Dorian Hardacre, committee member for ALLWESSEX, has had comments published in an article in The Telegraph. This was in response to the government’s white paper. ALLWESSEX is pleased that such a well respected news source has published information that exposes the government’s drive to win votes while at the same time having little or no regard to the damage it might do to the private rented sector. The smug response by the government spokesman at the end of the article says it all. What it says is “we hear what you say, you make a good point but we’re going to ignore you because we want to win votes and catch the attention of the public”. It is truly sickening and Dorian is undoubtedly right – landlords will leave the sector and students’ education will suffer as a result.

Everybody is entitled to live in decent accommodation but as we all know, local authorities have more than enough powers to ensure that happens. The problem is, they don’t exercise those powers in an efficient manner and so the government listens to left wing civil servants and organisation such as Shelter (that incidentally, has never put a roof over anyone’s head) rather than dealing with those local authorities. It also favours “big business” at the expense of small scale landlords – and that isn’t fair.

The government must listen and make adjustments to the proposals so that the concerns expressed by Dorian are taken into consideration when the rules are finally published.

The link below takes you to the article in The Telegraph.

12ft | ‘I’ll have to sell my 25 student lets – this Government has killed the sector’