I get it that this is likely to be unpopular but hear me out; we have a social housing and homelessness crisis (constantly, but hey ho), right? But when someone makes it into social housing, be it council or housing association, they seem to stick there for life no matter their change in circumstances. I get the idea that people who can't afford to rent or buy need affordable properties but 20 years on down the line when they're married, with grown up kids, 2 BMW's out front, earning a combined £80k, maybe they could be paying private rates instead of taking up social housing? Is there a sensible and valid reason why social housing can't be annually reassessed in conjunction with the HMRC to free some of it up?
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I’m absolutely fine with someone staying there long term. The original aim was to create communities that mix the doctor with the teacher with the bin man and with the labourer. And when people are forced to move away from their community it creates problems that end up costing us money as they lose their support network.
What we have in this country is an issue with the lack of availability of social housing. One Mrs Thatcher was the architect for that and no government since has addressed it (often making the problem worse on the altar of ‘social mobility’).
You should post this in a politics sub.
Eta no idea why this is being downvoted, it’s blatantly a politics question and that’s an embargoed topic on this sub, it would be more appropriate in a politics sub.
why should they be paying private rents instead of more social housing being built? Sounds like envy to me.
I feel like an unintentional knock on effect of this would be people avoiding work/earning a certain amount of money in order to be able to keep their house.
Even if they moved around people there still wouldn’t be enough social housing.
So your just adding more work, more costs and stress for those in social housing and the inevitable public backlash all to improve things by a tiny amount.
On top of this people create a life in the area and street they life so it gets very complex. You have to take into account schools, jobs, doctors, dentists, family, etc.
If there was spare social housing then it would make a lot more sense as you have room to move people around.
I won’t argue the complexities of how we’d implement a system like you suggest, but nothing pisses me off more than seeing people in social housing with their fancy BMW’s etc. If you can afford a car over like 3k, you do NOT need to be in a house that I pay for. If you are in social housing and care more about your image than getting out of your financial situation that you sign up to pay 200 a month for a car – again with mine and other taxpayer money, then someone needs to step in and ask them what the fuck is going on.
Edit: People downvoting, genuine question here. Am I paying for your Audi, or do you just like paying for other peoples Audi’s?
Because that’s how you get ghettoes where nobody ever does well.
Council housing doesn’t come one flat at a time. It was built in bulk. If you run people out of their homes for being successful, you’ll do two things:
1) discourage work and success.
2) remove all the hard working successful people from the entire area.
There was a time when council housing was dominated by criminals and wasters. Your idea would bring those dark days back.
I’ve lived in council housing in London my entire life and can tell you probably half the people abuse it in some way. A ton just outright refuse to work in any way. The other half are genuinely lovely and deserve social housing. My next door home is a huge 4 bed council and there’s only 1 person that (occasionally) lives there.
my biggest issue is the right to buy. They’ll buy it at a massive discount and flip it as soon as they’re allowed and off they go with a wedge of cash in their pockets. I think that the difference to what they paid and what they sold for should be paid back to the council.
I support the general vibe but you don’t want to discourage people from improving their own lot because they would lose access to social housing. I would support more of a sliding scale so that your rent increases with earnings above a certain figure, eventually that figure would be above the market rate which would push people to find a property privately, revenues generated could be reinvested into more social housing or paying the bill for those worse off. That way you don’t have weird cutoffs or have to keep adjusting figures for different inflation metrics.
That just creates a lot of instability – so your circumstances have changed, now you have to up and leave the house that you managed to make a home? If it works the way you suggest, people will be constantly moving and never be able to settle anywhere, form social circles and integrate into their areas. (It’s unlikely as it just creates an incentive to not to better to retain some stability).
A better solution would be to just build more housing. Government after government after government promises to build more housing, but they never quite reach the target.
Homelessness is up because there aren’t enough homes for everyone. Simply moving people around doesn’t create more homes – it simply shifts to the problem somewhere else. Fix the root cause (not enough homes) and the symptoms will be taken care of – fix the symptoms and you still have the same root problem that’s not fixed.
Every single benefit should just be means tested. If your circumstances change, your state entitlement should change.
How about just building more?
It’s likely to be very popular, council houses provided an alternative to private renting, with no private renting (or greatly reduced requirement for it), there wouldn’t be a place for private/corporate landlords, if corporates weren’t buying up the housing stock… Fill in the blanks from here.
It’ll be unpopular with people planning on downsizing to pay for retirement, but popular with anyone private renting.
I don’t think it should be guaranteed for life, and optional to move, for example if you have a family in a 3 bed house and the kids get to a certain age, that house should go to another family. We shouldn’t have couples individuals living alone in multiple bed houses when we have single mothers leaving horrible situations living in bed and breakfasts for months/years
I gave mine up when it was no longer needed, as it was the right thing to do. It happens sometimes.
I’m not on board with pensioners being exempt from the bedroom tax. Yes ideally we’d build enough council housing for everyone, but while families of 4 are allocated “temporary” 1 room bedsits for years it doesn’t make sense that a single elderly person gets to stay in their 5 bed council house, especially at no extra cost. Services like cheap council housing should be for those in need first
Stick it on the list of everything that is wrong with this country.
So you think people don’t deserve housing where they can feel secure (council won’t kick you out unless you dont pay, whether private you’re literally on the mercy of the landlord randomly deciding to sell or give the house to their family) if they make a certain amount? Doesn’t seem fair or right to me at all.
To me personally, the biggest advantage of social housing isn’t the cheaper rent, its the security.
Tories tried to do this years ago. It was deeply unpopular at the time. Pretty sure those opposed proved it wouldn’t do anything but increase housing issues.
Wasn’t that the whole idea.. you’d have a doctor living next to a bin man
That would be a disincentive to working hard and earning more. If you’re going to be made to leave your home, you may decide to deliberately stay on a low income.
Also, the demand is different in different areas of the UK.
I would personally prefer just building more social housing.
Social housing doesn’t have to be an “ambulance” service that exists only for people in poverty. The idea that it should be in something that’s been pushed since the 1980s when the government basically started gutting social housing in favour of privatisation but it’s not a given and IMO has caused far more problems than it’s solved.
By and large I’m not really comfortable with making peoples homes any more insecure than they have to be. Being able to say with confidence that in five years time you can still be living where you live now helps with so many other factors in life like planning employment, schooling etc.
Making social housing more insecure and means tested than it already is also risks creating a poverty trap. “Don’t get a job or we kick you out of your house” is not a position we want to put people in.
I’m against this, with private housing being the way that it is.
Having a stable home that cannot be taken away from you on someone else’s whim, that you can decorate to your own taste, is huge. Kicking people out of their secure housing to live at the mercy of a private landlord would be like a punishment for improving their situation.
As a child who moved multiple times because of crappy landlords, until we got into a council house, if I was an adult in social housing the value of having a house I could stay in for life would be worth more to me than money. I’d be very tempted to keep my income under a level that meant I could keep my home.
I think it’d be much better to just add council housing into a ‘council house tax’ that is paid through income tax.
Earn only £1000/month? Tax could be as low as £50/month to live there.
Earn £5000/month? Tax rate could be as high enough such that means your council house costs more than the private sector (incentivising you to leave)
In terms of social housing, I think the housing minister should be attending property auctions and buying houses that way. Also, when someone has utilised the right to buy and then decide to sell , the council should have the right to buy it back before its put on the market.
I understand why you posted this.
But the trouble is the law of unintended consequences. Do we really want to discourage people from seeking work, promotions and otherwise improving their lives? That’s how you create sink estates.
We already see this to some extent in another area – the savings cap for benefits claimants. If you are financially responsible and save £6000 – including from non-benefits sources – then they start cutting your benefits. At £16k, means tested benefits stop altogether. So people will spend to keep it under that. But £6000 isn’t a lot – it’s the sort of sum that is easily wiped out in one or two emergencies – so what might otherwise have been a manageable thing if they were allowed to save is an absolute crisis that becomes the start of a debt spiral.
Policies that discourage poor people from what is considered responsible for the middle classes are rarely a good idea.
A start would be taking back some private stock into council ownership particular owned by large landlords who bought it for nothing and are now ripping off the state with housing benefits.
Singapore has solved this problem via the Constitution of massive government owned apartment complexes that are heavily regulated. We should just do what they do. I’m sure some crony can make a dime and have it still be effective.
So what, your idea is to chuck people back out of secure affordable housing so they can go back to paying unaffordable rents, be pushed back into poverty and ultimately join the social housing queue at the back again? I mean, do you see any potential downsides to that?
It’s a similar theory to restricting access to food banks according to BMI. Healthy weight or overweight people have to be starved skinny enough before they can receive assistance. Once they’ve achieved a healthy weight they’re back out on their own until they lose enough weight to be eligible again?
I think one good reason not to do it is that you would get a sort of social cycling effect – where people would destabilize after being moved out of council housing, fall back below the threshold, do a little better upon moving back to council housing, get moved out, destabilize again. It would also fully blight housing estates if the only people who could live in them were the people in the worst circumstances.
I think that it would probably make more sense to raise the rent that people pay in line with their income, but what we actually need to do is just build more council houses. Everything else is balancing a basic failure of government on the backs of the less advantaged.
They are in Northumberland, band 3 applicants who have no real housing need are being cancelled which means seven thousand straight off the list so they can concentrate on the needy.
The whole system needs reform from the ground up.
1) The claims need to be reviewed every 5/10 years. You were in dire circumstances in 1995 but that was 30 years ago now, anything changed since then?
2) Make it easier to get rid of problem tenants. If you can’t act like a civilised person in your free/heavily subsidised house then off you go. You had your chance and you blew it.
3) End being able to pass it down (once), like it’s a piece of family furniture.
4) No social housing for those who have been here in the country less than 20 years of full time tax contributions under your belt. It’s insane how much of our social housing stock is taken up by people who have never (and lets be honest will never) be net contributors.
Just limit it to UK citizens? The same with housing benefit. That would instantly reduce the waiting lists.
Why should the tax payer help people who can’t afford to live here to do exactly that?
This is why the bedroom tax was a good idea. It helped create an incentive to reallocate more efficiently. I would make it even stricter tbh!
There’s a startling lack of empathy in this thread. Yes, some people might abuse social housing, but the vast majority do not. I grew up in council housing with a single Mum whose salary meant we very much needed it. My brother and I are now out of the house but she still makes a very low amount in the charity sector (where she helps a lot of people!) and definitely cannot afford private rates. But more importantly, that house is her home. She’s lived there 30 years and loves her neighbors and community. Making her move out because of the amount of bedrooms etc seems unconscionable to me, especially when, even if she received another council flat/house it would likely be in a whole new area where she knows nobody. More social housing is the solution to this problem, as well as a refurb of the existing stock that is frankly in appalling condition and laying empty.
With council houses you have to decorate it yourself. Anything that’s not structural, electrical, plumbing, windows etc is your own responsibility. There’s a misconception that people think that everything is just given to council tenants for free.
I grew up my whole life until I moved out at 27, in a council house. When we first moved in over 25 years ago, there literally wasn’t even a fitted kitchen. There were no carpets and the previous tenant smoked so every surface was covered in nicotine. So my parents over the years have spent a lot to make the place habitable.
Its given my childhood and my parents a stable place to live without having to worry about having to leave. They still wouldn’t be able to afford to rent a house privately, even more so today than 25 years ago.
It would be ridiculous to force them out just because their children have moved out, and after a quarter of a century of spending thousands on improving the property.
We shouldn’t be penalising existing council tenants who have paid their rent for so long – we should be building much more council housing (not housing association). Its successive government’s faults that new council houses haven’t been built in the last 40 years, not the fault of council tenants.
I used to work in social housing and the goal was always to find someone a long term solution because creating communities is a net good for social housing.
Very few people will make it to the £80k combined income mark. But having stable housing is good for individuals not only to gain consistent employment but also for their mental health. It allows them to make improvements to their own lives and then to their homes, taking pride in their qccomdation whether that’s a flat or a house. Consistent housing is also good for children with increased house moves contributing to school struggles.
Having a stable community also helps to integrate new neighbours. Having unstable housing removes this community and makes people care less about their accommodations, this leads to vandalism, deterioration of properties, fly tipping etc.
Not to mention the cost of moving people in and out on the local authority. This cost isn’t nothing, there are housing officers, neighbourhood officers, maintenance workers etc. The paperwork is processed and logged and stored. Overall this can be quite cheap when planned in advance because it’s business as usual. But it adds up when you have a LOT of moves. You’d also need a whole new team to deal with this, in a city you’d probably need 4-5 officers, a managing team, vehicles. You’re looking at thousands of pounds to save no money at all because the rent is the rent, regardless of who lives there. (Worth nothing housing is self funded by rent in the area, not the government)
Is it worth the knock on effects of mental health issues, school moves, job changes etc and the disruption to the neighbourhood? Nope. It’s not. Would it save the housing department any money? No. And to send people where? To private landlords who can then charge whatever they like and have the public purse top it up with housing benefits because they are considerably less affordable than social housing.
The entire issue is that councils must sell under right to buy but they don’t receive this money, it goes to central government and they then had to request money to build or buy replacements. This means house stock slowly dwindles as does any money to make improvements. If councils had the money. They could build, buy and replace providing affordable, stable, housing for a wider group of people.
Perhaps it’s better to campaign for better rents in the private sector instead of thinking others who have worked hard but still in council housing should be rewarded with struggle.
Next, people who earn over 50k should pay for medical treatment instead of using the NHS.
Such a bitter mentality.
People will try anything but the obvious answer: make it easier to build more houses. Both private and public.
Stop moving deck chairs while the Titanic is sinking.
On a related note how does one anonymously report a council tenant who is letting out their council flat?