Lifetime Social Housing Tenancies

I know your not asking me . But out of interest how much is your mortgage

And here we are with the complete ignorance

No. Like many many many people who live in HA I paid full rent.

The job I had and in fact the job DP had. Owning our home has given us the ability for dp to start his own business.

We were working harder when we lived in the HA

As I said very few people will downsize to something that will cost them more money each month when they don’t have to legally

Would you honestly downsize ( if you didn’t have to ) something that would cost you a lot more each month and even more money in moving if you absolutely didn’t have to do this

Nope. I managed to get my deposit because me and dp got made redundant at the same time

Id have still been living in my HA if that hadn't happened

None of this works.

Short term let's are vital to some areas where tourism makes up a huge percentage of their economy. Locals don't only need housing, they also need jobs. We need to encourage more people to holiday in the UK and spend their holiday budget here. So many businesses rely on this. I accept Airbnbs etc should be limited in some areas but just looking at contractors as a limiting factor is economic suicide for some areas.

You can't cap home ownership to one per person if you want a private rental market. We factually need a private rental market otherwise this would be catastrophic for the country. Also 10% of an 'average' is crazy. Landlords need to be able to cover their costs otherwise nobody would do it. Look at the private rental market and how rents have skyrocketed over the past few years and you will see what happens when landlords pull out of the market.

Homes that are empty will already fall victim to 200% or even 300% council tax. 3 months isn't long enough though for some houses to be renovated and added back to the housing stock. We need people desperately to do this as there is currently a huge shortage of housing.

Developers often aren't making a great deal of profit at the moment. If you look in lots of areas, most developers are pulling out of developments because they are no longer economically viable. There are also developers renegotiating with councils up and down the country as to the percentage of SH that should be included in a development as it isn't worth their whole risking a lot of capital into a project that could easily make a loss. This is something you seem to have ignored completely. We need more house building but this has to be incentivised. Nobody is going to want to do this for free when you can put a load of money in the bank and get 5% on it each year without any risk whatsoever.

This is nonsense. Absolute nonsense. Private rents can't just miraculously come down to match subsidised social rents.

So many people seem to have absolutely no grasp of economics and the financial factors that drive rental prices. It's not just supply and demand but also the cost of capital. Many private landlords have interest only mortgage and are still making a loss now that interest rates have sky rocketed. This shows how important the cost of capital is. The average house price is now £285k. It will be costing the landlord £14k just to own the property either through interest payments or opportunity cost of having equity tied up on property and not being invested elsewhere. This doesn't include the cost of actually being a landlord in terms of safety checks, lettings agent fees, insurance, maintenance costs etc. The landlord will also be taxed on the rent paid by a tenant and can no longer offset mortgage payments against this. This is a key revenue source for the government and something you would need to somehow recover elsewhere if all housing was SH.

Social Housing providers meanwhile often have access to limited amounts of extremely cheap capital or already own the property they rent out. They rarely pay market price for a property and deals where they are given land by the state or have a percentage of homes on a private development are common (subsidised of course by everyone else buying a home on that development). They don't need to worry about making their money work for them like the rest of us would need to if we were landlords or like private companies do. This is because the state doesn't look at the opportunity cost of having money tied up in property. The reality is that the country is losing money if they are getting a menial rent for a property when they could move that money elsewhere and get a better return which could be used to contribute towards the spiralling debt many councils face.

Basically you are comparing apples and pears and not taking account of the obvious, very real constraints that exist that means that we all can't live in SH and actually it can't be scaled easily at all. There simply isn't that much cheap capital available to the government anymore (or anybody) and developers can't afford to build houses and give a higher percentage (or even the same percentage) to SH if they aren't making a profit. Building materials, land and skilled labour costs have spiralled recently. You can't just pretend that all of this isn't relevant and wish that SH rents were somehow realistic. They aren't.

@RowsOfFlowers is this thread because you feel people with mortgages should get help from the government like some renters do ?

And you don't think people in social housing should get life time tenancy because people with mortgages struggle?

My point is there used to be help to encourage people to move from a 3 -4 bed to a 1bed and free up the bigger properties

now they don’t and they are often more expensive so why would anyone bother

plus the pensioners aren’t affected by the room tax either so again there is no incentive for them to downsize

I can tell you now, I worked harder when I was in my HA house than now I own my own home.

Bye then 👏🏻

So no one would bother to make improvements to their home or treat it as theirs because they knew they’d be moved on? That would create ghettos

The problem is people aren’t going to think well I won’t take this opportunity to get a secure or keep a secure tenancy for myself so that a person or a family I don’t even know should have it instead

and outside of London / South East it’s not that hard to get social housing

But I do think that there should be some way of helping & encouraging m people to downsize though if they want to or have to
at the moment where I live a 3 bed council house is around 90 -125 a week
a HA 1 bed flat can be anything from 100 -180’a week depending on if it’s a new build and a house can be around 400 - 900 a month depending on when it was built

then there is the cost of moving and possibly redecorating & new carpets
So why would you even consider moving when it’s you f yo cost you £££££ and you don’t have to move

there used to be a scheme that if you downsized the council / HA would pay moving cost and give you money to move I think it was like 2k but I don’t think they do this anymore so people don’t bother to downsize - why would they if it’s going to cost them more money and potentially cost them more in rent

if you take over 55 properties they often include heating and water so the while the rent can be cheap at around 100 a week but with the heating and rent it can be 160. -180 a week

UC / HB don’t include heating and water charges with rent so someone who is on a fixed amount say a pension or pension credit can immediately be 60 -80 a week worse off due to this rather staying in the original property where they can decide to put the heating on

Some of the comments on this thread such as where the nephew inherits a tenancy is why people like me will minimise the tax they pay and may even chose to leave the country.

There’s going to be trouble in the autumn when they try to tax those already supporting most of the country. People will only put up with so much.

I don’t agree with building great swathes of social housing unless it is 100% self funding. It’s just more asking the taxpayer to stump up. I would rather people be able to buy their own and take responsibilities upkeep. I don’t think that’s been mentioned on this thread, the upkeep of property. It’s now very very expensive. The country has moved rapidly to a dependency on the state by way too many people.