Letting go

That’s not necessarily a criticism of today’s report for Communities and Local Government by Julie Rugg and David Rhodes from the University of York - just an acknowledgement of the scale of the task facing them. 

There will certainly be disappointment with some of their recommendations. Advocates for tenants will be dismayed by their failure to recommend greater security of tenure or to outlaw retaliatory eviction just as institutional investors will feel frustrated by the fact that the report is not recommending more fiscal incentives or changes to the planning regime.

Rugg and Rhodes argue that action has to proceed from a sound evidence base and that too many opinions on the private rented sector are based on myths rather than fact. They conclude that: ‘Policy intervention is necessary, but should – as far as possible – flow with the market rather than introduce inflationary incentives or excessive regulation.’ 

As Julie Rugg tells Keith Cooper in an interview for Inside Housing this week: ‘One of the great things that we have been able to do is to understand the market. It is a really complex bit of the market, full of submarkets that interact in different ways. It is very different in different localities.’

And what follows from that is that: ‘Now we understand it better we are not going to bludgeon it into submission. It plays a massive number of roles. We don’t want to make it into one thing.’

The most eye-catching recommendations, a national licensing system for landlords, mandatory regulation of managing agents, and the creation of social lettings agencies run by local authorities or housing associations, are made with this objective very much in mind. 

The idea of a ‘license to let’ that could be taken away from rogue landlords will be welcomed by many people, including good landlords, who resent unfair competition from unscrupulous rivals who do not meet their obligations to tenants. Just like bad drivers, rogue landlords could get points on their license and eventually lose it altogether.

Meanwhile, one social lettings agency for an area would help to stop the ridiculous situation where different public agencies with different client groups bid up the rents on the accommodation available.

It obviously remains to be seen how the new system would operate in practice. In particular, the thought occurs that there are still unlicensed drivers on the roads despite the money and powers of the DVLA and the police. Would local authorities armed with income from the £50 a head license fee really be equipped to cope? It’s also somewhat surprising after events in the City recently that they should still choose to call it ‘light touch’ licensing.

Perhaps it was inevitable that people arguing for more radical measures would end up disappointed. Rugg and Rhodes argue that removing bad landlords from the sector would be better than banning retaliatory eviction, that the current tenancy framework is ‘adequate for purpose’ and are not convinced by industry lobbying for changes in planning regulations to allow ‘build to let’.

In doing so, they may have come as close as anyone probably could to coming up with a way to make the existing system work better. But they have also appear to have killed off the chances of putting something different in its place.