properties empty.
- However, local plans will be required to include a private rented sector provision.
- Local authorities would be able to insist on ample planning gain in larger developments, which would be used to invest in roads, schools, green spaces and GP surgeries.
- There will be a “use it or lose it” philosophy: planning permissions for smaller schemes would have a shelf life of two years, not three, and local authorities would charge council tax on development sites that were not developed within a timeframe.
Labour is also accepting other proposals from the report by Sir Michael Lyons.
These include sweeping new powers and responsibilities delegated to local authorities.
For example, councils will be able to form partnerships to focus on housing delivery, and there will be incentives for local councils to deliver new garden cities.
What a load of tosh.
I recently worked on the letting of a new build site that had been sold approximately 50% to investors and 50% owner occupiers. The reason so much had sold to investors was not because they "snapped them up" before anyone else could, quite the contrary, they waited and waited to buy them until the builders needed to get shot. The crazy thing is, we let a number of them to people who had looked to buy them as first time buyers but who had decided against it for one reason or another and so relished the opportunity to let them. Thee crazy part is, the deals available to them as first time buyers meant they would have been better off as property owners than as tenants by as much as £300pcm!
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The Labour party are obsessed with controlling house prices and find it convenient to portray landlords / investors as the villains of the piece, when the problem with property values in the UK has always been, and always will be, the lack of available resource – LAND. Compare the population densities in Europe and we are way ahead of the major countries:
England: 419 people/sqkm; UK: 256 /sqkm; Germany 233 /sqkm; Italy: 192 / sqkm; France: 111 (!) /sqkm; Spain: 92 /sqkm.
Until we can control population growth in this country the cost of precious land will continue to spiral and the property prices we are seeing in London will begin to spread outwards into the provinces – this is nothing to do with property investors or landlords, who continue to make a valuable contribution to the challenges of housing everyone in this country at the moment.
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