For several months the Home Office has been considering extending to the rest of the UK the document checks that are now compulsory when a new letting takes place in England. Since February last year, English landlords (with exceptions like lettings by councils and through nominations to housing associations) have had to make document checks…
One year ago, on 1 February 2016, the government implemented its “right to rent” scheme, requiring landlords who let property in England to carry out checks on the immigration status of potential tenants, as part of a government drive to create a “hostile environment for illegal migrants”. The government plans to extend the scheme to…
There are signs the government may drop its focus on homeownership in response to the referendum’s economic impact and the apparent slowing down of the housing market. But is the real choice between assisting homeowners and helping tenants? Or might we get the best of both worlds? As recently as 2008, a quarter of the…
Given the increase in race-related hate crime before and since June’s referendum, housing organisations need to be even more alert to possible discrimination in housing than they were before. CIH has already warned about the likely effects in the private rented sector of the new ‘right to rent’ document checks that began in England in…
The government wants higher-earning council tenants to pay more rent because it’s concerned that hard-working people are “subsidising the lifestyles of those on higher than average incomes”. But have they looked carefully at whose housing is taxpayer-subsidised? And is the answer what they say it is? The UK Housing Review 2016, published this week (see…
Immigration checks for new tenancies start today (February 1) but they don’t affect social landlords, do they? Actually, they do – because although many tenancies are exempt, all landlords need to be aware of those that aren’t – and of the repercussions of the checks applying across the private sector. From February any new tenant…
The Home Office is pushing ahead with the roll-out of immigration checks by private landlords, but has still not published its evaluation of the first phase of the scheme. In the meantime, an independent assessment confirms many of the worries that the Chartered Institute of Housing and others had when the idea was first put…
Landlords are struggling to see the connection between the government’s need to respond to the crisis in Calais and the sudden announcement that it’s going to be made easier to evict ‘illegal’ immigrants from tenancies, and that landlords will face jail sentences if they don’t properly check tenants’ immigration status. As Richard Lambert of the…
It’s a formidable task: there’s cross-party commitment to radically reducing child poverty in the next five years. Indeed, the Chancellor said in the March budget that ‘child poverty is down’. But is that true and what is needed to ensure that the number of children in poverty not only stays down but falls to 10%…