I see what you’re getting at on the whole (sort of) but I take issue with the what you say above. Surely, if somebody is on benefits, they do not pay the £45 a week, we (the tax payer) pay the £45 a week. The considerable amount of money they have spent on DIY, decorating, gardening was in actual fact money spent by us, the taxpayer. You see, in my eyes, if somebody does not actually work to earn the food in their belly and the roof over their head, they do not pay for anything. They are living out of the pockets of the tax paying majority, until they work and earn the money they spend.
As mentioned before, there are exceptions to the rule. People who are in between jobs, physically or mentally unable to work, single mothers with young children etc… ie people who actually require the helping hand. People who are capable of working, but do not, and have no intention of doing o (and yes, they do exist! I deal with them regularly!) do not deserve to claim the benefits.
Not trying to start an argument over it all, just thought I’d share my thoughts. Obviously what you said above may be sort of the case with working families who claim benefits in order to maintain a reasonabe standard of life etc…
Syzmon, That isn’t an answer to taking someone’s home away. Where there is fault, yes, but when there is no fault then no.
Why do those mortgage laws exist? They exist to stop exactly what I described, people losing their home through no fault of their own, you have not countered my argument, you have merely stated that it won’t happen, well we know this, but we know it won’t happen because people would be up in arms about it, for exactly the reasons I described.
You have not bothered to read the parts I posted where it is stated that MANY housing associations and local authorities are in NEGATIVE subsidy. They put back the rent they collect to the Government. The segment I posted pointed out that one local authority puts back £2m.
How is that rent subsidised? When the rent payers are giving £2m to the Government? I know there is an issue with HB, I mentioned it above for full disclosure, but that is a separate issue.
Roadrunner,
You are you conflating two different issues. One is housing, which is what this thread is about, and the other is the receipt of social welfare, which this thread is not about.
The two are not the same. You can’t argue about council housing and the receipt of social welfare as if they were the same thing.
My parents lived in a council house for 30 years, neither of them ever received any social welfare of any kind.
Don’t get your knickers in a twist the government will no doubt find a way to tax landlords more wherever they can and I’m not against that. My comment was to do with the high cost of private rented accommodation which I understood was your personal gripe. At least I thought we talked about it up at the Hut but maybe it was someone else. :Whistling: I agree that rents are stupidly high and I was amazed at what you/a.n.other said people were paying for one bed flats in ‘central’ locations. A lot of the people who rent privately could buy but don’t want the commitment and are willing to stump up extra for the flexibility of being able to up sticks to go to another job/girlfriend etc…and some unscrupulous landlords do take advantage of this. If more or the larger houses that are currently under-occupied were converted to flats the supply side would balance more with the demand and allow more people to own or rent their own space. You are wrong to assume that private individuals have the means or motivation to finance splitting their own large houses up- this is something that is done by property developers and professional landlords and speculators but rarely by the ordinary individual…and the reason is Planning Legislation. It now costs hundreds of pounds just to ask the council whether you need planning permission for a conversion to flats. Most people would stop at this point. Those who persevere are faced with a planning system that assumes the worst in everyone, like you do ;). If Mr and Mrs Bloggs, aged 70 living in a large 3 bed house want to split off a room to make a bedsit so they can afford to pay their heating bills and by doing so provide some cheap accommodation for someone else in space they aren’t using then why should the planning system block them at every turn? Sometimes it looks like local authorities are just trying to make money out of refusing and resisting planning applications and change and by doing so they are not safeguarding their communities…
Not any more. That’s how old mortgages worked. The bank no longer holds the deeds to your house. Most houses have no title deeds any more, its all done on land registry, and conveyances. Only really old houses have transferred title deeds, where the document has a historical significance, even if only to the houseowner.
Nowadays, you own your house outright from the very beginning. You are the legal owner, and your title is indefeasable. However, the bank hold a registered charge over your property, so they can apply to the court to have your house repossed, i.e. for the bank to take legal ownership, so that they may sell it and recover their money. If the bank legally owned your house, they would not need a court order to sell.
My point still stands, your correction, valued as it is, is no more an answer to the point I raised than the one provided by szymon, this is the way it is because people would be up in arms if mortgage owners had their homes stripped from them through no fault of their own.
I am just not sure why it is ok, to some people, to strip homes from council tenants through no fault of their own. They pay to live there, they invest in them homes both financially and emotionally, and stripping those homes from people for no better reason than a policy decision not to replenish the social housing stock seems to me to be fundamentally wrong.
Can’t that couple rent out their room to a lodger without any of that planning permission being required?
Isn’t a lot of the cost in house-breaking about making it safe for multi-occupancy? Installing fire alarms that sort of thing?
I don’t think there is a shortfall in short-term rentals for individuals, I don’t think that this is what drives up the prices. I think what drives up the prices is the cost of housing in general.
For instance if you have to pay £250,000 for a 3 Bedroom property, you really can’t convert it and rent the rooms for any less than £100 a week because the mortgage you are paying is quite high, and you need a return or what is the point of doing it.
If property prices were £100,000 for a 3 Bedroom property, than the rental costs would be cheaper, of course supply and demand have an impact but there is a bar that must be crossed first, before you even consider the supply/demand aspect.
Kaos when starting this thread seems to think that council rents reflect that cost of providing housing and are not subsidised. This is not true and a look at the accounts of any council will easily show how much subsidy is given to council tennants.
Take Ealing for example (it is where I live); in 2012 the Borough has budgetted to spend over £20m more than it expects to receives in rent on maintaining and managing its 17,800 properties. It works out at just over £1,100 per property. This is running costs only and does not include the capital cost of buying the properties in the first place.
A private sector tenant would have to fund a return on capital too so if you make allowances for that the subsidy on council tenants is much higher. Lets assume the avaergae value of a council property in London is £200k and a reasonable return on capital is 3% - this would mean council homes are subsided on avaerage by a further £6,000 per year.
Put these together and the subsidy amounts to around £150 per week.
I am not sure you are being fair here. Would also like to see where this information comes from to better examine it.
You say look at the account of any council, but I gave an example from ARCH of their local authority (A council) that put £2m BACK into the coffers from their rental properties, they were as they described it in “negative subsidy”…so not every council is how you portray.
Ealing are planning on spending £20m more than it expects to receive in rent. Is this the actual cost of maintenance though?
If it is anything like my council, this may reflect years of neglect in terms of council properties AND a requirement to meet Government targets for renewal, called the Decent Homes Standard.
Can it really be said that the rent is being subsidised, when that rent, as in the example above, has gone to Central Government, then returned to Councils to spend as they wish, which they have spent on providing public services while allowing their housing stock to fall into such a state that the last Government felt the need to bring in legislation to force local councils to improve it.
Is it a fair thing to suggest that the rent on Council homes is being subsidised when they have put money back into the public coffers, instead of taking from it, while at the same time watching their properties suffer.
I would like to see the source of your information in regard to Ealing so that we can enjoy the full facts, rather than the bitesized chunks that you have decided to feed us.
Bear in mind, there is only so much a tenant can do to a Council property without consent and in many properties there are public areas which are not under the control of a single tenant, which they cannot change, even to improve.
It was not given as a temporary home szymon, you can’t pretend now that it was.
No what you stated was that the law was there to protect people, it wasn’t always that way you know, this was put in place because of riots…as NinjaJunkie pointed out, most of our rights have come about because of civil disobedience.
The rent is not subsidised if the total amount of rent is higher than the cost of the properties.
You can’t break that down individually because some homes will require no maintenance and some require much maintenance at different times. If there is a profit in the overall rent compared to the overall cost than the rent is not subsidised.
You are talking about stripping people of their homes, because that is what part of the story is about.
Yes there is a difference, as I stated before, when you get a mortgage you decide what type of house, what size, where, what amenities are available, which schools are local, which hospitals and transport links.
I made the comparison merely on the point that stripping people of their homes through no fault of their own is unacceptable, I used that example because I know that those on the right would understand it better.
No council homes are NOT granted to people based on their income…I don’t know where you got that piece of information from. It is based on your need. Usually this is based on the children you have and whether you have a home. Council homes are also allocated based on how long you have been on the waiting list.
Council homes have never been temporary accommodation. And I think this is the fundamental difference between our opinions.
If someone has a home, which is given to them as a permanent home, they are entitled to stay in that home unless THEY do something that demands that they should lose it.
That to me is a fundamental right that everyone should have. Regardless of where your home originates or to whom you pay your money, whether it be a bank or a local authority acting as a landlord.
Kaos did you mention which council is paying a surplus back to central government? If it is Newham Council when they have 15 year waiting lists you have to wonder why they aren’t using the money to restore/buy/build more council houses? Their web page seems to imply that the shortage of council housing is a given and that if you want a council house you are going to have to wait years so don’t bother applying. Interesting too that they don’t seem have have any bedsits…I wonder why not when half London’s population are single and only ‘need’ a bedsit.
As to people having the option of renting out a room in their house of course they could but they should also have the option of easily converting a room or two to a separately accessed bedsit/flat if they wish. Not everyone who could do with the rental income from spare rooms wants to have to share the facilities of their family house with a lodger for obvious reasons so in order to turn those rooms into a separate flat or bedsit with it’s own access etc., although usually technically feasible and relatively inexpensive is more often than not made impossible by overly restrictive and under-resourced Local Authority planning departments.
As I understand it rent is collected and handed to central government, then central government hands back a set amount according to the housing stock. This number may or may not be more than the rent collected. Thus any surplus is not seen by the local Council. You could argue that this is an incentive for them not to bother building the housing stock, however, I think the problem is deeper than that. I believe the money is ring-fenced, so that councils cannot buy more housing stock, it is a policy decision not to increase the housing stock of local councils.
A bedsit is not long term accommodation. You can’t live in a bedsit for a long period of time and as mentioned above, council homes are not meant to be temporary accommodation. They are meant to be homes for people to live in on a permanent basis.
To the second point, this may be by design, as pointed out, in my local authority area, there waiting list for a proper 3 bedroom property is very long indeed, perhaps (though I don’t know) this is replicated elsewhere and in the private sector, due to the rent-to-let market breaking up larger homes, and there is a certain drive to decrease the number of homes that are broken up.
Perhaps the view is that it would be better for that couple to move to a smaller home, thus save the money they are spending on a larger property or open up the equity they hold in that property and allow a family to take the larger home.
This is all supposition of course, I don’t know the actual answer, just giving plausible alternatives.
Found this that might explain it a little, while trying to expand my own knowledge on this subject.
“Councils that directly own and provide council housing must separate – ringfence is the jargon term – all income and expenditure related to the council being a landlord into a separate fund. This is known as the housing revenue account. Anything that does not relate to the landlord function of council housing is put into another fund called the general fund.”
Yes, capital receipts raised by selling general fund assets can be fully used by the council, but there are national ‘pooling’ rules for HRA capital receipts. Under these rules, 75 per cent of the capital receipts generated from the sale of council houses is paid over to central government and so cannot be used locally by individual councils."
Dwelling Rents: 61,111,000
Repairs and Maintenance: 6,478,000
There are many other factors to bear in mind, which take an impact on the housing side, including a whopping 24m in fees for the ALMO that currently “manages” Newham’s properties, but it appears pretty clear cut that the cost of maintenance and the amount collected in rent are FAR FAR apart.
Far from being subsidised it appears, and please correct me if I have incorrectly read this, that Rent far outstrips the costs.
When I was a student 20 odd years ago Newham was in a bit of a state with it’s council housing stock. A lot of it had been rendered uninhabitable by a combination of neglect and mismanagement by tenants and council alike. I remember walking round an estate that was almost entirely boarded up with only a few hardy residents still willing to live there. The report in your last post was from 2003 and even by then they still regarded over half their housing stock as ‘Non-decent’ i.e. unfit for habitation. I would be interested to know if their projection that they would have eliminated the ‘Non-decent’ housing by 2011 was born out. Call me cynical but I suspect it wasn’t- after all it was several elections away at the time.
