Keeping a UK Council property for life even though you no longer live in the UK

[Vintlet]

This story has just been released
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyxkeny8x6o
It seems so unfair given the lack of social housing in the uk that the First Lady of Sierra Leone expected to be allowed to keep her London social housing property as a pied a terre. Surely we cannot be expected to house the world. No one in authority would have realised given that she was still paying the rent if she hadn’t boasted about keeping it on a radio interview. I wonder how many people keep and sublet uk council properties when they no longer have a right to keep it.

I give up.

You can lead a horse to the water but you can’t make it drink.

You should give up because you’re spouting utter horseshit

Most of us achieve security for our children with simple hard work instead of expecting other people’s taxes to do it for us.

Ahhhh - so now you’re questioning whether it is even a problem, as well as insisting there can be no way of catching fraud, or if there might be there are “legal rights”, “data protection” etc.

Better to change the law then, such that fraudsters can be identified. Given that in your view there may be hardly any, it won’t be a very arduous job then, will it?

I’d bloody well report him! Assuming you pay tax, do you not care that it’s supporting shameless freeloaders like him?

No wonder this country is seen by too many as a stupidly soft touch.

Change GDPR - and data protection laws around the entire world- to catch, I dunno, say 10000 social housing tenants who have property abroad?

does that sound more simple or more unrealistic to you?

I can’t be bothered 😂
if he gets caught - he gets caught
if he doesn’t - we’ll Im fairly certain he isn’t the only one doing this

But i have no doubt because he is an annoying little fucker someone will report him eventually

it’s not my job to do that

I think social housing just has to be a primary residence if people have land or something abroad ,fine ,as long as they actually live in the SH most of the year

If they have land or property abroad they don’t need social housing in the U.K. ! A colossal cheek if they have!

I couldn’t care less what property an immigrant possesses abroad - as long as s/he doesn’t expect to be give subsidised social housing, and doesn’t sponge off the taxpayer!

She broke the rules. She was found out. She lost the property. 👍

This is rife in London and I'm saying this as a person from a family of many backgrounds. Loads of tenancies are manipulated to bring family over and get more houses for their families and it certainly isn't racist to know that.

So is he living in the UK and visiting the house in Spain? Or living in the Spain and visiting the UK? It isn't clear....
Either way, if he's flying direct from the UK to Columbia or Spain on his Spanish passport he won't be able to do that now anyway. Dualmcitizens can only enter the UK with a British passport. Unless he takes two passports and flies to Spain then Columbia, and books the flights separately. It's going to get complicated for him anyway.

Social housing ISN'T subsidised. It's closer really to rent controlled. They pay rent, but the HA/whoever isn't making a large profit.
It still costs the tax payer money if it's used incorrectly because for every person in social housing who doesn't need it there is a person who has to be in tax payer subsidised privately rented housing. So it costs the tax payer money indirectly rather than a direct scam.

Seems very unfair. Do your family actually need a house or you just being spiteful by not allowing anyone else who needs it live there

He lives in the uk has done for around 10 year
but he has a house in Spain that he bought when he lived there
he didn’t tell UC that he had a house in Spain

he had even had a UC review and they didn’t know he had a house in Spain as he didn’t tell them when asked

he flies on his columbian passport to Columbia from Spain

He has ILR in the uk

At any rate, it’s usually considerably cheaper than any private rental, and as such should be reserved for people in genuine need, certainly not dished out to people who own properties elsewhere and are taking the right royal piss.

BS, she's the First Lady of Sierra Leone, not Dave & Linda who worked constantly from being 16 to 65.

And do you actually have any stats to back up your racism? Doubt it.

Yeah, that's my thinking
The problem is circumstances change so someone can not have properties when they get it and then be doing much better later on. It's not fair though when there is a shortage of the houses available.

The local authority where we lived when my DC were young built some large (3 storey) council houses for larger families, really nice with gardens and parking. There were only six of them and all the tenants bought them as soon as they were allowed to, then sold at the earliest legal opportunity for a huge profit. There are now no houses at all for large families on that estate.
It's really shocking that people who no longer need social housing feel that they can pass the tenancy on to relatives, even if they don't actually live there or need the accommodation. Even if people are devious enough to do this it is still illegal to sublet though.

You cannot succeed more than once and you can give succession rights to anyone other than partner ie brothers etc cannot succeed

So you can’t pass a house / flat down - it’s housing law

"Probably wrong"? That's an understatement. Corrupt as hell and if not illegal it should be.

TBH I certainly wouldn’t by any means rely on every country - certainly not outside most of Europe and other so-called first world countries - having a reliably accurate Land Registry.

Yes, but it is interesting that passing on the tenancy to relatives/subletting is seen as worse than when people buy the houses and sell at a huge profit. The first if against the rules so I guess it's more immoral.in that sense. But both involve benefitting from something when you need it but then continuing to profit from it after you don't need it at the expense of the people behind you who do.
I suppose it wouldnt be a problem if more houses were being built for the people behind. But some of the first people to benefit from right to buy are now vehemently against public spending. Margaret Thatchers plan was to create a generation of economically right wing voters and she succeeded but at the expense of the generations coming after.
I really don't think the answer is to scrap social housing entirely though. Quite the opposite in fact.