UK’s largest estate agency group Countrywide, sector player Hamptons International and commercial property consultancy Lambert Smith Hampton have proposed ten things which could improve the property market.
In the new research paper ‘Tonic for tomorrow: proposals for a healthier UK property market’, published last week, the companies identify key structural problems in the market and put forward possible solutions to solving them.
The proposals, set out in the table below, focus on: building more homes to accommodate a growing population, adding certainty and flexibility to the planning system, providing fairer property taxes and proposals to meet changing tenure trends.
Johnny Morris, head of research at Hamptons International comments:
“The demographic, cultural and technological changes affecting the UK property market, many of which have accelerated in pace in recent years, will have a profound impact on how both residential and commercial markets work in the future. Our proposals are aimed at ensuring the property market operates efficiently and seeking out the fairest solutions to meet the changing needs of the country.”
|
Proposal |
Description |
|
| Building homes for our changing population | Boosting the New Homes Bonus | We support the indefinite extension of the New Homes Bonus and doubling or tripling the grant attached to each new home. |
| Redefining Greenbelt for modern needs | We support a review of precisely what we call Greenbelt today, with a view to freeing up more land for sustainable development. | |
| Certainty and flexibility in planning | Giving planners time to catch up with policy | We believe there should be a period of 3-5 years free from reform of the plan-led system during which planning documents are brought up to date. |
| A new more permanent permitted development right (PDR) for office to residential | We are in favour of developing a new PDR right for office to residential conversions, which is effective for at least 10 years. | |
| Helping the high street bywidening the retail use classes | We support establishing a wider retail use and additional PDR to convert from retail to leisure. | |
| Fairer Taxes | Reforming business rates | We suggest increasing the frequency of revaluations from five to two years and scrapping annual RPI uplifts. Small businesses should be exempt from business rates and targeted assistance given to the high street. |
| Reforming council tax | We propose the addition of a new Band I at the top of the scale, bringing 1991 values up-to-date and merging some of the lower bands. We think this offers a better alternative to a mansion tax. | |
| Preparing for growing private rented sector | Stability and transparency forlandlords and tenants | We propose the creation of standard tenancy contracts of six months, one year and three years and a transparent rent uplift mechanism to be built into the longer term contracts. |
| Making build to rent viable | We propose that local authorities should be allowed to interpret the best value obligation in land sales in a more flexible way to be able to release land for PRS rather than just owner occupied development. | |
| Sharing out shared ownership | The shared ownership re-sales market needs to be simplified and opened up and funding made available to build more shared ownership homes. |
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