Breaking Property News 30/10/25
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Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves licensed to thrill
Why becoming an accidental landlord is so much more than red-tape
The embattled Chancellor of the Exchequer whose frequent leaks to the media about possible SDLT changes, Mansion tax initiatives and tax on uplifts on property equity at point of sale, now finds herself ‘bunny in the headlights’ for not getting a licence to rent her home out.
This means her tenant could receive £41,000 of rent, that Reeves could get a £30,000 fine and a civil or even criminal conviction. Plus of course she has a residential mortgage on her Dulwich home – so did she inform the lender. If not the lender could withdraw the mortgage and she would need to get a commercial landlord mortgage at higher cost. Also some lenders charge a higher rate of interest if a house is rented out, having formally been a residential home.
Why all of this matters is that the UK economy is worth about £2.7 Trn annually and the fiscal events – budgets given by the Chancellor have a great impact on the that economy, they stimulate growth or stagnation. Given the importance of getting the budget right – I think it is time to re-think if Rachel who lied on her CV is actually up to the job of steering UK Plc out of the economic turbulence it presently finds itself in.
Reeves become an accidental landlord because her life changed, a move to 11 Downing street. This brought with it a new set of rules and regulations that needed to be complied with, failure to do so will have both financial and probably political repercussions. But for even those not in the cabinet, it is clear that there is a real push for the Private Rental Sector (PRS) to only have institutional landlords to ensure things are done properly, (irony) as the minefield of regulations – recently bolstered by the new Act which has pushed even more power to the tenant, means that there are now beartraps aplenty for the armature landlord.
And on that theme, given the amount of kites that have been flown by the treasury team, and the lateness of our next budget the 26th of November, maybe what the government and the nation needs is not an amateur Chancellor bereft of fiscal strategy. Looking as the ex-governor of the Bank of England recently commented to solve things with weak policy worked out on the back of a ‘fag packet’.
Maybe Rachel has one merit, if there is only to be one budget a year, instead of the usual two, by Autumn 2026 it is likely that she and the present PM might well not be in the cabinet, her fall from grace being that she lied to the PM over this present rental licencing debacle, and Starmer’s fall being due to his trouncing in the May 2026 local elections.
On the flipside we could of course have Streeting as PM by Autumn 2026 with Angela Rayner who he so vocally has said he wants to see back in the cabinet – maybe as Chancellor after all it would seem that you do not need any previous qualifications to run that post under this Labour government and that £40,000 of unpaid SDLT was just a little financial oversight.
On the flipside we could of course have Streeting as PM by Autumn 2026 with Angela Rayner who he so vocally has said he wants to see back in the cabinet – maybe Chancellor after all it would seem that you do not need any previous qualifications to run that post under this Labour government.
Andrew Stanton Executive Editor – moving property and proptech forward. PropTech-X
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