Measures aimed at boosting professional investment in good quality, privately rented homes and to help meet the nation's housing demand are published today.

Housing Minister Grant Shapps welcomed the report by Sir Adrian Montague, saying it offered "a blueprint" for encouraging more institutional investment into the sector.

The vast majority of private-rented homes in this country are managed by individual landlords.

But Sir Adrian's report highlights the "real potential" for investment in large-scale development of homes built specifically for private rent by professional organisations.

The report finds that a combination of recent tax changes and wider market conditions have cleared the way for this sector to grow.

Sir Adrian's report makes a series of recommendations to speed up the timescale for building the private-rented homes needed to meet existing and growing demand. These include:

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•That councils use flexibilities in the planning system to plan for and enable developments of privately rented homes where they can meet local need. This could include waiving affordable housing requirements on new developments of homes specifically for private rent, or reviewing stalled sites to see whether some of the new homes planned could be made available to rent rather than sell;

•That a task force be set up to encourage and support build-to-let investment from the private sector, and to develop voluntary standards that future landlords would meet and tenants could expect;

•That the Government look to provide a number of targeted incentives to encourage the development of Build-to-Let business models, which could include sharing development risk in the short-term to get spades in the ground and building started;

•That the Government allocate some of the redundant, formerly used public sector land and buildings being released for housebuilding to build-to-let development, and publish data on how this is done; and

•That the Government work with councils and the Greater London Authority to identify a number of sites where there is good demand for rental housing and make them available to developers on the grounds that a proportion of the homes built be let out to tenants.

(CD)