Government's Levelling Up Tax Falls Short in Housing Crisis Response

In a bid to address the housing crisis plaguing the nation, the government's recent move to impose a Levelling Up tax on holiday lets, matching the rates of long-term rentals, has been met with skepticism. Critics argue that it is too little, too late from an administration that has presided over the development of the worst housing crisis since World War II.

Jeremy Hunt says he hopes to see this tax lead to greater housing availability in coastal and rural areas. We, at Action on Empty Homes, would love to see that too but don’t expect it anytime soon. Not least because the Government has recently introduced the lightest of regulatory touches to the short let market with a register promised and rules allowing every homeowner in England to convert their home to an Airbnb unless their local council undertakes time consuming policy changes to avoid this. Even then, short lettings for a total of 45 weekends [90 days] are allowed – a policy already operating in London which has nevertheless seen the housing market decimated by investors seeking high Airbnb returns with 1 in every 50 homes already lost to the short let market in the capital.

The numbers alone are breathtaking;

• 1.2million on social housing waiting lists

• 109,000 families in Temporary Accommodation

• 142,000 children trapped in Temporary Accommodation limbo

• Over 19,000 of these babies under a year old

• £1.7billion a year wasted on Temporary Accommodation – a spend that could build 100,000 homes a year say experts,

But the most striking number is the 55 deaths of children in Temporary Accommodation in which their substandard and insecure accommodation was implicated in the fatalities

It time for real change and the only change that will make a difference is greater availability of social housing and to deliver that fast enough to save lives, we need to make better use of existing wasted housing supply. Official government data for England shows over a million homes empty and out of residential use (the last census put this even higher at 1.5million).

Action on Empty Homes would like to see policy that addresses the waste of long-term empty homes, up 30% since the last national empty homes programme ended in 2015.

We also want to look beyond newbuild, as New Economics Foundation have suggested, and move hundreds of thousands of low income families’ homes out of a poorly managed and expensively rented private sector.

Joseph Rowntree Foundation have also argued for moving more families into the social or rent-controlled sector to put more money back in their pockets and save the state Housing benefit bill. As has the Affordable Housing Commission, Smith Institute and Nationwide Foundation