3 minute read
Mortgages for Business
The L-word
Don’t call us ‘landlordsʼ
Peter Barnes Head of MFB for Intermediaries Mortgages for Business
Oscar-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. 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.”
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
Quote
rented sector is by far the most expensive, by far the lowest quality and by far the least popular. It is absolutely the worst possible tenure for almost everybody in it.” The report goes on to say: “Those living in the private rented sector are more likely to live in poor quality, overcrowded conditions than owner–occupiers, and often have limited forms of redress.” The chair of the report is Baroness NevilleRolfe, a Tory.
It’s not all the doing of politicians, of course. Sections of the media have vilified the buy-to-let community, too. Indeed, almost three-quarters of those landlords surveyed (73%) told us they felt “unfairly portrayed as this generation’s financial bogeyman”. And only 8% felt that landlords were not “financial bogeymen” at all. The high-profile Guardian columnist Owen Jones is a case in point. In his book, The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It, he suggests unscrupulous landlords are the cause of high government spending on housing benefit and tax credits. Landlords put up rents, safe in the knowledge that the state will step in to subsidise tenancies through increased housing benefit payments.
No wonder the buy-to-let community doesn’t want to be associated with the term ‘landlord’. The term carries much more baggage than it once did. Things have gone far enough. What would happen if we took landlords out of the housing equation? The impact on the property market would be significant and almost entirely negative. And this is what makes ‘landlord bashing’ so baffling. There’s clearly a lack of affordable social housing – and that’s not the fault of landlords. The government is not creating a great deal more social housing to solve the problem (or making much headway on house building at all, really). In the absence of the state making any progress people need somewhere to live. Private landlords have taken up the slack from the affordable and council home sectors. Instead of bashing landlords – or hitting them over the head with regulatory sticks – shouldn’t the government be encouraging them to invest more? Shouldn’t the media be championing landlords for their contribution to the housing sector?
Be that as it may, what do you call landlords who don’t want to be called landlords? Most of the buy to letters we surveyed said ‘small housing providersʼ. About a third wanted to stick with ‘landlordsʼ . And just over a fifth opted for other options – including ‘rental accommodation providerʼ. Whatever term the buy-to-let community gravitates to, perhaps it’s no wonder they fancy a rebrand.
If it was up to me, I’d give them all knighthoods.
