Lord Thurlow (CB)

My Lords, this is my first contribution in Committee, so I declare my interests as the owner of a residential property in receipt of rent and as a practising chartered surveyor for some 35 years. I would like to stop for a moment and consider why rents are so high. Well, it is simple. It is supply and demand; we have not got enough, because there has not been sufficient building since the evolution of the AST regime that we heard about, which began to encourage investors back into the market. British institutions—life companies, pension funds, insurance companies—used to own millions of pounds-worth of private rented accommodation in the UK. The post-war rent restrictions made it uneconomical and they dumped it, as we have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Young. It took many years for that to come back. The investors returned slowly with the AST and now we are interfering with it all again. I am not objecting to that interference; I think ASTs needs updating. But the important thing to remember, or point out to the Committee, is that there is a vast amount of institutional money lying in the wings waiting to invest in private rented property. It is there, it is identified, some of it has been spent, and it is going to create tens of thousands of units of private rented accommodation. We are talking not about tens of millions but billions of pounds, and a lot of it is foreign investment. Institutional investment is the holy grail of generating high-volume addition to the inventory.