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As most of you who’ve used SpareRoom in the past six years will know, we’ve been campaigning hard to get the chancellor to increase the Rent a Room Scheme tax threshold. We just found out he did just that in the budget, raising it from £4,250 a year to the £7,500 we asked for.
This is great news for renters – especially flatsharers. With around 19 million empty bedrooms in owner-occupied properties in England alone, we’re just not using our housing effectively. As we’re not building in anywhere near the numbers we need to, unlocking some of those rooms will make a big difference.
Here’s how:
- Encouraging people to rent out their rooms means more supply – that helps keep rents down
- There’s a huge demand for affordable rentals right now, especially rooms. This addresses that need head on
- Average rents for people living with the owner are lower than traditional rents – good news for renters on a budget
- Unlocking just 5% of those empty rooms would house almost a million people, that’s the equivalent of a city the size of Birmingham!
It’s great to see the government addressing the housing crisis with simple, effective measure that will make a difference to hundreds of thousands of people quickly, while they work out the longer term policy changes we need to fix the housing crisis for good.
Thanks to all of you who signed the petition or helped spread the word. We’d also like to thank the people and organisations who’ve supported Raise the Roof publicly over the past six years, including Shelter, Sarah Beeny and Generation Rent.
Great news all round.
Matt