The government has finally admitted it is now aware that there are not enough private rented homes to house tenants, mainly because landlords are quitting the sector in droves due to the short sighted government approach of high taxation and infernal bureaucratic red tape.

The junior housing minister Felicity Buchan’s letter to the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee, included the sentence: “I recognise that demand is currently outstripping the supply of properties available to let.”

This admittance conveniently ties in with recently released Zoopla figures showing that over the year, when compared against the five year average, demand for private rental homes has rocketed sky high by a massive 142 per cent, whist at the same time PRS housing stock has plummeted by 46 per cent.

Following Buchan’s admission a spokesperson for an industry association responded: “We welcome the minister’s recognition of the supply crisis in the private rented sector, but the government needs to rectify the mistakes it has made in causing this.

“Since 2015 successive Chancellors have sought to choke off investment in the market with a series of tax hikes. All this has achieved is to cut supply whilst demand continues to soar for fewer and fewer properties. The ultimate losers in this are tenants, who are finding it more difficult to access the homes they need.

“We cannot continue to limp along without a pro-growth strategy which embraces tax measures to support investment and ensure renters can find a place to call home.”

Ever since 2015 the Tory government, some may say, have embarked on an anti-landlord agenda when the chancellor at the time George Osborne, announced that private rental landlords’ mortgage interest relief would be reduced in phases over four years  from 2017 down to basic rate of income tax by April 1st 2021. Not content with that hammer blow for landlords, Osborne announced in his Autumn Statement an extra three per cent stamp duty surcharge on homes purchased to rent out from April 2016.

Although in the 2016 Budget the higher rate of Capital Gains Tax was cut from 28 to 20 per cent and the basic rate from 18 to 10 per cent, however there would be an additional eight per cent surcharge to be paid on any homes.

The sixth Chancellor since Osborne, Jeremy Hunt, announced in November that the Capital Gains Tax Annual Exempt Announce would be reduced from £12,300 to £6,000 from April 2023 to be followed a year later by a further reduction down to £3,000.