Howard Flight, at Conservative Home:
Finally, under George Osborne’s period as Chancellor, the Treasury persuaded him that increasing the tax burden on smaller buy-to-let operators would reduce buy-to-let activity and so make available more properties for owner occupiers to buy.
This has ignored the evidence that there is very little competition for the same properties between buy-to-let and owner-occupier purchasers.
I'm not sure what evidence he has that everybody else is ignoring. But he's clearly ignoring things like this:
From Finder.com - number of FTBs going up year by year:
From the Financial Times number of BTLs going down year by year:
I am perfectly aware that it is a bit sloppy to compare absolute numbers of FTBs with relative numbers of buy-to-let landlords, but the total number of homes bought and sold has been fairly constant, and that's the best I can track down.
The smoking gun is 2015 - shortly before the new higher rates on BTL purchases came in, there was a spike in BTL purchases with a corresponding dip in FTB purchases.
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