To think if all your children have grown up and left you should give up your 5 bed council house?

[dilemma456]

The housing list are so long and especially for bigger properties.

I met someone who lives by herself in a 5 bed council house last night. Her children have all moved out. There are people who really need that house crammed into much smaller properties.

AIBU to think that if you're massively under occupying social housing you should be under an obligation to move out into something smaller and that the council should offer you support and encouragement to do so?

Yes, my children have dual nationality and so do I, but I'm not as well-placed a good-looking, young, single Scots person to flit off.

But they could just as easily meet someone from Australia or NZ and fart off there, too.

Even so, I'd be a liar if I said it didn't ease my mind some.

It's all done here. In a lot of ways it's about 50 years behind and then some for all the bleating everyone else is backwards, wrong, arrogant and just about every other negative adjective that can be dreamed up.

Their Scottishness is a real boon in other places rather than a hinderance, so I reckon they're better off elswhere, tbh.

Mine have Australian passports and on the one hand it's very far away but on the positive side it's very far away, I hope they don't waste their lives here more than anything else.

I can't say I disagree with you at all, mama.

I went away to have a think about this and came back to see 300 replies.
I started off thinking that unless there were specific circumstances underoccupying tenants should be bribed encouraged to downsize.

But, actually I dont think this could work. Elderly tenants will most likely need ground floor accommodation. If they then take up all the ground floor flats/bungalows then none of these will be available for families.

It's cheaper to have an elderly person, self-sufficiently living in the downstairs of a large house than paying for the care they would need in a small terrace with bedroom and bathroom upstairs.

I suppose its different in different areas, but the council flats I once lived in, & a lot of the others in the area, had all the studio & 1 beds on the ground floors, ]bigger flats were 1st floor upwards, most top floor, though all high rise............so it would of worked well there

....meant to type ALL LOW RISE

A very nice lady near me; living in a 3 bedroom council house with a huge garden approached the council last year and offered to move to a smaller property. the alternatives they offered her were dumps! totally unsuitable! one even had mould growing on the walls and another was a masonette with a steep flight of crumbling steps. She said she would like to be offered something in a good state of repair and was told "you'll have to go where we put you" she therefore declined to move from the house that she and her late husband had kept in good repair and nicely decorated over the years and to be honest, I don't blame her

A lot of people lavish a great deal of money and love on their council homes and why should they be thrown into any old dump at the end of it.

The old peoples bungalows near me have just been demolished because they were unfit for people to live in..although plenty did for years ..they haven't been replaced though

Where i live, the right to pass on a tenancy only works once, so for instance my Grandparents have a 2 bed BUngalow, they lived there for years and years and Nan is still there. The tenancy was in Grnadads name so when he died it 'passed on' ot Nan, so now even if i lived there for years when she dies i wouldn't 'get the bungalow becuase it has already been passed on.

YANBU providing she hasn't bought the house. However if it is still a council property, she should be rehoused to something more appropriate for her needs. If people own their own properties and pay to maintain them and heat them, etc., from their own purse they are entitled to do as they please. If they have lived a life subsidised by others they should expect to receive only what they need to live a comfortable life.

YANBU - my mil does exactly this and it makes me so cross! It's made worse (IMO) by the fact that her 28 yr old dd has moved back home to "save money" as she is apparently unable to afford to rent even a room in a shared house on her £750 PCM salary with no dependants and only herself to worry about! How on earth do my dh and I cope with mortgage, a 4 yr old, a 3 week old and one salary?! Aarrgghh! Sorry - rant over. To summarise, I agree with you op!

where else is better? My brother just left Australia due to poor job prospects, drought and high house prices. No chance of ever buying a house there.

True but I do think it's easier to be poor in the sunshine than the pissing rain.
I kept my younger brother occupied for hours in the sea when we lived in Florida, they played on the beach every day. We spent next to nothing keeping them entertained in the school holidays.
I live 5 mins from the beach in the UK we've not been this year :( too cold and windy.

I do agree with that, mama. Nice weather does make a difference. It also gives you more living space, if you will, when you can spend time outside (or live outside ).

Prehaps the answer lies in building more suitable accommodation for elderly people, so there is an incentive for them to downsize without forcing them.

Many of the posts above mention that current provision is unsuitable in terms of the resident remaining in their community and close to the social and emotional support it provides. Many of the more elderly people I have met and spoken to about rehousing weren't that attached to the building as such, but were very ( understandably) afraid of the loss of community support brought on by moving to a new area and resentful of the stigma attached to being labeled elderly, with its associted connotations of no longer being useful. If these concerns could be addressed within local communities I think that there would be lot less resistance to mooving. However that would require all of us to build stronger reciprocal (sp?) community links and social networks with elderly people in our own communities.

Well we have all these empty newbuild flats in the major cities, instead of trying to fill them with young family's (having targeted young professionals who don't want to pay a grand a month for a shoe box either) then the elderly could be moved into those surely ?

YANBU. I know someone who is in a 4 bedroom council house and all her DCs have moved out. She is using 1 bedroom as a walk in wardrobe.

Yes I'm sure that takes priority over someone who is crammed into a tiny flat with their children.

Mama don't get me started on Monoculture building. The innercity "professional boxes" are so unsuitable on so many levels.

Generally they are designed for people who spend little time in the house - the work, go out and sleep brigade. The community spaces are cafes and bars aimed at younger people. There are few with medical provision. They don't promote social interaction with neighbours. Where elderly people have been rehoused into them they ( the elderldy people) are at higher risk of social dissociation and depression.

Unfortunately there have been a lot built during the housing boom because the margins were much higher for the developers than other types of property. Now many are still unsold because the first time buyers and buy to let landlords they were built for are unable to raise the finanace. Housing associations and Governmment agencies are now subsidising them to get the stalled programes finished so there aren't block upon block of mothballed developments.

Makes me laugh to think people expect conditions to be better in the US or Australia. Council flats might be cramped here, but they're better than the tent cities or trailer parks elsewhere.

My mum lives alone in a two bedroom council house.
She is in a wheelchair and can not get up the stairs so does not use half the house, the council will not move her though

I work in social housing...

To answer a few of the questions raised on this threasd@

There are moves afoot to end the 'secure tenancy for life' but it won't affect existing tenants.

Properties are allocated according to housing need so the old lady living on her own will only get a one bed flat in a sheltered scheme whereas if we was offered a 2 bed property she'd probably be happy to move

Yes there's still a right to buy but discounts are capped by central govt. - wjere I work it's a max of £34K

There are incentives to moove but it's limited - where I work it's £750 per bedroom plus removal costs. ie someone moving out of typical 3-bed family home into poky 1-bed sheltered flat would receive £1500.

Something needs to change!

The fraud which is damaging everyone where I live is people getting a council house as a LP, circumstances improving, going to live with the new partner and renting the council house out at market rates.

Because HB doesn't have to go directly to the council any more these people can just pocket the difference. It's very lucrative but it removes housing stock from the people who need it. People at the very bottom.

That is why you get so many "no DWP / HB" notices. It isn't always to do with mortgage conditions and insurance. It's because the LL is getting housing benefit for the property and it wouldn't take long before the system noticed that it's paying out twice for the same address.

A distant family member did this for a year and I was considering saying something. I'm a bit ambivalent about the culture of reporting when people are just trying to get by but this was pure greed.

It's all very well saying that reporting is divisive and setting the poor against each other but what she was doing and what a lot of people in my town are doing is utterly immoral when there are families with children in bedsits and hostels because the coucil houses are being illegally sublet.

Her actions were completely selfish and far, far more damaging to people in need. Sadly we'll see a lot more of it in the future.

RunawayWife - I don't need council housing in the UK or anywhere else in the world but i do know i'll get more bang for my buck in either the USA or Australia outside of the bigger cities, where as in the UK the city is premium real estate and so is the countryside you cannot win.

Mama I think you were confusing me with lexxx

Oh dear, sorry Am knackered :)