‘End of the middle-class buy-to-let retirement plan’

recently, middle-class savers have helped fuel a buy-to-let boom with more than two million savers in Britain funnelling cash into rental properties to help fund their retirement.

The Bank is forcing lenders to “toughen up” over concerns they have relaxed standards for landlords.

Prior to the announcement of the Bank’s new rules, a number of lenders went further and tightened their criteria voluntarily with some, including Nationwide, now refusing to lend to landlords making rental profits of less than 45pc of their mortgage repayments.

When the building society announced the change in April this year, Paul Wootton, managing director of its buy-to-let arm, The Mortgage Works, said the move was a response to the change on tax relief.

He said: “This change is a proactive move that recognises the need to help safeguard rental cover for landlords over the coming years, and in advance of the forthcoming changes gage interest tax relief.”

While would-be landlords are being locked out of the market, current landlords are rapidly looking to sell, studies have indicated. One survey of almost 1,000 private landlords by the Residential Landlords’ Association found a quarter of buy-to-let investors are planning to sell their rental properties as a result of the Government tax changes.

Complaints about the taxman are at their highest level since the global financial crisis peaked seven years ago.

HM Revenue and Customs handled 81,066 complaints last year, an increase of more than 16,000 on 2013-14. The last time complaints were higher was in 2008-09, when the total was 83,917.

James Hender, partner at Saffery Champness, the accountancy firm which requested the figures, said HMRC was making “a large number of errors and had a poor response time.

HMRC apologised for its record and pledged to improve it, saying it expect ed a drop in complaints in 2016-17.