News
Government introduces housing white paper
Thursday 16th February 2017
The government have released a white paper and supporting documents setting out their plans to reform the housing market and boost the supply of new homes in England.
On 7th February 2017 the white paper "Fixing our broken housing market" set out a broad range of reforms that government plans to introduce to help reform the housing market and increase supply of new homes. Introduced by Communities Secretary Sajid Javid, he said that in addition to the ban on letting agents' fees levied on tenants in England, he would "go further" to introduce longer tenancies and to bring in more institutional investment in rental housing, claiming: "We'll improve safeguards [for tenants] in the private rented sector." Build To Rent - the institutional investment creating purpose-built-homes to let - will have three year tenancies as standard.
He also said he would maintain the Starter Homes initiative introduced by the Cameron government and would "tackle the scourge of unfair leasehold terms, too often forced on to hard-pressed homebuyers" by new build developers.
He also pledged that he would seek to cut planning red tape, oblige land-owning private developers to undertake a 'use it or lose it' policy with the risk of losing planning consent, and once again pledged to free public land for house building. There would be no threat to the Green Belt, he promised.
A full copy of the white paper can be found here Fixing our broken housing market