to think people are being deliberately perverse about Council/HA..

[fideline]

....housing?

1. Social (council or HA) rents are not subsidized.

2)Social (council or HA) tenancies are not a form of welfare benefit.

It's not that hard to grasp is it?

I bet it is

I do see the as a kind of welfare benefit though…. because of this:
That may be, but councils prioritise houses according to need, and if you are working and on a reasonable wage, with no mitigating circumstances such as DV, you are unlikely to get one.
HA/council housing is only available to the least well off in society, because there isn't sufficient supply for everybody to have a council house. I'm not trying to antagonise, but I think that is why people see it as a form of benefit (even though, I appreciate that legally it is not). I'm not being perverse, just saying the nature of HA accommodation and the way it is allocated makes it very similar to a welfare benefit.

oh I'm actually really dim because I missed 11 pages of chat before posting. suspect everything I've said has been said already and better…,. sorry!

but that's not the case everywhere in the country. Down south sounds like hell on earth with regards to CH.

Here you can be overcrowded in a private flat.. be working and still get a 3 bed CH because you need a bigger place.

To get a council house in the first place you probably need to be badly off. But you can then get a better job, earn lots of money, your children leave home, etc etc, and yet you still keep the large and very cheap council house. I do think that higher rents should be charged to those whose income levels go up while they are council house occupiers.
If I rent my house out to you at £50 a week, while similar houses in my area are being rented out at £200 a week, you have a fantastic deal. Why not accept that you have a fantastic deal from the council? If you are poor, and if you didn't have a council house you would qualify for higher housing benefit, then fair enough. If you are not poor and would therefore not qualify for housing benefit, the council should not be subsidising you (by which I simply mean charging you far less than you would be charged on the open market). That is not what the council house scheme was designed to do.
There's no point pretending that it is the private housing market that is the anomaly. That market charges people what they can afford, as with most consumer goods and services.

and round and round we go

...

Don't look at me. I have repetitive strain injury.

"council should not be subsidising you (by which I simply mean charging you far less than you would be charged on the open market)"

That is really not what subsidy means dino. Honest

Ever feel like you're nutting a wall?!

MrsDL No problem at all, but it is fair to say you missed a bit

This thread certainly proves a lot of people hold the same view!

" There's no point pretending that it is the private housing market that is the anomaly."

I think it is the anomaly. I believe history proves it.

An example from Wikipedia:
"A consumption subsidy is one that subsidises the behaviour of consumers. These type of subsidies are most common in developing countries where Governments subsidise such things as food, water, electricity and education on the basis that no matter how impoverished, all should be allowed those most basic requirements.[1] For example, some Governments offer ‘lifetime’ rates for electricity, that is, the first increment of electricity each month is subsidised.[1]"

That sounds pretty much what council house occupiers get - a lower rent than available on the open market, because otherwise they wouldn't be able to afford anywhere to live.

That's fine, until their income increases. God knows councils need the money from those who can afford it - they are cutting vital services like old people's homes all over the place now.

Fideline - why is the private housing market the anomaly? How long have council houses been around for, then, and what percentage of the population do they cover?

NB I once bought a former council house from a couple who were both decent earners (household income in the region of £50K, one teenager at home). They'd had years on very low rent as their income increased, then bought the council house for peanuts and sold it off at 6 times what they paid for it.
I don't think it's fair (if that matters to anyone) for public assets to be used like that. And I feel similarly about well off people paying peanuts to a council which is having to cut vital public services.

If you read the conversation from 9.30 to about 12.40 today Dino you can see what lots of us said about that. I have to dash to GP appt or i'd repeat some of it to you.

Would really be interested in whether any of it sways you.

Have a , get comfy and have a look.

what we said about private being the anomaly or not, that is

out of interest dino.. how much do you think council rent actually is on average?

Shouldn't people be annoyed by the very high private rents?

I pay full rent for my HA home in the village i grew up. Locals are being out priced by holiday homes and BTL. So HA is our only chance to have a home in our own village.

It's not right at all.

I agree with fideline (and others).

I grew up in a 3-bedroom council house on a northern 1970s-built estate that my parents have occupied since new. However, they exercised RTB (quite late on, for legal reasons to do with the type of tenancy) and that property is no longer part of social housing. You now have two elderly people in an unsuitable (IMO) family house and when they no longer want to use it, it will be sold on the open market.

I, on the other hand, didn't even think to try for a CH tenancy in the late 80s when I moved to outer London - I'd have been laughed out of the office. So I got on the mortgage spiral asap. After 13 years, I sold my flat for more than double and traded up to a family house 100 miles away - although the flat had doubled, I made nothing (in effect) because I still needed somewhere to live. The same flat sold 7-8 years later for double again (and the then owner moved to a large house almost 200 miles away).

Another 15 years later, I have sold the house (for roughly half as much again, taking into account additional building works I paid for) and am moving into an existing household, so do not need to buy another house. What am I going to do with my "windfall"? I'm going to become a (spawn-of-the-devil) BTL LL. I intend to move to giving people security of tenure asap and I will deliberately price below the "market" (but enough to pay mortgage and maintenance) in order to ensure I get good tenants who pay on time. Why will I do that? Because I expect to work until ~68yo, my "good" pension pot will yield an annuity of about £4K per year and I'm not convinced state pension will exist by then. The rent will provide me with income. If I put a family houseful of money into any other type of saving, I'd expect it to erode badly.

Who is subsidising whom in that lot? The only people I really see making money are the baby-boomers (like my parents) who were handed a wad by Maggie and the mortgage companies.

The average Market Rent for a 3-bed property is £311.25/wk. £437.50/wk in London. The average social rent is £84.56/wk and £110/wk respectively.

Social rents are subject to economic subsidy.

The net outcome is identical if someone rents a £311.25/wk private sector house and then claims £230 in housing benefit (a cash subsidy), as if they simply rented a £84.56/wk social house (an economic subsidy).

Since the government has control over the supply of land (we have no land shortage, only an artificial constraint through building permit rationing (aka planning)), a mass building programme, where large numbers of social houses are built each year (perhaps 200,000 or more, which is more than the current TOTAL build programme) makes good economic sense, since the government can build much cheaper than private developers, and this will work out cheaper than continuing to pay cash subsidies to the shitty assured-shorthold-tenancy/buy-to-let sector.

The current government is unlikely to repeal the assured shorthold tenancy shit, which paved the way for the festering boil that is buy-to-let to fuck up the housing sector under Blair (albeit it was brought in at the end of the Major government), which would be more of a nuclear option to repairing some of the damage, since it would fuck with millions of buy-to-let investors and their mortgages/the banks.

Actually council housing was designed expressly to provide homes for everybody who wanted one, the idea behind it was on the same street you could have a doctor a baker a police officer and a street cleaner.

That's exactly what it was for

Dinosaursareextinct wrote:
I don't think it's fair (if that matters to anyone) for public assets to be used like that.

I completely agree. But part of the problem is that councils were specifically prevented from using RTB receipts to build more houses (so the stock declined dramatically). And now, they cannot use the rents to subsidise other services - even if SH tenants were to pay "full market rents" that would not release more money for elderly care.

A PP said that the market had been distorted - it has, over 25 years and that is the real scandal that we should all be protesting about.