29/04/2026
Spot on. Both Conservative and Labour governments have destroyed the rental sector. I expect there will be more small Landlords departing after May 1st. If there is no incentive, there is little point
Landlords should get tax breaks.
Go on. React. I'll wait.
Because here's what nobody wants to say out loud: the way you tax landlords determines what renters pay. Full stop.
Britain has spent the last decade treating landlords like the enemy.
Section 24 killed mortgage interest relief. Stamp duty surcharges made acquisition more expensive. CGT changes made exit more costly.
Every single lever has been pulled in the same direction: make it harder, more expensive, less viable to be a landlord.
And what happened?
Landlords left. Supply shrank. Rents rose.
This isn't opinion. It's arithmetic.
Here's the thing most people don't understand about how landlords think, and I include myself in this. We don't lie awake at night worrying about gross rent. We worry about what we actually keep after tax.
That's the number that determines whether we stay in the market, expand, or sell up and walk away.
Which means there's a move hiding in plain sight that nobody in government has had the courage to make.
If you gave landlords meaningful tax incentives, you could cut rents, and landlords would still earn the same.
Read that again.
Lower gross rent. Same net income. Because the tax burden dropped.
The renter pays less. The landlord keeps the same margin. The Treasury foregoes a slice, but gets it back ten times over in lower housing benefit costs, lower homelessness pressure, lower NHS spend from housing stress, and an economy where ordinary people have money left at the end of the month.
Lower rents mean people can save. When people can save, some of them buy. When more people buy, wealth spreads. That's how you actually fix wealth inequality, not by hammering the people who provide the homes, but by creating conditions where everyone moves up.
This is the thing about taxation that people seem to have forgotten. We're not living in a dictatorship. Nobody puts a gun to a landlord's head and says stay in the market.
In a democracy, you direct behaviour through incentives and taxation. Right now, the signal is screaming GET OUT. And landlords are getting out.
The alternative is to flip the signal.
Reward landlords who stay in the market long-term. Reward those who keep rents below market rate. Reward those who improve energy efficiency. Reward those who don't evict without cause.
Design the tax system so that being a good landlord, affordable rents, decent homes and stable tenancies, is also the most financially rational choice.
That's not a handout. That's policy design. And it's the only version of rental reform that actually increases supply instead of killing it.
Britain keeps asking why rents are going up. The answer is in the tax code.
Fix the incentives. Fix the market. It really is that simple.
