Broker Voice
The L-word Don’t call us ‘landlordsʼ Peter Barnes Head of MFB for Intermediaries Mortgages for Business
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scar-winning actor Ben Kingsley denied he orchestrated the campaign to have himself referred to as Sir Ben Kingsley on a poster advertising one of his films. But Kingsley has form. Apparently, he once chastised a German reporter who had the temerity to address him as ‘Mr. Kingsley’. “It’s Sir Ben. I’ve not been a Mister for two years,” he said. It’s not a story that reflects very well on Sir Ben. But it highlights that names, and how people refer to us, matter. Indeed, the majority of buy-to-let borrowers polled recently by Mortgages for Business said they would prefer not to be called ‘landlords’. At first off it sounds peculiar. On reflection, it isn’t. Some parts of the US media have reportedly stopped using the word ‘landlord’ due to complaints from the buy-to-let community. 42 | NACFB 44
The government has hammered landlords for years – think Theresa May’s 3% Stamp Duty surcharge and other tax deterrents. They’ve become the government’s whipping boy in a bid to excuse its failure to build more homes and fix the housing market. And it hasn’t stopped – it’s ongoing. At the start of the year, I read that Charlotte Gill – a prominent Conservative, deputy editor of the Conservative Home website, and a columnist in The Express newspaper – was complaining that her party, and others, have failed to do anything about a housing market in which the younger population is “already having to cough up most of its income to landlords.”
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Gill’s tone echoes that of former Tory councillor Sam Clark who wrote on the Conservative Home website just before Christmas that the Tory government should consider outlawing buy-to-let purchases by landlords. Most recently, a House of Lords report, Meeting Housing Demand, claims the private rental sector has become "increasingly unaffordable”. The report quotes a housing policy consultant saying: “The private
