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Category: government and politics
Alongside the rest of the nation, landlords have been eagerly anticipating King Charles III’s speech introducing the new government today, hoping for some acknowledgement of the property market crisis.
Held in the House of Lords, His Majesty’s address was broadcast to the nation yesterday afternoon. The King covered many topics pertinent to the country’s future, including technology, education, transport and more.
As housing is such a hot-button issue, it simply had to be covered. Landlords and anyone monitoring the property market will be pleased to know that it was given its due coverage.
Section 21
Among the pressing issues covered were the topics of housebuilding targets, reforming grounds for possession, and reiterating Labour’s stance against Section 21, the famous piece of legislation that allows landlords to evict tenant without stating fault. The King referenced the legislation in all but name:
Legislation will be introduced to give greater rights and protections to people renting their homes, including ending no-fault evictions and reforming grounds for possession.
After winning the General Election, Labour dialled back their deadline for revoking Section 21, having previously promised to ban no-fault evictions within their first day in power. This was a touch over-optimistic given the complexity of navigating the court system, when proposing large-scale reforms to property law.
However, now that the King has seemingly set this target in stone for the world to see, Labour may face more pressure to fulfil their original promises. Of course, many landlords would prefer Labour to not try fixing what in their eyes isn’t broken.
What’s important to remember is that the King’s Speech is a mostly ceremonial affair to welcome in a new government; not everything the monarch reads out will come to pass and there is no legal binding behind anything said.
To emphasise this, there are many eccentric ceremonial rites that are still upheld after hundreds of years of tradition, including the practice of holding a Member of the Commons “hostage” in Buckingham Palace throughout the proceedings – they are, of course, not placed in any real danger and it’s treated as more of an honour.
Housebuilding targets absent from speech
Labour’s (likely campaign-exclusive) promise to fund the construction of 1.5 million new homes in the UK was conspicuously absent from King Charles’ Speech. It’s unsurprising that Labour would want to hedge their bets on this topic as no leading party in decades has successfully delivered on their housebuilding targets.
Labour’s snappy ‘Get Britain Building’ plan followed a similar strategy to many others: torpedoing ‘big government’ bureaucracy in favour of giving more power to regional governments.
While a monarch wouldn’t be expected to go into strenuous detail about schedules during a large ceremony, the general absence of the topic of affordable housing and any substantive detail of Labour’s housebuilding strategy may indicate a lack of effective planning on this front, especially since the government always provides the full outline of the speech to the King beforehand.
Conclusions
Labour has long prided itself on being the party that promotes change and progress, in contrast to their blue counterparts’ principal focus on maintaining the status quo as much as possible. The expected pledges of a Labour government are all present and accounted for in King Charles’ speech: fix the housing crisis, tackle climate change, improve workers’ rights, nationalise railways, and modernise the country’s infrastructure.
Time will ultimately tell if Labour are up to the task. We will hotly monitor each of the property-related pledges made in the King’s Speech, checking which – if any – come to pass.
