Private Landlords Provide Housing for 14% of Britons

More than 14% of Britons now rely on private sector landlords to meet their housing needs and fewer than one quarter of all tenants expect to purchase a home within the next two years. The number of tenants has grown consistently for the past nine years and home ownership started falling well before the financial crisis hit in autumn 2008.

One of the key reasons for the decline in home ownership was the residential property boom, particularly when prices peaked in 2007, locking many out of the most prosperous markets. Since then, values have fallen in much of the UK and continue to stagnate in many regions, except for South East England and Central London. While in 2006, 34% percent of tenants planned to purchase a home within two years, this figure now stands at just 24%.

In an analysis published in The Times, one of the reasons why so many Britons look to the rental market is due to the relatively low number of newly constructed houses. A number of developers in the north west, for example, put their projects on hold shortly after the crisis hit in late 2008 and construction of residential properties is yet to pick up.

In fact, the rate of house constructions has never been this low since 1946 and only 118,000 new residential properties were completed in 2009. These recently released figures suggest that Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s government is having difficulties charting a viable course for the housing sector, especially considering the fact that it had previously determined that 240,000 new homes would have to be constructed each year between now and 2020, in order to meet the country’s needs.