Election Day: party pledges and the impact on landlords

The pre-election campaigns have certainly caused a stir these last few months, with a fair few promises being made by each party. But if we’re being brutally honest, the big question we cannot help but ask is how will the changes affect landlords and what will happen post-election? Of course, we understand that there is much more to the election than landlord’s prospects, but with so many promises flying around, we can’t help but be curious. Whilst debating the ‘ifs’ and the ‘buts’, we came across a great article from FT Adviser that summed up the pre-election promises and added a few wise words.

Conservatives

Kicking off, we have the Conservative party putting in a good argument for first time buyers by providing an extra 200,000 starter homes in the UK. The party promises to extend the Right to Buy scheme for up to 1.3 million tenants of housing associations and intend on creating a 1 billion brownfield regeneration fund. If you’re a landlord, how does this sound to you?

Labour

Similarly, the Labour party has promised 200,000 homes but has provided a clear statement that they will be in place by 2020. They pledge to produce a Future Homes Fund which will use money saved in Help to Buy ISAS to increase housing supply. For those looking for incentives, three-year tenancies will be standardised and cap rent will rise to inflation plus one per cent.

Liberal Democrats

Coming in with a more dramatic but possibly not so realistic promise are the Lib Dems who are proposing that 300,000 homes a year will be built as well as a rather impressive 10 new ‘garden cities’. Although the prospect of garden cities sounds promising, the additional 100,000 extra homes in comparison to the other parties is most definitely idealistic. An attention-grabbing element of their manifesto is the promise of two new schemes, the Rent to Own homes, which is fairly self-explanatory but essentially allows the proprietor to buy a stake in the property market; the second being a ‘Help to Rent’ tenancy deposit loan to assist young people.

The Green Party

Taking a more controversial stance are the Greens who would like to give the Bank of England the power to curb excesses in the housing market; although they may not win the election, this plan is already under consultation. Unlike the more perceptive arguments of the other parties, the Green Party would abolish the Help to Buy scheme but would commit to building 500,000 social rental homes. Landlords, we want to know what you think about this?

UKIP

Finally, we have the UK Independence Party who has large scale plans looking further into the future towards 2025; their aim is to remove the barriers to brownfield construction in order to help build 1m homes by 2025. In addition to this, the party promises to exempt those homes from stamp duty up to the 250,000 threshold. Lastly, UKIP intend to ensure that non-British nationals will be denied access to Right to Buy or Help to Buy schemes.

There we have it, a sum up of what has been promised by our political parties; do you agree with what you have read? Or strongly disagree? Get in touch and let us know what your view is on the matter via Twitter, Facebook or Google+!

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