Jeremy Hunt's 2024 budget
We've been lobbying the government to stop prioritising holiday lets over homes by giving tax breaks to landlords of short-term lets, which residential landlords don't benefit from.
Jeremy Hunt announced in his budget speech that they're abolishing what's known as the 'furnished holiday lets regime' which gives extra tax reliefs to short-term lets that aren’t available to residential landlords
This is an important step. We don't have enough houses, so using the properties we have better is crucial.
How do landlords and tenants feel?
- 94% of landlords who answered our recent survey said they think that levelling these tax breaks would encourage more landlords to rent out their properties on a long-term basis.
- 86% of tenants who answered our recent survey said we should prioritise homes over holiday lets - when we asked which issues they want to see the government prioritise the clear leader (by some stretch) was the housing crisis.
But we believe there’s still much more work to be done. We got into this mess because successive governments have failed to plan long term and build enough to keep up with demand. Instead of removing the tax benefits, we were hoping the government would extend the same tax reliefs to residential landlords, which would encourage more people to rent out their properties to long term tenants. It’s no coincidence that the decline in residential properties (and subsequent steady climb in rents) began when the government abolished tax breaks for residential lets back in 2016.
Hopefully this new announcement will at least stop the huge rise in short term lets and encourage people back into the residential market. As we say, it’s a first step, but much more needs to be done. We’ll be continuing to present data on the rental market to the government, and to the opposition in the run up to the General Election, to make sure housing remains a top priority for whoever ends up in power.
This is a long term problem that won’t be fixed by one budget or policy decision, but hopefully this is the start of a renewed focus on housing.