MPs mock government’s latest housing market “fiasco”

The government’s latest regulation scheme has been openly mocked by MPs.

And the attack follows a warning earlier this week that government housing targets are highly unlikely to be met.

The government wants to introduce a mandatory Private Rental Sector database, and yesterday released lengthy guidance for agents and landlords on the sort of information that should be entered, and when, and the fee that should be paid to local councils for the privilege.

However, Conservative MP Gareth Bacon has openly derided the database, saying: “It is 2026. Advanced technology is available, yet the government’s proposals envisage the manual uploading of each individual property. 

“The regulations as they stand make no provision for bulk uploads, forcing landlords to upload properties one by one—Noah processed more animals on to the ark at a time than that.

“Each property requires around 70 data points, so that is an awful lot of admin with huge time implications. Assuming that it takes 30 minutes per property and there are seven productive working hours in a day, that amounts to 214 working days for a 3,000-property portfolio and 714 days for a 10,000-property portfolio.”

He says the database is not fit for purpose and he adds: “I implore the Minister to pause the impending roll-out of the regulations, which are due for implementation in just a couple of weeks’ time, scrap the current proposals and produce new ones after proper consultation with industry.”

Liberal Democrat MP Gideon Amos has called the database “a fiasco”. 

He adds: “Let us imagine that someone is an institutional landlord with 4,000 dwellings. If only one can be entered at a time, it will take weeks and months, by which time the database will be completely out of date for tenants looking at it.”

Another Tory MP, Sir John Whittingdale – who is himself the landlord of “a single small one-bedroom flat in Westminster” and says that under the local council’s licensing regime he pays around £1,000 a year for entry on to a system which “requires me to upload a great deal of information, all of which, as I understand it, is now going to be duplicated in this [mandatory national database] system.”

Housing minister Matthew Pennycook responded to the criticisms, saying: “We are looking at how to make it easier for landlords, particularly those managing large portfolios, to connect their existing property management systems directly with the service and to create some efficiencies in that respect. 

“We will look to provide a secure digital connection that landlords and their technology providers can choose to integrate with, reducing the need to enter the information manually to register their properties. 

“We will continue to explore opportunities to improve functionality and reduce burdens as the service develops.”

However, the database roll out starts in December and yesterday the government produced detailed guidelines for the database, which continues to insist that each property’s details are entered individually.

The government has also been told that its much-publicised housing target of 1.5m new homes by mid-2029 is now in jeopardy.

The independent Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) says, as part of a highly detailed report on the UK economy: “The weaker profile for housing supply in the near and medium term also partly reflects the cumulative effect of regulatory and fiscal changes outside the planning system over the last decade, particularly since 2019. 

“These policy developments have increased the cost, complexity, and timescales associated with residential development. 

“These include measures aimed at improving building safety, such as the Building Safety Levy and Building Safety Regulator regime, environmental requirements such as Biodiversity Net Gain and nutrient mitigation schemes, and wider fiscal measures including the residential property developer tax and higher corporation tax rates. 

“Taken together, these measures appear to have weighed on housebuilding activity to a greater extent than we had previously assumed.”

And to challenge the government’s initiatives further, the OBR says while the Your First Home scheme, starting in April, could help some first time buyers, it “could marginally raise house prices by stimulating housing demand” – thus worsening the affordability problem.

Kindly shared by EstateAgentTODAY image courtesy of Adobe