High joint income and in social housing with no plans to buy. Celebrate or selfish?

[SocialHousedNHappy]

I’ve been wondering about for some time and completely understand the dire and desperate situation that many people and families find themselves in. But… I hate the way that social housing is seen as only for the most desperate, when it was introduced as a housing option for all.

My household brings in a healthy income and we pay less than 10% to our monthly rent. This means we get enjoy a modest lifestyle and put some money aside for adult DC for when they’re older - they can then choose to buy whatever they fancy, car, house deposit, uni, whatever as will be their choice.

I hate that people seem to think that I should give up my secure tenancy and move into private rent. Looking on rightmove, a comparable house would be around 3x what I’m currently paying in rent, and to be honest, I wouldn’t move to private rented ever again. But why do people react as thought I’m doing something wrong, in the same way as they think of benefit cheats? I think the govt should be put under pressure to build more social housing - proper social housing, rather than the current situation where people are pit against each other and blaming each other for what is clearly a government failing.

I don’t want to sound like I’m gloating, because I’m not, but I don’t see why I should feel bad and not celebrate the life and comfort that my social housing has allowed me to enjoy.

I’m genuinely interested to hear if anyone agrees and feels the same.

If you like your house and it's a good price why would you move.

Nonsense. Not all landlords are greedy. Myself and DH are landlords but not by choice. The one bedroom flat we used to live in in London won't sell thanks to interest rates and COL, so we have to rent it out. The rent is astronomical, ridiculous really, and yet it only covers the mortgage each month. So yes, it is market rent.

We would happily have let go of the flat and made no money on it after 7 years just to be rid of it, but people can't get mortgages and so very little is selling.

But why market value, necessarily? Why not to cover the costs of the property? They aren't the same thing.

I think in a working system that would be the point, to take living accommodations out of the market where the question is not, how much does this actually cost, but how much can we get away with charging? Which ultimately goes to benefit landlords and banks.

It would require more social housing though and a different way of financing new builds.

Fwiw I do think future tenancies should have an income ceiling. Precisely because of the limit of properties available. All council owned property should be used to its fullest.

However I think anyone saying that morally you should move out, probably wouldn't do that if they were in the same situation because it's still someone's home and the alternative is much less secure in practice. And therein lies the issue.

Legally OP has done nothing wrong. Social housing is a thorny topic because the government has failed to manage it properly. It has gone from general needs housing to high priority only.

Previous governments have tried to remove life long tenancies but have been unsuccessful because when they put a 5 year review in tenants did not improve their circumstances, who would if it meant losing your home and unless you breech the terms of your contract you cannot be removed from your home.

More recently social rents have been replaced with affordable rents, succession rights have been removed and a bedroom tax created to charge for rooms surplus to requirements and still people refuse to give up their secure tenancies. Why, simply because it is not just a house but what some people on this thread seem to understand a home.

The problem is a combination of not enough housing being built, high rents/mortgages, the change to family dynamics e.g. more single headed households and people wanting a better work/life balance.

As many have stated, unless you could comfortably afford to buy a new home, as the rules stand you would be a fool to give up a secure tenancy. Instead I suggest OP keeps quiet in real life about her housing situation.

No because there is no 'checking system' for the income of people or families living in social housing.

So, if let's just say OP was housed in a 2 bed flat when she was homeless and had tiny children, fifteen years later, if she's done well for herself, has a great job and now a partner also with a good income, plus one of the kids has left home and the other one is also working part time, that would be three incomes coming in. As social housing rents are below the level of 'open market rent' (and rightly so), then OP and her family would be comparatively very well off compared to say, the same family living in a house with a mortgage or the same family living in a rented flat.

However, there is no facility for checking or updating or reviewing lifelong social housing tenancies. There are well known cases of rich and famous people and also MPs living in social housing.

Social Housing is not 'tax payer subsidised' - it is self-funding - in fact profits from social housing feed back into local authority coffers, so social housing is in fact funding tax payers

You are wrong. Social housing is not subsidised by anyone. It pays for itself. The fact that people in this country are so deluded about how social housing works is worrisome as it creates hostility and hate.

Housing associations make huge profits and have fat cat salary bosses. Council property values underwrite wealth for each local authority.

How about everyone should be entitled to a decent, safe, affordable home on a long term basis? That's what we all used to fight for and that is something that absolutely can be achieved.

Instead, bitter and twisted people who have got their facts wrong would rather fight to strip people of their homes? There's a sickness of hatred in this country.

Dealing with social housing tenancy fraud would be a better matter for people to worry about.

The issue is housing insecurity.

There's a massive problem if people who are on moderate to relatively high incomes have housing insecurity because it's so difficult to get a secure long term rental or too expensive to buy.

And that's compounded by the sheer demand and lack of supply of social housing for those on low income.

There wasn't this problem to this degree even ten years ago. Ten years ago it was still difficult to buy but you could get a rental even if you couldn't get a long tenancy. Now even getting a rental is extremely difficult for a lot of people, with so many chasing properties.

More social housing for the elderly would be a good idea. A financial incentive offered to move from 3 and 4 bedroom homes into smaller single storey bungalow-type homes with bathrooms, doorways etc adapted to older needs. As people get older, they can't easily manage stairs and the maintenance of gardens etc. People will say 'but why should the older tenants have to move, it's their home', but why should younger families, most of whom are working people, have to sit on the housing list for years with little realistic hope of being offered anything?

Redistributing/renovating existing housing makes infinitely more sense than destroying more greenfield land by building new houses. There needs to be strong incentives for people to downsize (perhaps some kind of IHT relief) as well as mandatory redistribution of social housing. We will never reach a place where everyone has exactly what they want but that’s a fantasy isn’t it? Nowhere has achieved that.

I agree with this point. Under-occupancy needs to be rigorously addressed and it hasn't been yet.

Of course it's distressing for a 70 year old woman to move out of the five bedroom house where she's lived and raised her family since she was 20 years old and where she still has her children and grandchildren all come over for visits and stays but that home is desperately needed by a homeless family.

At the moment under-occupiers of a certain age are asked if they'd like to downsize and are encouraged to do with incentives but are exempt from being forced to. Effectively the government has decided to let them dwindle out naturally, which may be the kindest thing.

ASB and illegal sublets need addressing head on. Most people I know who live in social housing are being severely affected by ASB households.

There's no housing shortage. There's swathes of properties sitting empty.

I live in a gentrified area where vast blocks have been put up. They're for sale for millions of pounds. I don't see anyone living in them, I don't see people coming and going from the lovely lobbies with a consierge sitting there doing nothing. I don't see lights on at night. This is the same story replicated over and over again in any city centre.

Housing has become a commodity and isn't treated as a home. They are seen as investments not long term security and stability. Or they are a luxury in the countryside.

That's where there needs to be change. It's insane that there are houses which are empty for over half the year yet locals who work in the services for an area can not find, nevermind afford a home because they've been priced out.

Holiday lets are also a problem but at least do bring sizeable amounts of income to an area too. But occupancy has to be high for the majority of the year, not just peak season, otherwise it's problematic.

Any crack down has to be on future under occupancy and income limits in contracts for social housing and on empty properties. Not tenants and owners who already have a property and think they have security.

I also think a crack down on dodgy contracts for retirement properties wouldn't go amiss to encourage those who do want to downsize.

Suggestions like sliding rent scales and assessing financial circumstances will never work because people will just earn less to stay eligible and/or pay less rent. I'm in SH and this is exactly what I would do. The only people that won't are the ones who have ambition to progress and buy their own home, so they're not the ones who are going to be "blocking" houses anyway. This is why we don't have these things now. It was suggested/tried in some areas, and didn't work.

Incentives to downsize aren't big enough for most people. 1k per bedroom given up in most areas. Some will contribute something towards removals but it's very limited. An elderly person would likely need help packing up a family home. If there's no one else to help they'd need a removal firm to do it but no way would the council/HA cover that so that's your 1k gone right there. Then how are you going to pay for flooring, decoration, even things like appliance disconnection and reconnection. It all adds up. Plus all the stress and hassle involved.

Realistically I'd want at least 10k to even consider downsizing. Not because I'm greedy but because that's how much I believe it would cost me to cover everything and not be out of pocket.

It's not allowed to offer financial incentives for a mutual exchange. I see the reasons why, but I actually think it would help. I could well be tempted to move to a smaller home if I knew all my costs were going to be covered. As it stands, no I'm not interested.

"You are wrong. Social housing is not subsidised by anyone. It pays for itself. The fact that people in this country are so deluded about how social housing works is worrisome as it creates hostility and hate"

The language around council housing is troublesome. My local council is stoney broke. I'd rather they charged more rent for council housing and then any money raised used to help those who are vulnerable. The OP isn't the only person who acknowledges that her rent is easily affordable for her.

But housing rent cannot be purposefully designed to garner excess income to the council - that would be stealth tax on the already vulnerable. Council housing rents are there to cover the costs, maintenance, and administrations of the council housing, nothing else.

If your council is stony broke then still their housing is paying its own way and is not removing resources from any other tax payers.

Councils already do sneaky things to garner income from their council housing property stock and they find all manner and excuses to make people homeless from areas and sell land off for 'development' to private development companies and rarely / never does that result in any social housing flats being created - at best they agree to include some 'affordable homes' (which are not affordable). Reference the HS2 scandal for a good example of this. These schemes are often quite unethical and dishonest and frequently never even manifest the original idea but they do it anyway.

So council tenants and social housing tenants are always on a raw deal. We pay good rent. There should be more fair and just social housing available to the average working class family as it used to be in the old days.

Of course social housing these days is filled with the elderly, sick, disabled, unemployed, and vulnerable, because the test of 'priority need' eligibility is so high that you have to be on your last legs or you can't get into the bid system. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy with people saying oh social housing is just filled with unemployed layabouts. No, it's not, it's filled with extremely vulnerable people who desperately needed that home. That didn't used to be the case in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s - council housing was filled with a variety of all sectors of society including working people and their families. This is how it should be.

Tax payers are subsidising because say 100k people who need housing or get HB.
Op needs neither taking house x at say £400 pm rather than market rent of £2000pm with the diff going into op pocket. The gov paying all those other 100k people HB to cover the inflated (?) £2000 rent. Rather than the 400pm.

I should have said that I was referring to the case in hand with able-bodied working occupants LittleMissSunshiner - I am also disabled, and made the mistake of buying a house with my compensation. My living situation, constantly fighting to keep rodents out because I cannot afford the necessary building works, is pretty grim. If I'd had crystal ball, I'd never have purchased property, so no, I would absolutely not wish further stress on people who are already struggling just to live rather than exist.

Plenty of social housing tenants work hard, A lot of them were the essential workers risking their lives during the lockdowns. But seeing as that is your attitude next time i hope they lock down too and refuse to work. I KNEW things would go back to the default setting after Covid, Thankyou for proving me right.

Still smug and tone deaf to use the word celebrate my cheap secure housing the last week of most pay checks before Christmas when people will be hoping their kids aren't too disappointed.

As for the conversation at work, I get the impression OP couldn't wait to tell of her cheap lifetime rental. It might have been better to just let the ones who do have housing costs struggles to have a conversation amongst themselves, with if necessary a "I have a long term rental at the moment seems steady for now" and leave it at that. All true, none feels jealous, but that wouldn't be good enough I assume

But hey let's all celebrate the OP booking a holiday when some of her friends can't.

As said, well done you OP you clever little thing.

You mean we're subsidising private landlords.

Then simply campaign and vote to put rent caps in place, like other countries do, if you don't like subsidising private landlords?!

Erm, wouldn't a simple solution be for the councils to be allowed to keep the rents, as was originally intended, rather than the money be sent to the treasury? Your idea of raising rents would mean tenants paying even more to the treasury than they do now, but the councils still not receiving it.

Perhaps private landlords could pay extra council tax also from the extra high rents they're taking from properties that could otherwise be owned by the public and add to public funds?

She's benefit scrounging but the shiftless people who repeatedly produce offspring they can't support are what? Deserving saints we all should be happy to help?

I'd rather help a working family like OP.

I thought you were a CF when I first read your post but at least you have not used the right to buy and taken your house from social housing stock. I'm assuming you could be in your house for decades yet but at least it will go to another tenant when you eventually move out.

If people didn't want to move to bigger and better houses there would be no such thing as a housing ladder.
I could have stayed in my first purchased house (very similar in size/area to what I'd likely have had if I'd been given a council house) mortgage free from the age of 26, having only maintenance costs (which would certainly be lower than even social housing rent). But I moved and increased my outgoings as a results because I wanted the type of house you can't possibly get through social housing. Personally I'm surprised so many people want to stay put in a house that they likely wouldn't have chose if they'd had infinite choice, rather than move somewhere else of their choice (as long as they can comfortably afford it of course)