Gover and Out

Renters reform bill now under threat

Housing Secretary Michael Gove has become the latest high-profile MP to announce he would step down ahead of July’s General Election.

Gove said he won’t stand as the Conservative candidate for Surrey Heath when the nation goes to the polls on 4 July.

It brings an almost 20-year career in Parliament to an end.

Gove was Housing Secretary between 15 September 2021 and 6 July 2022 before he was sacked by then Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

He then returned to the role when Rishi Sunak replaced Liz Truss as Prime Minister.

What happens to the Renter’s reform bill now?

Although the bill was passed through parliament a few weeks ago, it has now been abandoned and will not become law. After 2/3 years of panic selling by Landlords, firstly due to minimum EPC ratings of C being proposed for 2025, which was then abandoned in a speech by Rishi Sunak, but not before he passed the sinister Energy bill, with its draconian penalties for breaking energy performance rules.

Now that Gove has resigned and an election has been called, the future of the housing levelling up is more uncertain than ever.

Levelling up, what levelling up?

I believe that it is fair to say that the property market is in chaos.

An organised witch-hunt against landlords

No changes that would help tenants

More and more homeowners and landlords in arrears thanks to ridiculously high interest rates, which are unaffordable considering that house prices are a much as ten-times average salaries, whereas they were only three- or four-times average salaries a few decades ago.

With a combination of more demand than supply, for reasons that we all know and large developers taking control of the supply of new-build homes, plus the war on landlords and no policy to encourage the development of affordable and social housing, young people have never had it so hard to find a home since the end of WW11.

Will a change in government result in a change in the housing crisis? In your quest to answer that question, you must ask yourselves, if anything will be done to reduce demand, because if the current demand continues, or even increases, the situation will not change, indeed it will actually get worse.

In the meantime, landlords have been exiting in droves, the pressure on property has not eased, if we have more people arriving that will only get worse, there are still over 670,000 empty homes in the UK in need of renovation and the exiting chancellor saw fit to basically wipe-out Capital Gains Tax, which has further discouraged everyday people from buying and renovating these properties.

In summary, I struggle to see how they could have possibly made things any worse!