To think that making the benefits system instant would help alleviate poverty?

[AndHarry]

Hands up, I have no experience of how the system works but as I've been reading the news and various threads on here, the same thing crops up again and again: JSA, housing and other benefit claims take so long to process that people are left destitute and once they are approved it takes so long to make changes that it's often not worth taking casual jobs.

So with the universal credit why can't job centres process claims electronically during appointments with claimants, with money paid using the 3 day payment system?

Is that totally naive?

[youretoastmildred]

It shouldn't be allowed for people who can only marginally afford it to become landlords, in the same way that there are restrictions on setting up as a bank.

If you have a contract to supply someone with a home, and at the same time are in constant danger of losing that property to a lender - that it is iniquitous.

[WooWooOwl]

Mildred- that's no different to saying that people who can only marginally afford to pay their rent each month shouldn't be allowed homes

Or you shouldn't be allowed to open up a grocery store when you can only marginally afford for people to shoplift.

Going on that reasoning, isn't it just as iniquitous to have a contract to supply someone with rent money when you are in constant danger of losing that money due to redundancy?

[Talkinpeace]

data-sharing laws prohibit instant cross-government checks
ROTFLMAO
no, they explicitly permit and encourage it "for the prevention of fraud"

[youretoastmildred]

No. it is completely different, because I think we as a society need to take seriously that people need homes and some security in them.
If I buy bananas every day from a shop that suddenly goes bust, at worst it is an inconvenience. But renting a home from a landlord who goes bust is more like putting my savings in a deposit account at a bank which goes bust. That is why you can't just decide to set up as a bank in the same half-cocked way that anyone can decide to be a landlord.

There is something very particular about shelter and security of shelter which is different from other commercial transactions, and I know it is not fully recognised in law in this country, so don't trouble to point that out - I know that. I am saying it should be.

This year has been horrific for us because we were given notice on our rented house because the landlord wanted to sell. between jobs, schools, and childcare it was a really tricky balancing act holding it all together with two complete house moves (3 in 3 years). It cost a fortune and was a fucking nightmare. We didn't default on anything. we had done nothing wrong.

The people letting us the house had inherited it, let it to us for a year and a bit and then decided to sell it. I think they should have sold it, in the first place, as a windfall, not a house - invested the money, and a professional landlord who is properly set up to do so could have let it, or just sold it directly to a family to live in it. They were fairly well-meaning, but inexperienced, unresourced landlords who didn't understand what their responsibilities were. The fabric of the house was old and they were disappointed that their responsibilities in this area were expensive so they probably didn't make as much money off the whole thing as they had hoped. SO in other words they dicked us about and then made us homeless. It shouldn't have been allowed.

[youretoastmildred]

Or in other words, using a house as an investment vehicle, with high risk, is unethical when you are charging other people to live in it, and base their lives in it, and apply to schools around it.
Only those stable enough to pretty much eliminate the level of risk that will result in immediate foreclosure should be allowed to do it.

No businesses are risk free and a landlord whose business is not doing well would have to take steps to reduce his / her exposure - but it shouldn't be "shit one bad month now my bank is threatening me"

[Wallison]

Completely agree with you, mildred. As I said above it is horrifying that something as fundamental as providing shelter is left to the vagaries of unregulated individuals who may not have the financial resources to cover all eventualities, and who can withdraw that shelter any time they want to. 'Accidental' landlords are often the worst and create more problems than they solve just due to not having a clue about what being a landlord is all about, not having the wherewithal to stay afloat and eventually depriving someone of their home on a whim. It really would be better for all concerned in lots of ways if those properties never found their way onto the rental market, because it benefits no-one in the long run.

[WooWooOwl]

I think what happened to happened because of a different issue to the one you posted about earlier and I responded to.

Your situation could have been prevented if there was some kind of a check to ensure that homes rented out were of a high enough standard, especially in relation to the rent charged, but if you only had a year long contract then I don't think you have grounds to complain because you wanted to renew that contract and the other party didn't.

I agree that there's something different about transactions involving shelter, but if the landlord would only go bust because the tenant failed to pay, then it's unfair to blame the landlord. The landlord has no more responsibility to provide the home than the tenant does to provide the income. Their responsibility is the same.

People need a secure income as much as they need a secure home, and I don't think it's ok to say that people should be allowed to control one of those things for someone else but not the other.

I think it would be very very wrong to take away a landlords right to sell their property at the end of their their rental contracts, and this is all that happened to you. You are being very emotive to say that you were made homeless, and while I can see that it may have felt that way, all the landlord was doing was sticking to the contract you signed.

I have assumed here that you weren't given notice to leave mid contract, so apologies if I am wrong. If that was the case, then I agree you were treated unfairly and your landlord should not have been allowed to agree to provide you with a home for a certain period of time and then fail to deliver that.

[Wallison]

If you lose your home, then you are homeless, surely. What is emotive about saying that.

[WooWooOwl]

Because it sounds like someone has literally turfed a family out onto the street with a seconds notice, and that is unlikely to have been what happened.

There will have been a notice period where the adults will have been given time to sort themselves out and find somewhere else.

Rental agreements come to an end every single day, I don't remember being homeless when mine ran out.

[Wallison]

I don't think it sounds like 'no notice'; I just think it sounds like someone has lost their home. Which is what happened. Or are you trying to say that she still has it?

[WooWooOwl]

She might not have that home, but that's not to say that she's homeless. She probably found another home, and went straight from one home to the other home, and was never actually without a home at all and therefore never homeless.

[Wallison]

Right. So because there are other homes out there, it doesn't matter if someone gets turfed out of theirs? Ffs.

[Wallison]

Would you have the same glib cold attitude to someone who owned their home and lost it? Because the practical implications, especially for families, are just the same.

[WooWooOwl]

Being turfed out is not the same as a contract coming to an end.

A contract is a contract and when it finishes it finishes. Regardless of whether its for a flat, house, sky telly, or a mobile phone.

I'd say most of us have rented property at some point in our lives. I'd also guess that most of us have never been homeless.

This is exactly the reason why social housing tenants should consider themselves lucky, and why there should be enough social housing for everyone that wants it instead of just a few.

[WooWooOwl]

My attitudes towards human beings and my attitudes towards legally binding contracts are two different things.

[BackOnlyBriefly]

If landlords are forbidden by insurance companies to take HB tenants then you can't blame them, but you can blame the company. I get the point about statistics, but I'm pretty sure that the insurance companies could make a similar case for not accepting black people if we let them get away with it.

Of course being black doesn't make you default on bills, but nor does receiving HB. The truth is along of the lines of:

"HB claimants are poor and won't have savings to cover a shortfall"

"HB claimants are either unemployed or in poorly paid jobs so statistically more likely to be under achieving or poorly educated and less capable of money management"

But (because of past discrimination and other social factors) black people are statistically likely to be in the same situation.

Also you could look at it this way. The government follows policies that leave many people unemployed or poor. To alleviate suffering they give tax money to the poorest and then the big companies say to their LL customers "Don't take them in. Let em live in the gutter".

Sounds like we could reasonably call that discrimination and/or sabotage of a social system that everyone else is trying to make work.

[youretoastmildred]

"all the landlord was doing was sticking to the contract you signed. " look upthread. I am not trying to suggest that the landlord was doing anything illegal. I was saying that the law does not strongly enough protect tenants.

3 months' notice is not enough in a family with children at school, 2 adults in 2 different jobs (which are hard to take time off from apart from anything) and childcare.

"if the landlord would only go bust because the tenant failed to pay, then it's unfair to blame the landlord." I don't necessarily agree with this, depending on how long the rent was in arrears - but that isn't the only reason. It happens all the time that the landlord was just altogether over extended. And the tenant can be paying the rent while the landlord is in the shit for all kinds of reasons.

I think the best analogy might be something like buying an annuity. When you cash in your pension and buy an annuity, only certain bodies are able to offer this as a service they provide. It has to be absolutely water tight. I think letting a house should be like that, when you are undertaking to do a deal with someone such that they make their home in your house.

If this is unrealistic for every individual who somehow comes into possession of a house they don't want to live in, then there could be other ways of them working through other parties to take an income from the house. There could be ways of doing deals with HAs, for instance.

The reason things like this aren't required is that they presumably decrease the potential theoretical (often wildly over-imagined, and ultimately disappointing, but that is another thing) rental yield from houses. I don't care. If we have somehow ended up with a legal system that prioritises greedy over-leveraged boy-racer landlords over people renting homes for their families, the system needs to change.

[youretoastmildred]

"My attitudes towards human beings and my attitudes towards legally binding contracts are two different things."

This is the whole problem. Stop burbling on about the law as if it was issued by god on stone tablets. The problem is that the law was made by one group of people to benefit people like them at the expense of people not like them. The solution is to change the law. This is nothing to do with suggesting that anything illegal is happening.

[WooWooOwl]

I'm not burbling on about the law, I'm pointing out that there's nothing wrong with a contract coming to an end and that you weren't pissed about or treated badly, you were just being a tenant.

I agree it would be nice for many if contracts lasted longer, that would benefit many landlords and many tenants. Believe it or not, lots of landlords that are planning to rent out their property long term would prefer tenants that would make it their home and stay a long time. It saves them a lot of bother, and is obviously great for the family that wants to rent long term.

But these are not the sort of contracts many people are looking for. One of the big benefits of renting is that it can be short term and that you aren't tied to a place for longer than you want to be. People use short term lets while they are working somewhere other than they want to live long term, or when they are having work done to their own home, or when they want to try out an area before they commit to living there long term, or when they are studying in a certain area.

So what law would you change without making it impossible for people who want or need short term rents?

[Wallison]

Short term lets could still happen with security of tenure - all you need to do is put a break clause in saying that the tenant can give notice at any time, but the landlord can't. That's how it is Germany and many other countries. Just because something is law in this country, doesn't mean it's right and doesn't make it any less stressful and costly for tenants.

[MajorieDawes]

Right, that's a brilliant idea. So we are abroad, letting out our house, and the tenants can just up and leave whenever they want leaving us thousands of miles away, having to pay both our own rent and the mortgage.

The fairest way is equal terms required of both parties.

[MajorieDawes]

Right, that's a brilliant idea. So we are abroad, letting out our house, and the tenants can just up and leave whenever they want leaving us thousands of miles away, having to pay both our own rent and the mortgage.

The fairest way is equal terms required of both parties.

[Strumpetron]

Short term lets could still happen with security of tenure - all you need to do is put a break clause in saying that the tenant can give notice at any time, but the landlord can't. That's how it is Germany and many other countries. Just because something is law in this country, doesn't mean it's right and doesn't make it any less stressful and costly for tenants

Wouldn't that just make it more stressful and more costly for landlords? Seems like a really unreasonable idea. I'd be on edge if I were a landlord in that situation.

[Strumpetron]

For some reason after living in the our apartment for 12 months, it goes to a monthly roll over contract. I'm not happy with this at all, and I don't know what the reasoning behind it is.

[WooWooOwl]

If those of us who were adults now started out with a system that was weighted so heavily in favour of tenants, then maybe there would be a valid argument for that type of system.

But that's not how it is, the law can't change the goalposts so drastically without damaging a great many people.

Just because something works in another country doesn't mean is morally right either Wallison.

I agree that the fairest way is to have equal terms for both parties.

I don't even think the change in the law that you would like to see happen would even do anyone any favours. In my case it would mean a property that can house two people would be empty, because there wouldn't be a benefit to me in selling it, even if it couldn't be rented. It would cause massive problems for people in Marjorie's position too.