“It is worth bearing in mind that approximately 25 per cent of PRS tenants pay housing benefit to landlords who effectively provide the social housing that the government is unwilling or unable to offer,” he said.
In order to address this, Leaf suggested the government should help to retain good landlords and encourage others to take their place.
“The cost of fixing the present housing crisis is huge but the cost of doing little or nothing is likely to be much higher – not just in the mounting cost of paying housing benefit and providing temporary accommodation,” he added.
“Either way, Madam chancellor, please leave well alone and try to stimulate as much selling and renting as possible, which will not only be good for the market but economic growth.”
Pensions
Advisers are also really keen to see simplification and security with pensions.
Eleven.2 Financial Planning director, Greg Moss, wants to see cross party commitment to the stability of pension rules and incentives.
“The big picture which dwarfs whatever blackhole we’re currently worried about, is the enormous strain on state provision for retired people in future, with a dwindling working age population,” he explained.
“I’ve been in advice long enough to see pensions go from being a dirty word to something that’s widely seen by investors as a helpful and well understood tool within their planning.”
He stated this change “wasn’t easily won”, and warned that damaging the pension “brand” by eroding people’s trust in whether current rules and tax incentives will survive in between savers’ working years and their retirement is a “dangerous game to play”.
Dennehy called for simplification of pensions to provide savers with clarity.
“The government has future state pension liabilities of £3.8bn, and without suggesting that the government fundamentally needs workers to save and self-fund part of their retirement provisions which will help alleviate this pressure on the government,” he said.
However, he pointed out this could be viewed as “tomorrow’s issue” and will most likely fall on the feet of politicians in 10 or 20 years time and, therefore, can be ignored for the time being.
“You therefore need to make it easy enough for the general population to get a grasp of these ideas, and not by overcomplicating it,” he concluded.
Income tax
Simplification was a desirable quality for several advisers with Moss stating that he would like to see this with income tax rules to remove some of the “absurd” distortions.
“The fact that someone with £101,000 of income has a 15 per cent higher marginal tax rate than someone with £500,000 is Bizarro World nonsense,” he explained.
While Moss acknowledged that less complexity means less need for advisers like him, he described this as an important step toward solving the advice gap.
