to think if you earn over £60,000 and still rent your council home

[RedHelenB]

that in fact it is a lot better than if you had bought it cut price? At least it will go back into the general housing stock when you no longer need it.

But we have to constant put money into our council house to make it livable. The garden was dangerous, we spent time and money turfing it. The central heating was so expansive we fitted a woodburner. The kitchen is atrocious and so we will have to find a cheap way to do that up soon.

There are no carpets upstairs, the bath and toilet leak horribly.

I could go on.

You can and should report the leak - it will be fixed and if it is not, you can follow an official complaints system - it is your duty to report it

permission for woodburner? if not council may ask you to remove it if they visit

kitchens and bathrooms get updated on a cycle of maintenance, all you have to do is ring them and ask them where you are on the cyclical maintenance programme for the re-fitting of kitchens and bathrooms.

it is usually 20 - 25 years

I've reported it twice, they have simply replaced it with another shit part that leaks.

I will just buy a new cistern when I have the money.

Yes I have permission for my woodburner.

They didn't care about that at all.

we do want to buy it eventually.

a single mother on benefits does not need easy access to the train station

I think that's one of the single most disgusting and stupid comments I've read in years in mn, and that is quite something.

Damn those single mothers how dare they want to go somewhere! And damn them to hell if they want to yknow maybe eventually get a job that requires a train journey. Mah let's put them right in the middle if our new ghetto. That'll teach them.

You are right Geckos48 the councils have become negligent in ensuring their houses are liveable. My mum had new kitchen cupboards fitted last year for the first time- she has lived in that house since 1949! They took years getting round to fitting double glazing and central heating, I remember ice on windows all through my teenage years and the double glazing was only put in about 10 years ago. All decorating and flooring installation and upkeep is done by the tenants so why should they move out?

I do think that there ought to be some limit on how much you earn while keeping a Council house. Not sure £60k is the right figure. It would be fine in some parts of the country and far too low in others.

It is annoying to see cases like Bob Crow and Baroness Uddin where very highly paid public servants are using housing that is meant for families in need. What I dont know is how many highly paid people there are who are renting council houses. I'd have thought most of the rich ones would have exercised their right to buy long since.

If you earn over £60k pa you should at least be paying an open market rent (not the subsidised council set figure which covers only maintenance and doesn't take into account the c.o.f). Selling off housing stock cut price is not helpful and why should someone already doing ok get a windfall at the expense of the local authority when the government is short of money?

They've never updated mum's bathroom Custardo - she's lived with that loo, sink and bath (no shower) 64 years and counting!

I hate all this shit about counci house being subsidised. In my area all the council housing has been run by a private profit making company for over ten years. They get all the rent and have to maintain and manage the properties.
To my surprise they actually do a better job of managing, maintaining and modernising than the council ever did.

This company makes a profit every year. Quite a large profit in fact.

To say that council housing is subsidised is just total bollocks.

soontobesix sorry I did forget to say that as the money has never been reinvested in more property it should not have been sold.

But profPlum, that just chases money round the system. if I pay open market rent, the government has to then reuse it to fund housing benefit for a low income family who are being charged open market rent. Money gets spent on admin, plus the system doesnt offer the lower paid family any security.

We live in a housing association house, and DP earns 60k, it won't be forever we're saving for a decent deposit on somewhere, this place is modified for DS's medical needs though, any house we'd buy would have to fit the initial criteria and then have further adaptions for DS.

I don't think we have rtb here, even if we did, we wouldn't.

I wouldn't private rent again, I've only ever had bad experiences that meant my kids being shipped from pillar to post due to no security.
A LL can tell you all they want that they have no intention of selling and leaving you homeless, it doesn't mean they won't change their mind 6 months down the line.

The final straw was when the last private rent place I had got condemned because it was falling apart, unsafe and a Heath hazard.

If everyone was made to occupy a house the right size for their needs, including the elderly, a lot of houses would free up.

There is a lot of empty 1 and 2 bed flats around here that have stood empty for ages, there is also a lot of people scamming the council to get bigger houses (on in some cases 2 houses!)

Cyclical maintenance program of 20-25 years, more like 40-50 years round here. That's for kitchen or bathroom i.e if you get your kitchen done, you go back to the bottom of the queue to get your bathroom done.

redshift, i would say the real benefit of council housing is the secure tenancy, which families just dont get rom a private landlord.

As for subsidy, normally council houses cost less than privately rented ones. So if the same portfolio were being managed by a private landlord without any contraints on how they did it, we would see them making an even bigger profit. They probably also have rules on who they let to and who they evict which will be different from what they could do if they were purely private.

Of course, the way to make a big commercial profit is to not have any bad debts, and refuse to let to those pesky HB claimants, like that couple in the news at the moment. So the subsidy is a good thing for reasons of social benefit all round. But taking a smaller profit is still a subsidy.

Council rents are set at a fair rent, not subsided (housing is overpriced) and enable people in lower paid work to live in a secure tenancy. A bit like the dwindling fixed rents in NYC, they enable people to live and work in areas they wouldn't otherwise be able to afford. We should be arguing for more council homes, not fighting over the scraps left in a race to the bottom for who 'qualifies' -as that will lead to ghettos, which I'm sure none of us want.

They aren't planning on scrapping right to buy are they?

But I dont think "subsidy" is an insult. Let's call it something else if that helps- let's say that council rents are discounted to a fair rent level and also have benefits in terms of secure tenancies and willingness to accept HB tenants.

is that a benefit we want offered to people on £100k per annum, or £200k? where would we draw the line? clearly not as low as £60k, IMHO, but somewhere?

What id like to know is how many houses would actually get freed up by this. Its probably about 17. I bet wellpaid people have bought their huose anyway.

Not that I know of but subsidies are far lower than they were, so not great savings to be had. Plus the open market price is now unaffordable for most.

I thought they were going to increase the RTB discount?

It's not a benefit because council homes are not really profit making (hence selling them all off). But you are right hardly anyone earning £60k (exception of London) will be a council tenant. This proposal is a slippery slope though- today it's £60k, next year £40k and eventually it will be benefits only tenants as no one else will want to live there. That is not likely to create a good stable or prideful environment for our young people to grow up in. We need to argue for more, not less properties. Private rent subsidies cost us all so much more in every way.

Its stupid saying housing is over priced. The price of a property is set by supply and demand. Its stupid to talk about a fair rent. What is a fair rent for one person is not a fair rent for another.

"We live in a housing association house, and DP earns 60k, it won't be forever we're saving for a decent deposit on somewhere, this place is modified for DS's medical needs though, any house we'd buy would have to fit the initial criteria and then have further adaptions for DS.

I don't think we have rtb here, even if we did, we wouldn't. "

I have no problem with you living in a housing association house, but I feel you should pay the market rate that you would for a similar house. Prehaps there needs to be allowance to allow disabled people to have bigger houses.

Ultimately someone has to pay for the cost of housing. Its silly to say that private rentals are too high as most landlords do not make a profit in the short term. We need a private rental market as well as social housing. What we need is people to choice about where they live.

It is silly to think of anyone living in a particular house for life especially social housing. People in the private sector (whether rented or owned) move all the time.

i'd agree with you reallytired but there is little govt investment in social housing

therefore perpetuating a housing shortage

I'd happily pay the market value for rent, but what can I do? I can't force money upon the housing association.

All I can do is keep the house clean and in a decent state (neutrally decorated, garden maintained etc) and use the money I'm not paying in extra rent to save up quicker to move out to make way for another family.

The person buying his council property is doing it at a price below market value. To replace it, the council has to buy land as well as finance the cost of building the new property. So Right to Buy makes no economic sense.

The problem with an income limit for being a council tenant is being just above or below it. It is a disincentive for earning more, if you are going to lose your subsidised housing costs. And in London/South East, many people will find it impossible to find anything affordable for a family if only just above the cut-off point.