Shelter Scotland has demanded an urgent review into a registration scheme which is failing to protect tenants from bad landlords. Shelter says a minority of landlords taint the sector with Dickensian treatment of tenants and the charity estimates that one in four properties is still not covered by the scheme introduced three years ago. The
The Chancellor has said the economy will shrink by the biggest amount in modern times – down 3.5 per cent in 2009 – before recovering slightly to grow by 1.25 per cent in 2010 and 3.5 per cent by 2010. He has extended the stamp duty holiday until the end of the year for houses
The European parliament has voted to allow VAT on housing repairs and maintenance to be cut to at least 5 per cent. MEPs hope that member states will introduce the cuts to revitalise struggling industries such as construction and increase work to improve the energy efficiency of buildings.
The average council home in England is more than a half a century old, junior housing minister Iain Wright has revealed. He was responding to a parliamentary question from the Conservative housing minister, and said the typical council house is 53 years old, almost a decade older that its housing association counterpart.
Just a few days after the National Housing Federation warned the government will miss its house building target by up to nine years, the Town and Country Planning Association has also said that three million new homes will not be enough to meet the expected growth in the number of elderly people and young families.
The Housing Corporation has released a new report into whether the needs for support and guidance of small housing association are being met. Small housing associations (those owning or managing up to 1,000 homes) make up 78 per cent of all providers of social housing and over 1,300 of them are registered with the Corporation.