to think it is fair enough that High earners, earning £30000 pa have to pay market rates for social housing.

[NoahVale]

www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jul/04/david-cameron-ally-rohan-silva-firms-must-be-forced-raise-low-pay

I spose there has to be a cut off somewhere, and I spose it helps that I dont earn £30,000,
no doubt if it was just in the bracket I might feel a bit peeved.

[MrsChiefTyrell]

That should read "we will be forced to deliberately reduce our income to just under 30k"

[MuffMuffTweetAndDave]

And if you reduce your work income so you're under 30k, you might even end up eligible for HB!

[MrsChiefTyrell]

Thanks MuffMuff. Even if I work full time (we have a newborn plus 4 others aged 4, 6, 7, 8) I could never earn the extra £12k a year we need just to be where we are now and anyway childcare for 5 kids including two full time as not in school would always be far more than we could afford. Tax Credits won't help much if at all with childcare especially now thresholds have reduced.

We will have to reduce working hours so income under 30K. How crap is that.

[MrsChiefTyrell]

Yeah we'd get more tax credits and probably Housing Benefit. Well done Tories! We will have to lower our income or be homeless and then we shall have to claim it back in benefits! Argh!

[MuffMuffTweetAndDave]

How wonderful that you're going to have to become less productive members of society mrschieftyrell. Just what the country needs. Fewer tax receipts. Alternatively, by my reckoning CB for 5 kids is just shy of 4k pa. It may be more to your advantage to keep your earned income the same but stop claiming that, depending on your long term work prospects. Or keep CB but stop TCs. May be a number of options.

[MrsChiefTyrell]

CB or TC arent used in the calculation of "household income" for the 30k income threshold for reduced social housing rent though is it? I haven't included either. So we are even more screwed if they are :(

Thinking about it, as a blended family there will be lots of other issues for us an other blended families. As a blended family (as many are nowadays) we have other factors to consider: For example- we cannot give up CB for 4 of our children. If we did then their other parent would be automatically entitled to it (despite then living with us full time) and as the parent whom doesn't receice the CB must pay maintenance to the other parent we'd end up having to pay child maintenance to my ex and my partner's ex for the children that live with us.

[MuffMuffTweetAndDave]

Oh right, I thought CB and CTCs were considered. Can anyone confirm? I guess either way, if you're not able to give up your CB, that further reduces the options available to you. You could give up TCs, although I don't know if you'd still be entitled to them anyway? You mentioned losing some upthread.

If TCs and CB aren't considered at all, very possible that your family would be better off with the lower earner giving up work, and claiming lots more top up benefits instead and staying under the 30k threshold. A marvellous scheme. Bet you'd get HB too, if one of you was on 20kish with 5 DC and £600 a month rent!

[MrsChiefTyrell]

Yes, can anyone confirm is TC and CB are used int he 30k calculation?

[Toofat2BtheFly]

This is the bit that gets my goat !

SH housing cannot be compared to rentals on the open market ,

When I took possession of my tenancy my house was a wreck , bare plaster walls , bare concrete floor, waist high garden , bare minimum of everything . Obviously we ploughed what we could to get it liveable and continue to do so when we can .

A similar house on a private let would have been all done and ready to go . Had it been council standard of ready to go , no one would have agreed to the tenancy without a massive reduction in rent thus bringing the market value down iyswim .

Will there be any payback for us from the council for investing our money ?

[MuffMuffTweetAndDave]

One of the more biting ironies here is that, as a blended family, you quite possibly take less out of the benefits pot even with the 1 extra child than you would've as two separate one parent, two child households. One less lot of eldest child CB rate for a start. You'd be living in two houses instead of one, and if a 3 bed ex-council is £1400 a month privately in your town, ie more expensive than average, it's potentially an area where there isn't enough housing stock for everyone who'd like to live there. You don't mention who earns what, but I can't see how at least one of the separate households wouldn't be entitled to HB as modest earner/s in a fairly dear postcode. I'm not sure what the new TC thresholds are now, but suspect you'll be getting a sliver at most now, whereas with 2 each at least one of your households and probably both would still be well under.

TBH I suspect some couples in your situation will simply choose to live separately. Cost of maintaining an extra household might work out cheaper than the extra rent, if there are going to be more top up benefits involved.

[strangechild]

Muff

With respect strangechild, it doesn't really make any difference what anyone thinks of people taking action to ensure they remain under the threshold. Nor even whether it turns out to be the best decision for the long term

'Taking action to remain under the threshold' is what others might describe as playing the system.

But actually I wasn't making a moral point, I was making practical one: if you rely on the state for hb or tax credits, don't surprised if they are reduced again and again over time. The uk's current level of debt is unsustainable. This is a fact. And anyone who refuses to engage with this fact and think about the longterm is not doing themselves any favours, that is all.

[MuffMuffTweetAndDave]

Describe it how you want, that wasn't my point. The claim that income reduction won't be doing a person any good in the long run, or at least the implication that a person will do better if they don't, is purely speculative. And even if it wasn't, not everyone doing so will have the option of thinking long term. This is as much a fact as the debt.

[chasingmybabies3]

A household income of 40k for a family in London is not much when you take into account food, bills, childcare etc. This seems to be yet another way of keeping people down & halting social mobility. Does anyone know when this will come into effect ? It will be interesting to see how they will mange this fairly.

[Unreasonablebetty]

I think they should pay the market rate if they earn 30k per year,

A year ago we were right at that earning point with just my husbands wage, no other help and it wasn't easy or hard, BUT we live in the smallest (built as an extension then renovated into a house) home that any one says they've ever seen. We live in the South east and pay £700 per month opposed to others who live in a normal sized house on the same street paying £1150.
And even our house is almost double the rent of a council tenants in the same area.

No way is it fair that my husband pays almost double what council tenants do, when we have half the house to show for it... whilst having quite a bit of extra cash.

I do however believe that there needs to be some wriggle room with that 30k- depending on house costs in the area so those who are dead on 30k a year don't end up being screwed over.

[HelenaDove]

Council housing dosent actually exist anymore and HAs are private companies not charities

[cleaty]

My parents rent on their council house is £500 a month. The houses privately rented are £600 per month, but they are usually furnished. The reason they want to live in a council house is that they are both disabled, and so moving is extremely difficult and stressful for them.

All of the private rents close by are short term lets. My parents wont be affected by this policy, but if they could have long term private rents then they would be fine with doing that. They need to live close by as they get help from family.

They need to provide security to private tenants. That is why so many people want a council house.

[RufusTheReindeer]

Not read the whole thread yet, but i just had to say that i agree with ghosty

When CB went for some incomes 60k was a high earner, then it was 40ish and now its 30k, its getting lower and lower, minimum wage is going to get higher

Its going to meet in the middle and then minimum wage earners will be high earners and entitled to no help

[goodnessgraciousgoudaoriginal]

I guess the message to most people on here would be "welcome to the middle class"?

I especially like the double standards about deliberately shunting down work hours, or one person giving up work so that couples can still afford subsidised housing and keep their nicer home locations/lifestyles, whilst in the same breath decrying those who evade tax. It's pretty much the same mentality on both sides "I do enough already, I work my arse off and deserve some benefits to that", but one is acceptable and one isn't apparently.

There are literally hundreds of thousands of people who can't afford market rent in the area they would need to live - so they have to commute from an area that they CAN afford, even if it means scraping by. Why is this okay for them but not for others?

I strongly disagree that building more and more housing is the way forwards. I personally do not want the country to turn into a total concrete jungle, destroying all our wildlife, because we couldn't control population numbers, or sort out a workable solution to housing.

Market rents should be controlled within reason. Long term rentals should be given strong incentives but with decent get out clauses to protect landlords against truly nightmare tenants. People should have to pay fees on second homes which are empty for more than X months in a year (sometimes they might need to be empty for works or whilst finding other tenants obviously). It should be illegal for companies to build new apartments and keep them empty.

[gamerchick]

In what way are CHs subsidised goodness or what way do you think they are?

[StrawberryTeaLeaf]

Council housing dosent actually exist anymore

It does in many areas Helena, including many London boroughs.

[gamerchick]

Yup it does here as well.

[hilsyou]

Council housing dosent actually exist anymore
That would be a surprise to my landlord (my council) who still own 13,000 homes (including mine!). Some areas don't have any council housing as it was transferred to HAs, but that's certainly not true of every council in the UK.

[StrawberryTeaLeaf]

I did this calculation on the closest council housing to me (a mixture of 2 bed maisonettes and 4 bed houses) back in the summer.

The 4 bed houses that have been bought under RTB and are now advertised for rent seem to command rentals in the range £2500-2800 pcm, which is roughly what the net of a £40kpa gross income would work out at, depending how it was split between two people.

So the WHOLE of a couple's earnings would then go on rent!? Madness.

I am nosey to know what the council rents for those houses are. Soon only people who bought some time ago or very poor social tenants will be able to afford the city. It boggles my brain.

[StrawberryTeaLeaf]

I'm equally boggled that people are willing to pay nearly £3k rent pcm to live in a very ordinary ex-LA house in a not particularly lovely part of London.

[goodnessgraciousgoudaoriginal]

gamer - subsidised in so much as they are a finite number of homes provided to those in need outside of the private renting market, with significantly lower rates than would be charged otherwise.