A Labour MP who has campaigned for some years against short let landlords says proposals to crack down on the sector “do not go nearly far enough.”

This week Housing Secretary Michael Gove announced that councils will be given greater power to control future short-term lets by making them subject to planning consent.

Meanwhile, a new mandatory national register will give local authorities the information they need about short-term lets in their area, and the government suggests this “will help councils understand the extent of short-term lets in their area, the effects on their communities, and underpin compliance with key health and safety regulations.”

Existing homeowners will effectively get retrospective planning consent and will still be able to let out their own main or sole home without planning consent but only for up to 90 nights throughout a year.

But York’s Labour MP, Rachael Maclean, has slammed the proposals.

She is quoted on the York Mix website as saying: “The changes … will not bring any of the hundreds of thousands of lost homes back, instead the new rules will reinforce their holiday-let status by automatically granting them retrospective planning permission. In many areas, this means the horse has well and truly bolted, and the government confirmed it plans to do absolutely nothing to get it back.”

She continues: “Owners are actually being given the automatic right to flip homes to holiday lets without seeking permission, unless local authorities have actually managed to introduce restrictions – which itself could be a long, costly and uncertain process.

“This is completely out of step with where people are on this issue.  

“There is also now a huge risk that, in hotspots like York, there will now be a flurry of new holiday lets, as investors scramble to snap up remaining properties before controls come into force.”

Maclean says the 90 day rule “will do little to address the housing crisis in places like York where over 2,000 properties are short term holiday lets, when we’ve got hundreds and hundreds of families on our housing waiting list and local workers increasingly finding themselves priced out of the city.

“It is clear that this government are out of ideas and of touch with the impact they are having on people living in places like York.”