Once upon a time, a political party noticed that homeowners voted their way, and tenants voted for the other lot.
At the time, many tenants lived in social housing, which at the time was called "council houses" and they tended to be built and maintained to higher standards than private homes of comparable size, and could be had for modest rents.
In order to strengthen their hold on power, this party (let's call it the Con Men Party) had the idea of forcing the owners of this social housing to sell it, for less than its value, to the tenants. This would increase the number of homeowners, reduce the number of tenants, and thus increase the number of Conned voters. To maintain this hold, the owners of the social housing would not be allowed to use the receipts from sale to build new homes.
In some cases, the Con Men committed crimes to get rid of poor tenants and bring in prosperous owners. When caught, some of them ran away to foreign countries with no extradition treaty, or pretended to have given away all their money so they couldn't be made to pay fines and surcharges, and didn't emerge from hiding until they were so old they thought their Con Man friends wouldn't send them to prison.
For a time, this scheme worked well. The Con Men Party got lots of votes from the happy ex-tenants who had been able to buy well-built and well-maintained homes for less than they were worth. Only the people still needing social housing were unhappy, but they wouldn't have voted for the Con Men anyway, so who cares?
Eventually, many of these former Social Housing homes became owned by private investors, who were very pleased to see that asset price inflation pushed up the value of their investments, and the deliberate prevention of new housebuilding pushed up rents for people needing homes.
Later still the sons and daughters of people who had once been tenants found they couldn't afford to buy houses, and there was no social housing to be had. So they lived with their parents into middle age, or lived in nasty, run-down accommodation, or sometimes slums and barracks called HMOs. If they had enough money, they paid high rents.
Slowly, the Con Men Party became aware that there was a growing underclass of people with poor and expensive housing. These disgruntled people could sometimes be fobbed off by telling them that the reason for scarce housing was due to little green men from Mars, who had landed their spaceships in Britain and seized all the houses. The deliberate prevention of housebuilding was hushed up, and the reason social housing had disappeared was almost forgotten.
However, these numbers of these young unfortunates slowly grew. They were tenants, not homeowners, and apart from the very stupid ones, they started to blame the Con Men Party, and didn't vote for it.
The Con Men Party has always known which side their bread is buttered on. They didn't want the young unfortunates voting for someone else. They began to think they might have been overly generous to private landlords, and started to make the BTL trade more controlled and less profitable. They started to say that even people who were young, or poor, ought to have decent housing.
Surprisingly, the Con Men Party is in power now, and wants to stay that way.
Do you think it will want to tilt the scales in favour of the large number of young unfortunates who can't buy a home, or rent a decent one? And reduce the popularity and profitability of BTL?
I think it will.
