Council's paying thousands per month in rent for substandard accommodation in London - is this fair to the tax payer and the fmaily?

[mids2019]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly21w7qewvo

Noticed this story in the news but what struck me as well as the ghastly toilet was the fact the council was paying 2,500 Linda in rent for the property. I love outside of London and a 1K mortgage seems on the high end of things in my local town. It seems bizarre that councils are paying such money to private landlords given their already squeezed finances but I guess there is no other option in London.

Could it be that is a fairer solution to offer accommodation outside the capital of rents are so high or should local councils try and minimise local emergency housing costs but be at the mercy of slum landlords?

Everyone moans about Thatcher but no party has changed it in the following 50 years

The issue is the case in the link is the landlord. He has a legal obligation to ensure the dwelling is safe and sanitary, which is clearly isnt. Why the council are not pursuing him to ensure the home is livable is ridiculous.

London boroughs have been dumping tenants in places with cheaper housing for years and it's a bloody disaster. It's always the problem tenants who get shipped out to wreak havoc on some unsuspecting community. I've no idea what Croydon is actually like but if the tenants from there that have been dumped in our small market town are at all representative I'm thinking Manhattan in "Escape from New York".

Councils should withhold payment on houses like this until repairs are made. Frankly the council should and could set the tone for rents by refusing to pay that much.

I have a friend in a two-bed council flat in zone 2 that pays £400pcm.

If the subsidy was at that level it would be more reasonable.

Given the number of people in London struggling with housing costs, living in HMOs, leaving entirely etc - it doesn’t really make sense that some people are subsidised to this degree, certainly not for anything more than a couple of months.

The issue is with one delivery driver wage, they probably can’t rent a house anywhere in London under their own steam. It’s preferable for them to wait it out and hope the council delivers / continues to fund this kind of arrangement.

Probably because if they do, the tenants will get thrown out and then the council have another homeless family to house. The landlord will just then rent it to those who have no alternative for housing as a HMO to those who cannot get any kind of government help.

Poor people should not be uprooted from where they grew up and where they can be supported with relatives babysitting and membership of a community they have always been part of, to be resettled in areas that have cheap rents because there are no jobs and poor infrastructure so people don't want to live there.

The Right to Buy scheme was a quite deliberate policy to ensure that local authorities would not be able to meet housing need and would have no choice but to line the pockets of wealthy landlords (who have often bought up the former council homes once the minimum period before sale has elapsed).

Building more social housing directly - not relying on property developers who choose to keep the supply low in order to keep prices high - and ensuring that these houses are located where the people living in them can access jobs and their own community networks is what is needed. Plus more controls on landlords so that they can't just keep increasing the rents that the taxpayer has to fund.

When the Council own the house and the tenant is on benefits, the housing benefit is transferred from one department to another. The house is also counted as an asset owned by the Council.

When a private landlord owns the house and the tenant is on benefits, it costs the taxpayer more.

Do you see the problem with RTB now?

I do think there is an issue with a household where the sole earner is a delivery driver with family of perhaps 3 children (each of them ideally in a room each) having the income to afford anything in the private sector in central London.

I think this is part of the issue is that if living near employment becomes financially unviable who takes responsibilty? Should the state i e. the tax payer subsidise this arrangement or should a family face economic reality and look to relocate?

I think when you have a number of young city workers just affording bedsits in HMO who are in good graduate jobs then there has to be a financial question about how you adequately house low income workers perhaps with multiple children safely and adequately while being economically sensible.

Maybe this family has just fallen foul of this reality?

We had to leave London as we couldn’t afford to buy and the rents were too high. This was before the council did rent top ups and despite the fact we were both young ( ish late 20s ) working architects.
We’d spent many years in Tottenham, as the rents were lower there, prior to leaving.

I do think people need to move further out or both work to pay the rent.
A relative who is a landlord in the Watford area and has a tenants with three kids all at school,( youngest just started ) the mum doesn’t work and the dad works nights as a waiter. The council pay £990 of their rent. I really don’t understand why the mother doesn’t work to pay the rent. The problem is the council pay it so there’s no incentive for her to work.

Rents are high because of changes in the tax system leading to less available property and council housing still having the right to buy scheme.

„Poor people should not be uprooted from where they grew up and where they can be supported with relatives babysitting and membership of a community they have always been part of”

But why should people who are working and paying taxes be uprooted? My DC who are in quite well paid London jobs have all had to move out of London because they do not qualify for any state benefits and so cannot afford family housing in the capital. This has meant they have much less help with babysitting and they have all had had to build a new community outside London. Difficult while dealing with a long commute.

The current system uses tax money to support low skilled/no skilled families
where both parents are at home or one does a minimum wage job to stay in London

Increasingly, those who are paying those taxes are seeing that this is unfair and unsustainable. Unless centrist governments get a grip on it they will be swept aside by more extremist parties - so it is all of our interests to address the issue and stop pretending that all is right with the world.

Its in everyone's interests to demand change in housing legislation - whether you live in London or not.

This is not just a 'them Londoners' problem. Large parts of the country have unaffordable, poorly maintained, insecure housing and unscrupulous landlords.

Wages have not kept up with the rise in cost of housing. That is not just a London problem.
It has decimated the standard of living.
It has put millions below the poverty line.
It's the rise in food banks. It's children going hungry.

Stop sniping at people who have little enough as it is. Be angry instead with successive governments who have failed to make buy to let less lucrative. Failed to protect tenants. Failed to build and maintain more affordable and social housing. Failed to cap rents. Failed to tax property wealth adequately. Failed to curb overseas investors.

I think landlords need imprisonment for letting houses like that. If a landlord refuses to fix issues like sewage spilling out from the drains, they need to face the consequences. And charging £2.5k for the 'privilege' of living in a sewer!

I know that's an extreme case, but in general I do think there should be much more accountability for landlords with fines or imprisonment for substandard living conditions.

If there was a mandatory £100 per day fine (after 48 hrs say) for no hot water for instance, I bet landlords would be much quicker to get issues fixed instead of leaving families stuck and still liable for extortionate rent.

@Tlaloc999

I think there is an amount of sympathy with this view as we have a market driven society and in effect the market isn't working in terms of living in London.

Yes there are many graduates in this country that balk at the idea of living in London due the expense of living even though it would massively benefit their career. Even if you manage to start a career in London you accept house shares and bedsits even on a good reasonably paid graduate scheme.

You therefore have the problem of the expectation of having a property with multiple bedrooms if you have a low skilled job and children. How do you square the circle?

In reality does this mean that there is always going to be some deprivation within the capital?

I do think there is an issue with a household where the sole earner is a delivery driver with family of perhaps 3 children (each of them ideally in a room each) having the income to afford anything in the private sector in central London.

it has been said upthread but this particular emergency accommodation isn’t in central London.

Lots of issues at play.... letting in 900k people last year probably wasn't the best idea...they all need somewhere to live which means cost of private renting increases....combined with right to buy meaning so much housing stock has been sold off. It's a horrendous situation.

Build quality social housing for
secure rent.

Selling off rtb to be bought up by landlords to then get taxpayer money via h b was never going to be good for society . Pretty good for some private landlords.

It would be interesting to know in which parts of the UK those 900,000 people ending up living.

I was so shocked to see this on the news yesterday. Overflowing toilet covered in sewage and the shower too and the landlord not sorting it out. I felt so sorry for this family and their kids. The parents worked too but rents are so high and wages so low that not even people on top up benefits can afford London rents. I was so glad to see they had been moved to better (but still temporary) accommodation.

Councils are being bankrupted by the costs of temporary accommodation. Rooms in shared, grotty houses.

Support networks are more important to those who have next to nothing and no agency over their lives. They're not a 'nice to have', they're often the difference between surviving and keeping your head above water and failing to cope. It's different for people with qualifications and well-paid jobs making sensible decisions about where they can have the best quality of life. They have agency and resources to fall back on if things don't go to plan.

There is also an ethnic element which is under-acknowledged. People from certain communities and of certain ethnicities don't feel comfortable in certain parts of the UK because of racism and prejudice in those areas. There is probably nowhere which is totally without problems in this respect, but outer London is very different to some other parts of the UK.

I think we can all have laudable aspirations about combating poverty but can you escape the fundamental point living in London (rent and mortgage) is expensive. Unless we change our economic system in some fundamental sense this is just a reality.
providing high quality accommodation for large families with low income parents becomes economically non sensical with the tax payer taking up the burden. I actually have sympathy with the council having to find resources from stretched budgets in a desperate expensive fight to keep families in London.

there are other parts of the UK and many other families have to uproot depending on career circumstances or other financial reasons. It is not unknown.

(on the subject of the toilet it appears from the piece there was miscommunication or blame passing between a letting agency and a landlord who didn't even recognise the letting agency. The letting agency said an inspection had taken place but this was disputed and the letting agency's now asking the landlord to fix the toilet prior to re rent. The family didn't obviously have funds to get an emergency repair but couldn't they have rem o ed the foul water from the toilet and cleaned the shower prior to repair?)

couldn't they have rem o ed the foul water from the toilet and cleaned the shower prior to repair

You mean the family? Where would they have put the sewage? It was a bit more than dirty water. If a fault with the toilet was causing sewage laced water to fill the shower, where could they have drained it all to?

@SnappyCroc

„Support networks are more important to those who have next to nothing and no agency over their lives. They're not a 'nice to have', they're often the difference between surviving and keeping your head above water and failing to cope. It's different for people with qualifications and well-paid jobs making sensible decisions about where they can have the best quality of life. They have agency and resources to fall back on if things don't go to plan.
There is also an ethnic element which is under-acknowledged. People from certain communities and of certain ethnicities don't feel comfortable in certain parts of the UK because of racism and prejudice in those areas. There is probably nowhere which is totally without problems in this respect, but outer London is very different to some other parts of the UK.“

I take your point about those with next to nothing - though I would argue that we all need our support networks.

I do not agree with the ethnic argument though. There are many, many communities in UK with a large ethnic population where housing is much cheaper. You can BUY a house in many parts of the country for under £60000 - less than the value of two years rent payments in London.

A family (whatever their ethnicity) in poor quality temporary accommodation in London would be much better off in a stable rental in Birmingham/the north where the children could attend a local school and both parents could work. There are jobs available there in retail, delivery, care etc where parents could develop further skills. They would no longer have „next to nothing“

Nobody disputes that there is insufficient quality housing available to lower income families in London. And we all have views on why that is. But even if this government’s policies work out (a big if) they will be unable to deliver within a five year term. Families need immediate solutions - not five years being moved from pillar to post.

@Tlaloc999 . The whole point is that people at the mercy of the council for housing don't have agency over their lives. They don't have choice. If shipped out of their communities in London to cheaper housing, they might be sent to Birmingham. They might also be sent to Thanet.

I think you’ll find Dover residents are sent there. In fact Dover has to use most of Kent including for temporary b and bs the problem is so huge