James Cleverley blames Labour’s Renters’ Rights Act after receiving Section 21 notice

Reply to the comment left by Beaver at 27/04/2026 – 09:31
The 40% income tax threshold is just above £50,000 per year

So an average working earner like me plus a single rental and I’m below that

And even if above it, you get a 20% tac credit, so to say it’s not offset is disingenuous

Reply to the comment left by Jonathan Clarke at 27/04/2026 – 07:37
The 40% tax bracket starts just above 50K per year

So an average working income like me plus 1 rental doesn’t affect me, especially as items like maintenance, buildings insurance, letting agent fees etc are all tax deductibles and not included in that total

Reply to the comment left by Billy Gunn at 28/04/2026 – 06:19
The income tax calculation is on gross rental income, not net.

Reply to the comment left by Billy Gunn at 28/04/2026 – 06:19
Agree it may not affect you as it stands if your income is say 30K pa + £1200 pcm rental income. It will/ may affect your strategy going forward if you were planning perhaps just one more 2nd similar BTL . You would then be pushed straight into 40%. Prior to Sec 24 I built a decent sized high leveraged portfolio rapidly in personal name and was tax negative for about 3 years. Today just 2 properties could take an average wage earner (which I , like you was back then) into 40% . Sec 24 quadrupled my tax bill

Reply to the comment left by Jonathan Clarke at 28/04/2026 – 11:19
It can also affect you if you are looking at the feasibility of EPC upgrades, i.e. raising more capital to fund property improvements and considering how much you need to raise rent to service the extra capital, and you are already sitting near one of the thresholds.

Reply to the comment left by Billy Gunn at 04:09
It’s true that if your net income before deduction of mortgage costs is less than the higher rate threshold, or you don’t have a mortgage, then section 24 won’t make any difference to you.
But in a non-competitive market where demand exceeds supply, the price is set by the highest-cost provider. So the effect is to drive up rents overall as larger landlords try to cover the extra costs of section 24, which essentially increases the effective mortgage rate by 33%.
This is the same reason why our electricity is so expensive even though we have a lot of very cheap supply, as the price is set by the most expensive supplier, even if they only supply 1% of the demand.

Reply to the comment left by Peter Merrick at 28/04/2026 – 14:28
It isn’t just the larger landlords that find they have to increase rents because of section 24. The majority of landlords have a small portfolio and are non-incorporated. Many do what they do because they became accidental landlords or are supplementing a pension.

If you have income from the state pension, a private pension, and residential property that is bought on a buy-to-let mortgage it’s very easy to exceed the threshold and be penalised by it. Even if you are self-employed and also receive some income from BTL-mortgaged properties as many plumbers, electricians and others in the building trade do, then again it’s easy to exceed the threshold and be penalised by it. But if you are one of the big incorporated players then you are not penalised by section 24.

And it’s easy to nudge your earnings over the gross earnings threshold to recover extra tax or push rent up to try and service extra finance for property improvements such as EPC improvements. Again, it’s the small people who are penalised for doing something that is supposed to be socially useful. The effect of section 24 is perverse. And the effect of ‘rent controls’ or parties threatening them is that small landlords using finance have to put up rents now in case they can’t do it later, with section 24 creating a need to push them up, rather than do what they used to do which was to hold them down and provide competition.