Rental sector in the UK 'will never reach European levels'

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While the rental sector in the UK will increase in the coming years, it is unlikely it will ever reach the levels it achieves in other countries, an industry expert has said.

Malcolm Harrison, a spokesperson for Arla, said that affordability problems in the UK would drive rental demand in the coming years.

However, he added: "I don't think we'll ever get to the proportion of renting that you see in Europe and North America.

"All our forecasts suggest that the private rented sector will increase from its current 11 per cent of all housing to round about 15 per cent of all housing in the next ten years."

In particular, Mr Harrison said that buy-to-let landlords had helped revitalise the rental sector after it "had nearly died" at the end of the 1980s.

"The private rented sector is something like 2.7 or 2.8 million properties, and there is something like 900,000 buy-to-let mortgages. So it's about a third," he explained.

"And what that has done is refinance a large chunk of the private rented sector."

Recently, a leading lender, the Woolwich, signalled its faith in the buy-to-let market by improving the mortgages available to landlords.

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