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Tips, insights, and advice to help you find, rent, and manage your next home with confidence.
If you own a leasehold flat and have been waiting for the promised revolution in your rights, you are not alone. The Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024 received Royal Assent on 24 May 2024, with its final parliamentary stages fast-tracked in the wash-up before the general election.
Few things frustrate a homeowner more than watching a neighbouring property slide into disrepair. Peeling paintwork, broken guttering and an overgrown garden are unsightly, can attract pests, and often raise fears that the value of nearby homes is quietly being eroded.
Wales is gearing up for a major overhaul of its private rented sector, and while the legislation itself is not expected until 2027, the groundwork is already being laid. The Welsh Government's legislative programme for the next 18 months includes a Rental Bill that will start with rent data collection and a strengthened enforcement role for Rent Smart Wales, before opening the door to much wider reforms later in the Senedd term.
Ask anyone who inspects housing for a living and you will get a blunt answer: the idea that our homes can no longer be trusted to keep us safe is not a headline, it is the day job. A recent Guardian editorial on 23 July echoed Sam Johnson-Schlee's warning that our confidence in the basic safety of our homes is under threat, but for environmental health officers working in housing, that threat has long been a lived reality.
Landlords hoping the arrival of a new housing minister might bring a softer touch to rental regulation look set to be disappointed. According to Landlord Today, the government's fresh appointee to the housing brief has made clear that they want rental rules to become even tougher than they already are.
Condensation streaking down the windows, black spots creeping across the bedroom wall, a persistent musty smell that no amount of scrubbing shifts. For many social housing tenants, the instinct is to reach for the supermarket and try to solve it themselves — or to assume that a proper repair will cost money they simply do not have.
Few subjects get renters talking quite like rent controls, and the debate in Greater Manchester has just grown considerably louder. With tenants voicing clear backing for capping rent rises, and metro mayor Andy Burnham weighing up what reform could actually look like, an idea once confined to the fringes of housing policy has moved squarely into the mainstream.
Ask tenants what would help with soaring rents and the answer seems obvious: cap them. A new survey of 5,607 renters by SpareRoom found that more than 80% back the introduction of rent controls, and the findings land just as Andy Burnham weighs up reform of the rental market.
The House of Lords has completed another round of scrutiny of the Social Housing Bill, with the report stage debate on Monday 20 July producing outcomes of real consequence for the sector. Report stage gives peers a further opportunity to examine the bill's detail and propose changes, and on this occasion three proposed amendments were put to a vote.
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