Spare room changes: 'I won't go quietly'

[TheHeretic]

blugnu said:

So why did we sell all the houses?

The council didn't "buy her a house" She rented the house off them. I have no idea what benefits she got - she worked all her life but I don't think she had a private pension, although I think she still got something from my grandad's pension, but not much.

We should never have sold the houses off. All it did was create a shortage of affordable homes whilst making some people rich, creating a huge bubble in the economy which has since burst. I'd rather the state still had affordable homes to offer people, personally.

The sale of council houses is an entirely different issue.

[blugnu]

blinkythefish said:

Or, more pertinent to the "bedroom tax" debate, did she pay the rent on the place, or was that picked up by the taxpayer?

If they were paying the rent, then the new legislation wouldn't have affected them.

If the taxpayer was paying the rent, why should the taxpayer pay extra to provide others the luxury of an extra room, especially when a lot of taxpayers are not in a position to afford that themselves?

I don't know. I think she got housing benefit, although she worked well into her seventies. She didn't have the extra rooms as a luxury, she had them because she had once needed them and thus they were an integral part of her home.

[Deva Link]

blinkythefish said:

Or, more pertinent to the "bedroom tax" debate, did she pay the rent on the place, or was that picked up by the taxpayer?

If they were paying the rent, then the new legislation wouldn't have affected them.

If the taxpayer was paying the rent, why should the taxpayer pay extra to provide others the luxury of an extra room, especially when a lot of taxpayers are not in a position to afford that themselves?

Even if she was fully paying the rent herself, the rent is still set a level below normal so everyone in 'council' property is being subsidised.

There's an ongoing argument, separate to the current debate, that no one should under-occupy council property.

The main issue for people like the lady in this case is that there's usually nowhere locally which is suitable for them to move to as the housing that was built isn't mixed enough.

If she was getting housing benefit and was moved into a smaller, privately rented, place then her housing benefit would almost certainly go up. Brilliant.

Edited by Deva Link on Wednesday 27th March 16:08

[blugnu]

TheHeretic said:

blugnu said:

So why did we sell all the houses?

The council didn't "buy her a house" She rented the house off them. I have no idea what benefits she got - she worked all her life but I don't think she had a private pension, although I think she still got something from my grandad's pension, but not much.

We should never have sold the houses off. All it did was create a shortage of affordable homes whilst making some people rich, creating a huge bubble in the economy which has since burst. I'd rather the state still had affordable homes to offer people, personally.

The sale of council houses is an entirely different issue.

Well if they hadn't sold them, there would be more houses for the council to house people in, so it isn't really. The sale of the houses means there aren't enough houses, especially as I would imagine that it was the bigger houses in the nicer areas that sold most readily.

[TheHeretic]

blugnu said:

Well if they hadn't sold them, there would be more houses for the council to house people in, so it isn't really. The sale of the houses means there aren't enough houses, especially as I would imagine that it was the bigger houses in the nicer areas that sold most readily.

It has nothing to do with it purely because the issue is whether a single person in a big house should be moved into a smaller home, and a family of 4 or 5 can move in out of their 2 bedroom flat. Right, or wrong? I don't want to go harsh, but gran never owned her home, and she was subsidized by the taxpayer be it via lower rent, or via benefits. The taxpayer value should be paramount, especially if someone is not being turfed on the street, merely rehoused. The fact gran was there for a long time shouldn't mean anything.

[blugnu]

TheHeretic said:

blugnu said:

Well if they hadn't sold them, there would be more houses for the council to house people in, so it isn't really. The sale of the houses means there aren't enough houses, especially as I would imagine that it was the bigger houses in the nicer areas that sold most readily.

It has nothing to do with it purely because the issue is whether a single person in a big house should be moved into a smaller home, and a family of 4 or 5 can move in out of their 2 bedroom flat. Right, or wrong? I don't want to go harsh, but gran never owned her home, and she was subsidized by the taxpayer be it via lower rent, or via benefits. The taxpayer value should be paramount, especially if someone is not being turfed on the street, merely rehoused. The fact gran was there for a long time shouldn't mean anything.

Successive governments have messed up housing. Somehow we've gone from a system where we had lots of state owned homes that could be rented by people at a reasonable rate and for as long as they liked to, 50 years later, hardly any state owned homes - in fact just not enough homes. Hundreds of flats in city centres and so on, but not enough family homes.

And now a lot of those houses the state once owned are owned by someone else and are being rented out for more money, in a worse state of repair - and the state is paying. So it's not any cheaper - in fact it may even be more expensive - and the state has less control and the housing is poorer. How have we allowed this to happen? All we have done is changed from a system where the working class benefitted from the government subsidising housing, because, like my nana, they got a nice house at a fair price as there was no landlord making a profit, to a system where landlords benefit by making profits renting out houses the state built and owned back to the state.

It's ridiculous.

If the state is going to pay for housing in one way or another - and frankly given the chronic shortage of housing it has to - who would you rather 'benefited' from this spending - people like my nana who worked all their lives in poorly paid jobs (she was a cleaner) or landlords? Because someone is going to benefit. I rather think I'd rather poorer people got nicer houses than landlords got to make more profits, personally.

[blugnu]

User33678888 said:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-219490...

Why on earth are my taxes subsidising this bints lifestyle?

I can't watch the video clip here btw - I just read the text underneath. What makes her a "bint"?

[Ozzie Osmond]

Why do "passengers on the state" think they are immune from the realities of life?

Ridiculous.

[ewenm]

blugnu said:

If the state is going to pay for housing in one way or another - and frankly given the chronic shortage of housing it has to - who would you rather 'benefited' from this spending - people like my nana who worked all their lives in poorly paid jobs (she was a cleaner) or landlords? Because someone is going to benefit. I rather think I'd rather poorer people got nicer houses than landlords got to make more profits, personally.

Absolutely. I'd like as many "poorer" people as possible in the housing they need. Unfortunately for some, if those needs change then the housing should change too. If someone's needs change from a 3/4 bed house to a 1-bed then they should move to enable best use of the housing stock available. If they want to benefit from the social housing they have to accept that others need to benefit from it too.

[blugnu]

doogz said:

blugnu said:

I don't know. I think she got housing benefit, although she worked well into her seventies. She didn't have the extra rooms as a luxury, she had them because she had once needed them and thus they were an integral part of her home.

It's really simple.

If she didn't own it, it's not hers.

I never said it was her house. I said it was her home.

[cwis]

blugnu said:

Well if they hadn't sold them, there would be more houses for the council to house people in, so it isn't really. The sale of the houses means there aren't enough houses, especially as I would imagine that it was the bigger houses in the nicer areas that sold most readily.

The sales were supposed to fund the building of more houses. Unfortunately the local councils spend the money on <Insert preposterous money wasting scheme here>.

[BoRED S2upid]

I agree with everything said on here but do councils have a selection of 1 and 2 bed properties to downsize these people to and I imagine upsize the ones still producing offspring? I imagine this has not been thought through, yes they should be downsized but in reality can the local council do this, do it efficiently and quickly?

[10 Pence Short]

You know what's scary?

There is a whole section of society out there who don't care about the state of the real economy. They don't care what Labour did or the banks or the job market.

They don't care, because the only thing that affects them is the size of the state handout. They have no ambition to do anything else, other than sponge off the state.

Everyone is going apoplectic about Qatada. I'd rather we spent our time trying to deport professional state scroungers (of course realising, that more than likely includes Qatada...).

[blugnu]

cwis said:

blugnu said:

Well if they hadn't sold them, there would be more houses for the council to house people in, so it isn't really. The sale of the houses means there aren't enough houses, especially as I would imagine that it was the bigger houses in the nicer areas that sold most readily.

The sales were supposed to fund the building of more houses. Unfortunately the local councils spend the money on <Insert preposterous money wasting scheme here>.

Wrong. As I recall from A level politics, the councils were not allowed to spend the money on anything, and it just sat there. This article suggests it found it's way back to central government to fund tax cuts.

http://blogs.mirror.co.uk/parliament/2012/04/a-few...

[SpeckledJim]

blugnu said:

TheHeretic said:

blugnu said:

So why did we sell all the houses?

The council didn't "buy her a house" She rented the house off them. I have no idea what benefits she got - she worked all her life but I don't think she had a private pension, although I think she still got something from my grandad's pension, but not much.

We should never have sold the houses off. All it did was create a shortage of affordable homes whilst making some people rich, creating a huge bubble in the economy which has since burst. I'd rather the state still had affordable homes to offer people, personally.

The sale of council houses is an entirely different issue.

Well if they hadn't sold them, there would be more houses for the council to house people in, so it isn't really. The sale of the houses means there aren't enough houses, especially as I would imagine that it was the bigger houses in the nicer areas that sold most readily.

But given that that ship has sailed, a family of four has 4 times more right to a 3-bed house than a little old lady on her own. And they will get 4 times the utility from it.

There is no Sentimentality Trump Card.

[Tumbler]

blugnu said:

doogz said:

blugnu said:

I don't know. I think she got housing benefit, although she worked well into her seventies. She didn't have the extra rooms as a luxury, she had them because she had once needed them and thus they were an integral part of her home.

It's really simple.

If she didn't own it, it's not hers.

I never said it was her house. I said it was her home.

And yet if she owned her home and could no longer afford the running costs, she would have to downsize. Also let' us remember those who scrimped and saved to buy their own house, will have to sell that house to pay for their care home, whereas your nanna, would get her care free.

[cwis]

blugnu said:

Wrong. As I recall from A level politics, the councils were not allowed to spend the money on anything, and it just sat there. This article suggests it found it's way back to central government to fund tax cuts.

http://blogs.mirror.co.uk/parliament/2012/04/a-few...

Hmm. Do you have any less biased sources to back this up?

"Scandalously, the Thatcher government took the receipts of the sales and put them in the Treasury coffers where they were used to pay for tax cuts for the rich and fund the soaring welfare costs of having more than 3million unemployed."

I thought they spend Scotlands oil money on that?

Edit - found a source with a slightly different bent:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_Buy

"Proceeds of the sales were paid to the local authorities, but they were restricted to spending the money to reduce their debt until it was cleared, rather than being able to spend it on building more homes."

So it looks like you were right that it was not used to fund more houses, but wrong about it funding tax cuts.

Have to say - it was a big mistake that they made, and sucessive government continued to make, too.

Edited by cwis on Wednesday 27th March 17:28

[10 Pence Short]

The link was from that well known politically impartial tome, The Mirror.

[cwis]

10 Pence Short said:

The link was from that well known politically impartial tome, The Mirror.

Just goes to show how impartial and accurate A level politics is too...

[Kermit power]

Blugnu, do you really not see the glaring flaw in your argument???

Setting aside for a moment the question of whether or not people should actually receive subsidised housing, a three bedroom house costs more to maintain than a 1 bedroom flat, regardless of who owns it.

By continuing to occupy a 3-bedroom house which she no longer needed, your Nan was depriving someone else of that property, thus forcing the council to either build another one or pay for one through private provision. The council's property maintenance bill increases, and the housing stock model becomes completely skewed as well, because they've had to create more larger properties than are needed at the expense of smaller ones.

It's easy to understand why the generation who lived through two world wars and a depression voted themselves the benefits they did, and to an extent it might even have been viable if people had carried on conveniently dying 2 years after they retired, but they didn't, and they also didn't rework the system to take this into account, and from there comes the problem. It's no longer just one extra generation requiring a house larger than they need, but often two generations. The system which was designed in lots of ways to see people paying in for 45+ years and then taking out for maybe 5 is having to try and pay out for 15+ years.

The biggest problem with your Nan's affordable housing is that it wasn't affordable! Yes, it was affordable to her in terms of a direct cost, but it wasn't affordable to society at a macro-economic level.

You say your Nan was a cleaner. You don't say what your granddad did, but if his wife worked as a cleaner, then I assume he also had a working class occupation? Think back to what their grandparents' lives would've been like, assuming they had similar jobs in the Victorian era. They would've considered themselves pretty lucky just to have a home of their own when they had kids. Many working class families would've had to share! The notion of having the luxury of extra bedrooms you didn't need would've been absolutely insane!

Nobody wants to return to the Victorian era, but surely you have to recognise that letting people stay in accommodation they can't afford and no longer need is a step too far? It doesn't matter whether the council had kept the housing stock, or whether it's in private hands, it's all just degrees of how much we can't afford it!

The biggest problem to my mind is the provision of housing benefit at absurd levels. There are people living in properties in Central London receiving £28k in housing benefit every year! It takes the entire income tax yield of four average taxpayers to meet that bill!

OK, so you might say it's unfair that people can't afford to live in the area they've grown up in if housing benefit is capped to a sensible level. That's sad, but why is it any more unfair than the taxpayers footing the bill not being able to live there because they can't afford the rent, due in no small part to the ever-increasing spiral of housing benefit levels.

What should've happened, in my opinion, is that housing benefit should've been capped at a rate equivalent to the rent on a council property of a similar size, to increase by no more than the rate of inflation, and to be paid based directly on the number of people in the household. Yes, private landlords could've demanded sky-high rents, but without housing benefit rates ballooning to meet those absurd demands, they wouldn't have been able to fill their properties, so would've been forced to rent out their properties at rates which tenants could afford, plus people like your Nan would've known from day one that they had a choice between budgeting over the 16+ years they had dependent children for the day when they'd need to pay more to stay in their home (and of course, their other costs would've decreased when their kids left home anyway), or been able to reconcile themselves to the fact that they would have to relocate to somewhere smaller.

Bottom line - the system is unaffordable, and has to change. It's sad for people like your Nan, but not half as sad as it will be if there's a disorderly collapse of the system.