Local Housing Allowance

The think tank also had a look at rents at this time.

So, um, rent controls would cut the cost of restoring the local housing allowance.

That's the, the route that the, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation want to go down.

Now, I think we have to be really careful when we talk about rent controls because apart from anything else, of course, that they scare people and they would really scare institutional investment in what's become a hugely growing single family home sector.

I'm selling it when that happens"? Tomorrow's tenant just gets absolutely screwed by that sort of attitude.

And you can go to Berlin and see evidence of that.

You can go to plenty of other cities where there have been rent controls, and that's just before we start talking about the black market and all of those other things, right? But this seems a little bit like an effort from the JRF to get the rent controls argument in by the side door to say, "Well, this is how we can help with local housing allowance, and we increase it by this much, but we control rents.

This is, this is how it should work." Um, now we also need to be fair to the JRF here, right? There's rent control, and there's rent control.

Yeah.

And as for LHA rates, they are fucking miles off.

I knew this one would trigger it.

They are fucking miles off market rents.

I've had this...

And you know what,

Sal? That feeds into what you were saying before about if we want social housing to get better, the LHA rates have got to go up, haven't they? Because...

Yes.

NRLA Chief Policy Officer Chris Norris wants the Chancellor to consider indexation of CGT to take account of inflation so that only real gains are taxed.

Maya Wilson-Outson, senior money writer at The Telegraph, will also join Chris to debate whether local housing allowance will be unfrozen and should tax relief help landlords achieve minimum energy efficiency standards.

Hannah Kenyon will provide her regular update on what you have been calling the NRLA Advice Line about this month.

But first, on 9 September, the Government published the Private Rented Sector Database Regulations 2026.

I think it's fairly unlikely, sadly.

I think our readers would agree that it would be a good thing.

Now, 24% of people in the private rented sector, Maya, receive local housing allowance.

The government's concerned that unfreezing it, and of course it's been frozen since 2025, I believe, will push up rents.