In hoping the benefits cap may prove to be A Good Thing?

And if they all have to move to 'cheaper areas', then WHO IS GOING TO BE LEFT TO DO THOSE JOBS.

I don't know of ANYONE that can still eat and stay alive if they earn £45 before tax a day, yet has £50 to pay to travel TO work. So at some point, THERE WILL BE NO-ONE LEFT IN THE 'EXPENSIVE' AREAS TO DO THOSE FUCKING JOBS.

Never mind. You can all push your own fucking hospital beds, and cook your own food post-op, and pick up your own fucking rubbish.

'Sorry £35K is way too low to stop CB.For many people on that bracket it's the difference between heating and not.I'm no expert but I would have thought £60 K would be better.Far more likely to not be a serious impact on all families and they wouldn't need to pay to means test it.'. A quote from MrsHeffley on pg4.

So it's NOT OK to stop CB for people with a pre-tax income of £35k who work, but it IS OK to stop CB for people who get £26K on benefits???

Which is basically you saying that you can only have dc and live without being in poverty if you can get a job that pays you that amount. . Who the FUCK are you to decide who can and can't have a child or children?! Is the person who clears away your bin bags every week not allowed to have dc, or at least, not allowed to get CB for them? What about the person who pushes your bed from the maternity ward to the theatre when you have a c-section? Or the person who cooks your dinner for you to eat while you are convalescing? Or the person who serves you when you are buying your food?

"Of course you're making hundreds of pounds in p;rofit because at the end of it you'll end up with 200k worth of property you haven't paid a penny towards,"

I have an investment property on a buy-to-let mortgage. This required a 25% deposit. While the interest payments are tax deductible, the actual capital value of the loan is not. It has operated at a loss every year. The only year it made a mega loss was the one time we accepted HB tenants (they unfortunately did not choose to hand over their HB to us, never paid a penny of rent and it took us over six months to evict them).

I take a commercial risk. It has cost me a substantial amount. It is a complete myth that i will end up with a £200k property that I have not paid a penny for

Average house price 25 years ago, Q3 1986: £39,593.
Average house price, Q3 2011: £166,597
Difference: £127,004
Not bad for an investment on which somebody else makes your repayments.
Your rental income would have risen dramatically over the 25 years while your mortgage didn't, so you'll be looking at a sizeable monthly profit for at least half that period, on top of your growing asset.

thepeople - if after 25 years property prices have gone up, then i will have made the difference between the purchase and sale price - minus 25% capital gains tax (and of course other taxes such as income tax). In the meantime, we are just about breaking even.

how come you know so much about this then? are you a more successful landlord than us?

So where's my 200k property? I haven't done a thing but apparently you dont have to

peachy - sorry didn't explain very well. if someone in our area is working but doesn't have kids they are unlikely i think to qualify for HB and most certainly would be way down the LA housing list. we like renting to people who aren't on HB with kids as they don't have wild parties and keep the place clean. but people who are on HB with kids may qualify for LA accommodation and i think would be encouraged by the council to stay on till we had taken them through the full eviction process which takes forever. I know this might sound hartless, but like many people we work hard and this is our pension.

thepeople - as people have said on this thread previously landlords are not earning hundreds of pounds a week profit. 6 years ago, when we first started, we made a small loss each month after expenses, and that was assuming the place was fully rented and the tenants caused no damage. yes we make some profit now, but thats only because interest rates are at an all time low and we currently have good tenants. you could easily be £10k + out of pocket if you had a bad tennnt and that would take you 3 or 4 years to recoup assuming the interest rates were low.

Elli wrt to Agencies, usually it's their insurers that demand no HB (we have also been landlords in the past and that' what we were told)

There's a lot of talk about greedy landlords setting rents at whatever levels they want and rubbing their hands with glee as they rent their places out to HB tenants

If anyone is interested in hearing from my side of the fence (greedy landlord I guess) I can tell you that this doesn't actually happen because ...

1. the council already sets the max HB at the 30 percentile of all available rents on the market in the local area (this means the rent is less than the mean based on number of bedrooms if you look in the local paper).
2. The rents are set by market forces and the fact that they are expensive is because everything is getting expensive (inflation), and due to more people renting (population rising, mortgage criteria due to credit crunch), low housing stock (no one is building any houses), and that we are a small overcrowded island more densley populated than most countries.
3. And Landlords aren't mad on HB tenants as demonstarted by posters who are on HB on this thread stating that Landlords aren't interested in them once they know they are on HB.
4. If it was such a goldmine renting to HB you'd have loads of people jumping on the bandwagon and doing it. And then you'd have more competition, laws of supply and demand etc meaning rents begin to fall.
5. The fact that most agents have a blanket policy of 'no HB'. This means there must be good financial reasons for tuning HB business away which indicates no instant gold mine.

Yes, I am a Landlord but I don't actively target HB tenants because there just isn't that much money in it (but I don't discriminate either).

PS have you seen the price of petrol those greedy petrol station people are charging, and the price of bread that the greedy bakers are charging, and the price of a glass of wine those greedy pubs are charging these days.

Why without kids? I know several people with kids who have gone from private rented into LA housing, we would probably need to as DH hasn't been self employed long enough to satisfy the Agencies around here.

peachy - yes but a working couple not on HB, without kids, wouldn't have any chance of getting a LA property, so it wouldn't come into the equation. our current tenant went on HB part way through the contract and has been an excellent tenant for years .

And YY to deposit although if someone is already in a house wher ethe tenancy has ended it should not be such an issue- and our council does a deposit loan scheme for this reason.

Also, with the eviction thing- that's not just HB, any family wanting a LA property would have to do that, and whetehr you get HB is not factored into LA tenancy eligibility.

I agree with all those points.

The cases that sadden me really are the ones I have seen where a tenant has been excellent for a long time, become redundant, and the LL has had to evict them for mortgage / insurance reasons. A good reliable tenant doesn't have a personality transplant with their P45, and will use their redundancy money to pay rent if they were bothering before; it's those cases that seem pointless IYSWIM.

And also no HB can prevent someone even claiming just a (say) £20 top up from applying, which is different 9and a working person then) to someone waiting 18 weeks for a whole rent claim IYSWIM.

the other issue with HB tenants that needs to be addressed - which has been mentioned on here - is that the council encourages the tenant to go through the whole eviction process or they claim they are intentionally homeless and won't rehouse them. so to get a tenant evicted, who is either damaging the property or not paying rent, would take forever. And if they are on HB its likely it would take years to get the money back - assuming you got it at all which is unlikely.

I can see that problem, motherofallhangovers, and it's one that should be addressed at admin level. My landlord is a company - it lets the properties pending renovation to tenants on benefits - but, crucially, the agents have made themselves experts on the system. I asked what would happen if my claim was slow to be processed and they said they'd deal with it

I like your points above, Peachy, though the deposit is a major barrier for most poor people. My mother paid my deposit and the agency accepted the month-in-hand in instalments; I paid it over 18 months!

Along with the tax rebate, the govt could make the upfront payments - and recoup unreturned deposits from tenants' previous landlords. If a tenant loses their deposit due to damage, govt could deduct instalments from the recipient's other benefits.

The people to get a better system enacted are the owners. As people have said, this government listens to them; not the tenants.

I've even had to refuse a couple of friends who I'd love to rent the flat to. There's just no way I could afford to cover the mortgage all that time.

I have heard people say the same where I live - either landlords or people being turned down for tenancies being told this by landlords. You can understand landlords not wanting to wait six months or more to receive any rent.

I'm a LL and I refuse to take HB as our council is known to take months to process the claim and make the first payment (18 in my friend's case! She was the tenant, they kept losing her paperwork) and I simply can't afford to pay the mortgage in the meantime, especially as it's not guaranteed until they've processed it.

We were landlords once, for a short time.

Dh said he had a 'feeling' drove to the house and there was the kitchen in the garden!

Luckily we managed to get the tenant to buy the house so did not need to follow through, but we had all the documents made up ready to start big time proceedings!

OTOH my next net stop now is carpetright so we can replace the one upstairs at no cost to the lovely LL.

So we know it from both sides.

I always though with tenancies the carrot and stick appraoch would be easiest.

A tax rebate for LLs prepared to offer their proerties to someone on HB.

A sensible LL would focus on references, and people on HB can still be asked for a deposit.

At least it would be entirely down to the LL- no penalising if you refused to take part BUT a move in the right direction.

Of course it shouldn't- it works both ways in anything. I would say that some tenants are forced to get the landlord to drag them through the court at the request of the council housing departments, or they are seen as intentionally homeless and wont be helped.

The entire system, including the intentional homelessness clause, bad tenants requiring courts orders/costs etc, and bad landlords needs over hauling, without doubt. It should be a criminal offence to wreck a property not belonging to you, but it should also be punishable to leave a family in sub standard conditions. The council departments around housing, eg housing departments, environmental health etc need to all work hand in hand rather than against each other as well.

20 -sorry to hear about your situation.

the other side of the coin is that a tenant can live in your house for several months, not paying any rent and causing thousands of pounds worth of damage, whilst you take them to court. And when eventually the court finds in your favour you may have to employ someone to physically go round and evict them. You may (most probably) get no compensation for the damage or loss of rent other than the deposit - so you could easily be £10k plus out of pocket.

i agree there are some appalling landlords out there from the threads i read. But whatever extra legislation is put in place should not penalise the good ones - or people might find that these landlords all sell up. which is what we would do