london,
01
December
2016
|
16:39
Europe/London

Council Leader reacts to Airbnb "victory"

Airbnb recently announced that their systems will, from January 2017, automatically limit entire home listings in Greater London to 90 nights a year, unless the hosts confirm that they have the required permission to share their space more frequently 

Commenting upon that news, Sarah Hayward, Leader of Camden Council, said:

“This is a major victory for Camden Council and partner councils, who have collectively been pressuring Airbnb to take action to stop exacerbating the capital’s housing crisis, and to control the impact of their properties on the lives of nearby, working, Londoners.

“We’ve campaigned strongly for Airbnb’s systems to automatically limit entire home listings in Greater London to 90 nights a year and I’m delighted the company have listened and taken this step. Swathes of properties in Camden had effectively been removed from the longer-term rental market, making it both more expensive and difficult to find a longer-term rental property in the borough for those working here.

“It was abundantly clear to all councils involved that many users of the site were flouting the 90 nights limit and the simplest way to stop that was for Airbnb to stop it at source, rather than councils undertake resource intensive and costly retrospective enforcement operations against the culprits, working with limited data from the company.

“Many of the properties listed on the site are located amongst working residents and those individuals will also share our joy that the impact of those renting the Airbnb properties will now be appropriately restricted to a 90 nights a year maximum

“We will continue to lobby the Government to introduce similar measures over all short-term letting companies and we’ll work with the Mayor of London to hold companies such as Airbnb to account.”