Breaking News! Poor people not to be trusted with money

[sfp]

LHRFlightman said:

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Why should tax payers fund private landlords profits?

What makes them different from any other contractor who supplies goods/services to the local authority? Or do you feel taxpayers shouldn't pay for ANY services supplied by private sector firms and from which they profit?

I find that a bit odd.

[uuf361]

rover 623gsi said:

uuf361 said:

I've never really understood the 'full rent' term when used for council housing - and would be genuinely interested if someone could explain.

As an example, a former member of our team (combined income approaching £50K, plus one child aged 18) were living in a 2 bed EOT house in a nice area and said they were paying full rent of £80/week. My confusion was that the same houses (i.e. her neighbours in an identical house next door being rented on the open market) were paying £900/month.....

This may not be the case everywhere of course, but I was perplexed as to why they thought less than half the open market rent was full rent (unless this is the maximum the council is allowed to charge ?), and I can't understand why the council wouldn't be allowed to charge the market rate.

Paying full rent just means they are not receiving any HB. For quite a long time social housing rents have been set at around 60% of the open market rate – there is a fairly complicated formula which councils and housing associations follow to enable them to reach that target while allowing for local and regional variations. The Coalition introduced two rent levels ‘social rent’ – still at 60% or open market rate - and ‘affordable rent’ – set at 80% of open market rate.

Social housing providers are now able to offer their properties at ‘affordable rent’. The don’t have to, but the reality is that nearly all providers are now only offering new tenancies at affordable rent (more income for them, so why not?). This, of course, is putting an upward pressure on HB.

...

an aside to this is that as private rent levels have shot up the rents in the public sector have not been able to keep up because while there is a target of 60% of open market value we are only allowed to increase the annual rent by a maximum of RPI + 0.5% + £2 per week.

Cheers, that makes sense