Council housing in the seventies

[rattymol]

In the seventies one third of people in Britain lived in a council house. Council houses were built because of the terrible way private landlords behaved and the poor standard of housing many people lived in. We are returning to those days
4.5 million households privately rent with 23% of that housing deemed not to meet the decent homes standard. We need council housing again.

I can see what you are saying, but given that tenants have to have a very low income in order to get the tenancy in the first place, I can't imagine that many would have a big enough change in circumstances to be able to afford to buy it for quite a number of years, even if they want to, and meanwhile the building costs are being recouped.

Also, I don't know if its the same in all areas, but the discounts are now rather less than they were in the 80s/90s.

This isn't true. Our HA prioritise working applicants (and carers/disabled obviously) and do a full income/outgoings check. When we qualified for ours we had a combined income of approx 48k at the time.

Tenants don’t necessarily have to be low income to get housing everywhere.

And certainly in times gone by when there was more stock it wasn’t a pre-requisite. In fact where my grandparents lived was all basically allocated to people who’d got jobs in a new build big factory and office and were moving locally.

If there’s enough of it there doesn’t need to be an income bar. People with “normal” levels of income can live there.

And discounts on buying varied on how long you’d lived there. You could easily have clauses that people couldn’t by for however long it took to cover costs.
I always remember my grandparents neighbour commenting that they must have got a much better discount than her because they’d lived there longer so that can also come into play - if people want to buy when they are newer they’d cost a chunk more.

I must admit I don't know what the discounts are. I suppose if somebody has to be there a long time before they are eligible to buy then it might work.

i know one of the amended right to buys that my previous tenant had was that you had to be resident for something like 5 years to be able to buy and 8 for any kind of discount and then the discount was incremental. They had to move from their place to mine for adaptations which was a terrible shame.

In principle I completely agree. This would lead to more diversity in the population of an area - as in people working in different jobs and being invested in the well being of that community as they have a stake in it for life. Housing the 'neediest' and excluding anyone earning over a certain amount leads to ghettos.

The trouble is those needy people need housing immediately. To operate in that ideal way requires a lot more housing.

We moved Into our brand new council house in 1980 in a new town in Scotland. In order to get one of those new builds you had to be a working family as it was classed as "high amenity" there were other areas of town where there wasn't the same restrictions.
Our street was a mixture of 2,3 and 4 bed family homes, mixed in with 1 bed pensioner bungalows. Most of the families were traditional dad worked mum stayed at home, but there were exceptions, we had a single mum 3 doors away who worked as a nurse, a multigenerational Pakistani family opposite. A proper community.

99% of those homes were bought in right to buy and many of the bungalows are owned by young single people or couples and a lot of the 2 beds have been converted to 3 beds as they had huge bedrooms.

In the town there are many areas similar where all the "good" bits were snapped up, and there are "bad areas" where the houses weren't bought and all sense of community has been lost.

There are a fair number of people in rentals, both social and private, who would be in a position to buy if they could get a mortgage. There should be a specific mortgage scheme available to people in that situation where they don't need a deposit upfront (a deposit could be accounted for in the monthly repayments) and the affordability checks take their rental record into account. It's madness that banks will look at someone who has paid £1400 a month rent every month without fail for 10+ years and decide they can't afford an £800 a month mortgage.

Private firms used to offer 100% mortgages. There were high rates of default.

There is in a way , if you use RTB or RTA then the discount is your deposit so many people can only buy if it's their HA or council property but people choose to ignore that.

@NewNovember , what are you meaning?

I mean there is a system where people on lower incomes can get a mortgage with no deposit by using the discount in lieu of the deposit. The pp said such a scheme should exist and it does in a way.

Brought up in a council house , 3 bed , solid . Big garden front and back , semi detached , lovely friendly area .
Good school nearby , shopping area within 15 minutes walking distance, Dr's dentist , everything you needed on your doorstep.
I should imagine very few on them are now council / social housing.

When I was growing up around 80% of people in my town of lived in council houses. The houses were nice, newly built in the 1950s and roomy with gardens. More or less anyone who wanted it could access a council house. There was absolutely no stigma attached to living in one.
Then in the 80s council houses started being sold off and they were never replaced.
I agree we need many more council houses.

Yes, we've already returned to slum landlords. There was a programme on recently where a woman who lived in a 3 bed council house in the past revisited it and it had been turned onto 6 homes by a slum landlord. Her old kitchen was now someone's entire home, same with the bathroom etc. Housing benefit is now going straight into the hands of slum landlords, instead of going to councils for council homes so they can reinvest.

No we shouldn't time limit them. That just stigmatises people who live in them. And what are people supposed to do after two years?
The whole point of council housing is that they provide security. They are a home not a stop gap. We can as a society afford it if we prioritise it.

The 2 year thing gets trotted out on here a lot and is ridiculous. I'm not sure where I'd find the deposit to private rent and if I did and could find a private ll to take me on the rent would be heavily subsidised by UC

My rents just gone up to a little over £100 a week but it was around 95 a week for the last 6 years for a 3 bed house, not all of us live in expensive areas

We should vastly expand the supply of council housing. Its the only realistic was to fix the housing crisis. It is entirely possible for the government to do this. Look at what was achieved after WW2 when the country was on its knees. The only things stopping us are a Tory government which wants every rising house prices to appease its core voters, and a Labour party too scared of being seen as left wing

This, I would immediately give my vote to a party with mass council housing build as their priority. The money tree was rattled well enough with covid dodgy deals.

Council houses should never have been allowed to be sold off . But I don't blame the people who did buy them , what an opportunity especially in quaint country towns and villages. They were sold off as a lot of them needed repairs and modernisation and done were structurally unfit such as concrete houses .

Lots of council housing got sold to HA and many don’t have the RTB, but lots of older stock seems to be being sold.
homes should still be for life as thats the whole point of social/ council housing to take away that , means its not what its for.
RTB is also fine as long as money is used to build further homes which it wasn’t in the past, older homes being sold means councils or HA can build newer , cheaper to run/ maintain houses .