Will our next PM take on the buy-to-let investors?

It is heartening to hear affordable housing being given such a high priority, for the sake of the young families crammed into homes that are too small, the young people rendered rootless by years of renting and the parents pondering blowing the hard-earned retirement nest egg on a home deposit for their offspring.

The housing association sector is the obvious candidate to be midwife to Brown’s baby. After all, this is what the sector has actually been doing for years, against a background of decreasing grant aid from government and increasing regulatory demands. Housing associations can serve up affordability of tenure however Gordon wants it: staircase up, staircase down, rent, shared ownership, keyworker and even reasonably priced market sale, as our feature on page 14 discusses.

But there is one player in the complex game that is the UK housing market that can scupper some efforts at affordability: the investor. Cuckoo property speculators are edging first-time buyers out of the nest, whether in the Thames Gateway, Design for Manufacture homes or housing market renewal pathfinder areas. They are leaving homes empty and waiting for their value to rise, failing to manage their tenants and creating dystopian living environments. Look back at the front-page article in our January 2007 issue on the lives of residents at Thames Walk in east London to remind yourself just how bad it can be.

Cuckoo property investors are edging first-time buyers out of the nest

The buy-to-let phenomenon poses developers with a dilemma. When the government has driven high density and the banks want the security of sales on the money they have advanced to help build that 14-storey apartment block, what do you say to the man who comes into your office waving his cheque book? Some are now resisting the temptation to say yes, as our opening news report opposite shows. The new PPS3 will also ease the situation, alleviating the pressure for high density.

But having been eager to state that mistakes have been made in government policy in the past, will the chancellor look to acknowledge and rectify the imbalance created by investors? If our new PM truly wants to create the “home owning, asset owning, wealth owning democracy” he talks of, he will have to.

Josephine Smit, editor