St Brelade Deputy Sean Power said that the buy-to-let market is contributing to the Island’s chronic shortage of housing. In a letter in today’s JEP, Deputy Power responds to the comments of GR Langlois director Mark Le Boutillier, who argued this week that the States needed to rezone more land for development. Mr Le Boutillier said that a survey by his company revealed that more than 500 households that were looking for first-time buyer homes. But Deputy Power, who is chairing a scrutiny sub-panel on the proposed States Property Plan, said that the buy-to-let market is partly to blame by taking A to H category houses out of the market place. ‘A number of houses in the A to H market are being bought by buyers simply to rent. These buyers may be Jersey or non-Jersey residents,’ Deputy Power said. ‘This buy-to-rent market removes houses from the local market and in many cases a local family is gazumped by an investor. We may well need to deal with this.’ In his letter he also describes recent developments in St Brelade and St Clement as ‘some of the worst examples of bad housing development the Island has ever seen.’ ‘I refer particularly to the room sizes, amenity space, storage, parking garden sizes and the cramming of houses onto a small site resulting in high density development,’ he says.
The Heart of Island Life
