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Buy to Let

Call to allow buy-to-let investments in pensions

Julia Rampen
Written By:
Julia Rampen
Posted:
Updated:
19/03/2013

The chancellor should allow residential landlords to hold their properties in pensions in his upcoming Budget, a buy-to-let expert has urged.

Specialist buy-to-let lender Paragon’s director of new business John Heron said the Treasury return to Labour-era proposals to allow buy-to-let properties to be held alongside commercial property and other assets in the tax wrapper of a self-invested personal pension (SIPP).

He told Your Mortgage: “If they are going to maintain the Funding for Lending scheme I would like to see it extended in a way that doesn’t distort competition – and why would you not reconsider allowing individuals to sit rental property in their pension scheme?”

Heron also called on the government to level the playing field by allowing non-bank lenders to access the same cheap funds as banks and building societies.

Heron was among those in the BTL industry who criticised the government-backed NewBuy scheme last month for “tinkering round the edges” of larger long-term debates on the housing crisis.

Addressing the controversial issue of lending to landlords on housing benefit, he said Paragon had always lent to landlords with tenants in this category and had never identified a link between housing benefit and poor credit performance.

Nothing in the changes associated with the introduction of Universal Credit was likely to change that position, he stressed.