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.

That's true of the UK too. There are communities where the women aren't allowed to work.

I suspect when the time comes they will find it has been stopped. Certainly even when succession is allowed it can only happen once. So homes can't be passed around families like parcels.

Couldn’t agree more-someone I know has a good one in a funky area of London she got asa single mum - since remarried and they own outright a nice 3 bed Victorian house, also in very nice in demand area in London which they rent out and have kept the other flat to me it absolutely takes the piss and if she’s reading this- I stand by it.

That house doesn't belong your family. It's not your daughter's to pass onto anyone. The sheer entitlement of this post is flabbergasting.

This calculation doesn’t make any sense though because private rent isn’t the default.

Social rent is a perfectly valid charge to rent a property. It covers the cost of providing it and a surplus towards capital investment and new social housing.

I think the local authority made it clear that she wasn’t evicted. There is no mention of fraud. I imagine she might have been paid to give up the property

And that's very bad for community building as well! Social housing was intended to be secure housing for a large part of the population not emergency housing. The problem is after so much was sold off it's much harder to get, and people tend to think it shouldmonky be for the most vulnerable/poorest/most destitute and that people should move out when that stops applying to them. But that wasn't how it was first intended! It's obviously wrong to sublet it, keep it when you become president of another country or try to keep it in the family through sneakiness though. Regular checks aren't a bad idea but also we need to build more social housing and normalise it as something for ordinary working people not just sink estates or the very poorest.

Except you can't do these. You can have one successor tenant. A successor tenant generally cannot then add a new joint tenant to allow it to eventually shift to a third family member.

I think 20 years ago you probably could but not now.

This thread is really pissing me off. Who knew there were so many selfish twats around. Families being housed in cramp b and bs, and people living in council housing that can afford private. Talk about "I'm alright Jack ". No morals whatsoever. This is one of the reasons we have a housing crisis.

It is news because she is the First Lady of Sierra Leone. I'm pretty sure it would be news if she was a white first lady.

So if you know it’s wrong why brag about it?

One of the problems that admin had after the Grenfell fire, so many of the flats were sublet so it was difficult to ID everyone.

But likewise, there are people who bought their council houses very cheap and in some cases (depending on area) now own a million pound property. I don't resent them. But I know people (now in their sixties) who did that and are now well off and very scathing of people on housing benefit. Very angry at possible changes in tax or of the thought of having to pay inheritance tax. It's like they were helped and by definition their family was helped. But anyone now in need of help isna scrounger. And they did work hard. They paid rent on the council flat. But don't understand that someone on housing benefit might also be working hard. Sigh.

Homes fit for heroes, who had served their country in 2 world wars. The government didn't want a Soviet Style revolution, it had to do better.

You can go to prison for sub letting social housing

thats not really true. They weren’t trying to ID people from tenancy agreements.

yes they discovered via the fire that there was subletting but that didn’t impact identifying the victims

Very true.

Old secure and assured tenanies ( i.e lifetime tenancies) - as far as I know councils don't issue them anymore - but those that have them - have them for life unless they breach the tenancy agreement.

That doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do,

I don’t know the specific flats, but others must for it to be common knowledge 😂

What's not true of the UK is we don't have those honest conversation with the electorate though. Where the government says, if we don't have 85% (or whatever the figure is for the UK), of adults of working age, working, the sums don't add up. They talk about debt, and gdp and lots of things people don't really grasp. They need to be clearer about expectations for the population if we want to continue to have a decent (by international standards anyway) country. I feel like the social contract is quite broken at the moment. A lot of scandals and the state of the country have left people feeling like they should just grab what they can and eff everybody else, but that's how societies collapse (eventually).

Why would she have been paid to give it up? Surely, given her circumstances, Southwark saying “this isn’t your primary residence, we will bring eviction proceedings on that basis unless you surrender the flat” is more likely.

I assume you knew who she was before this news came out, as you think she is very well known?

Local authorities would never, ever pay someone to leave a property either

I can certainly see why you'd want to keep it. But I thought it could only pass to someone who already lived there if the person on tenancy passes. They can do that for two generations. But I didn't think you could just go and buy a house and just pass the tenancy to a sibling who may or may not be entitled to social housing and even if they were I don't think they could skip the queue like this?

I'm not slagging it off but I just thought it wasn't possible.

AFAIK you have to be living in the council property to be eligible for it, and definitely no treating it as a second home.
The council did right to take it off this woman.