to think its a disgrace that Cameron is going to stop lifetime council tenancies

[sparklesandglitterxx]

and think that that is NOT the solution to the housing crisis?

the solution as far as i can see it is, lots and lots more council houses need to be built, regulation in private renting needs to be improved, and GENUINELY affordable houses to buy for those on low wages that wish to or are able to buy

fed up of seeing the great things about Britain being chipped away. Why punish renters? The whole Tory attitude towards council housing being a last resort for the destitute disgusts me. council housing needs to be brought back to what it was originally meant for...which is a decent secure home for anyone who wants one. i live on a council estate which is a mix of council, HA and bought. People stay here, they build lives here, generally it is a lovely community. i have never been happier or more settled anywhere i have lived, I have done well in my life and been able to have a big family. my children are happy and thriving at school and have lots of friends. My point is if these changes go through, they will end up DESTROYING communities like ours and so many others. The Tories just seem to want everyone either paying their landlord mates every penny they earn or pushing up house prices by buying. But not everyone wants to buy, and more importantly not everyone CAN buy, (I have friends on good money who are still priced out the market) and hardly anyone would actually CHOOSE to be in insecure, expensive private rented !! I also think that if more people are in secure housing, it will help peoples mental health (hence cutting costs in mental health services), it will improve childrens chances in life, as they wont have to keep moving schools and away from friends etc, it will encourage people to better themselves, it will cut the HB bill, and also with people spending less on their rent they will have more to spend in the economy, thus boosting it!

I also suspect it wont end here....while it will be for new tenants only to start with, i would imagine it will end up being everyone in council / HA

"Ginorwine would you expect home owners to be forced to sell and downsize once their dc have grown up."

The majority of older home owners I know have done exactly this - we have teenage children and are already discussing the timescale on which we should sell our current family home and move somewhere smaller.

We have moved all over for jobs. Nth scotland, seast - I can remember people complaining they canny fin a job. Err, if they were living in the right area there were plenty. But they are tied to their council house and by divine right expect the jobs to come to them.

My comments are not meant to be harsh .
Social housing is a resource .
To be used for those that need it .
Yes council houses were meant to be a home for life .but the world wrongly or rightly isn't like that any more and scarce resources are used to greatest effect to help the most vulnerable surley .
The argument about community i u derstsnd but what about those who privately rent ? They don't get that option and after all social housing is
Social resource for people who are vulnerable
Rented from another party who have a duty to support the most vulnerable
Rented property is rented not owned .

I say this as someone thro work who has seen families living in terrible conditions as they can't get housing .

A lot of people have stated here that council houses were intended to be for life. As someone born in the 60s (20 years after the decisions were made and actions taken) bI can only come to this second-hand. Is there any clear official record of that ? I'm not talking about what politicians said in the press at the time, but a statement of policy somewhere ?

They - people who own houses can't always stay you know .
My friend can't afford her home and has had to sell up .she fought to stay for two years but in the end had to go elsewhere .she lives on a house in an area with high deprivation , much drug use now .she would not get a council house -please don't think all home owners have it easy or have theluxery of staying put ....... She had to be shipped off as you put it .

I am pretty strongly socialist and would never voted tory but I agree with lifetime tenancies being ended.

I also like a pp live on a street of council houses the majority of which are occupied by a single elderly person.

BUT there should still be security - when people's children leave home and they stop qualifying for a 3 bed house they should have the right to maintain their council tenancy status with a new tenancy in a smaller home (there does need to be some more 1bed council homes built urgently)

Here's an idea: what if council rents were 5% HIGHER than local market rents (only works combined wit next para too). So long as the housing benefit ceiling took this into account, no family with actual financial challenges would suffer from this, as their HB would cover the difference anyway. It would be balance-sheet neutral for the councils as the increased "income" would be solely offsetting the increased "outgoings" on HB (they already "pay themselves" this money, it doesn't matter how much they pay themselves). This would mean that when people become affluent enough to afford to move out of council housing they have a genuine incentive because market rents are cheaper.

BUT without some additional measures this would be a recipe for all rents spiralling up because local council rents going up will increase what could be considered "market rent". So there needs to be a sliding scale of charges for private landlords such that charging a modest rent and not being greedy will result in being able to make a modest but fair profit from the investment but higher rents attract additional charges and higher taxes (perhaps a capital gains tax surcharge when the house is sold if an excessive rent got charged at any point) so that landlords are disicentivised from pushing rents up.

Could that work? Or could it be made to work with additional measures I haven't thought of?

Home owners are also susceptible to interest rate changes. We are currently in a period of historically low interest rates but there will be plenty of people who will remember the time around 1990 when interest rates and hence peoples mortgages increased massively in a short period sometimes so they cost more than people's salaries. There were lots of repossessions and a huge crash, probably worse than the on a few years ago.

I do think that the concept of 'a suitable roof over a person's head', rather than 'a specific building in a specific place' should also be built onto the system, in an ideal world.

So e.g. if a family qualified for a council house in area a, but a job was available in area b, then that 'eligibility' should be transferable, as well as eligibility being transferable from a 1 bed flat to a family house to 1 bed sheltered housing as family needs change.

This would, at least in my own experience, more closely 'mirror' how people now behave in the remainder of the housing market - they move for work, they change their housing based on the changing needs of the family. The early model of council housing mirrors in many ways the employment and societal trends at that time - people remaining in the same employment for life, people remaining very much within the same area for much of their life (often the same area as their family has lived for generations). As the rest of society has changed - much more flexible and uncertain employment, much greater mobility in terms of location - the provision of social housing, in a utopian world, would reflect these changes.

Paying full rent (no cheaper than a local private rental either) for forty years as my parents did was hardly a free house.

Any way my point to add was the anecdote that on retirement my parents did leave their 3 bed house to move to a 1 bed flat in pensioner accommodation (off site warden) These flats are now in HA ownership and have been redesignated as being for "vulnerable adults" which is changing the age range of neighbours. I don't think they would choose to move there now tbh.

Having suitable flats for the elderly to move to was what our LA used to do very well.

As requested above, here is a link to the revelant Bill
www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/bills/cbill/2015-2016/0108/cbill_2015-20160108_en_10.htm#sch4

Schedule 4 is the section on changes to secure tenancies. My quick reading is that it applies to new tenancies not existing ones.

LurkingHusband, the context in which councils and non-profit organisations like the Peabody Trust built housing was of a long-standing failure of the market to adequately provide.

You can see this in everything from 1930s novels like South Riding, to Hansard, to the newspaper reports as the building contracts are awarded.

These council houses were to enable low income people (usually working - sometimes it was a condition) to move out of private sector Dickensian slums, where they were sickening and dying from the poor conditions.

Local councils took pride in building housing fit for their citizens and in tearing down the slums.

There simply was no expectation that the private sector would magic up housing adequate in number and quality to replace these massive govt building programmes. It never had before and in fact still hasn't - the Thatcherite home ownership programme relied on selling the council houses, not building sufficient affordable new private-sector housing.

So there was no expectation that people would move from council housing back into a failed private sector. Of course some might choose to, if they had a reason to move and could afford to move into housing of adequate quality.

That's the context in which people expected to live in council housing for life.

Maybe someone could help me with a decision in order to free up a council house should I move my son and his family into one of my rental homes. The dilemma is who should I evict, the man who is seriously ill with cancer or the family who have moved into the area and have children settled in school. They can't afford to buy or should I just leave well alone.

Demographics says no to ever rising house prices. As the older generation dies out the younger generations are not willingly going to vote to pay most of their salary to live in some shitty insecure flat. They will be voting for what will benefit them, either lower house prices or better renting conditions. It is one of the reason why Corbyn is so popular with the young, because he is the only one talking about these gross intergenerational inequalities.

Food is cheap because it is abundant. we should take a lesson from that. we've seen the fewest homes built on this government watch, only to be beaten by the previous government.

YY redstrawberry

I get that it doesnt seem right that there maybe one elederly person in a 3/4 bed council house and theres families overcrowded in private accomadation ideally the single person should move to appropriate accomadation but there may not the right accomadation available also it doesnt seem fair to force the single person out of their home they have lived in all their lives ,not sure what the answer is people dont think we should build more houses. ,Fwiw my parents own a large semi four double bedrooms three reception rooms its way too big for them and its hard for my dad to keep on top of it [ my mums disabled] but they wont hear of moving because its their home and of course they own it so nobody can force them out. Theres a lot of nasty comments on this thread it seems those of us that live in social housing should be the lowest of the low and be grateful to live in some damp dingey crime ridden dump my council house is nice i,m happy to live in this area .

I'm happy that you live in a nice area x2boys. There seem to be quite a few people in this thread who think that social housing should be so awful that it acts like a punishment for not being a home-owner. Old Maggie would be proud

They will be even less thrilled then by the fact that they are currently refutbishing my estate we have all had new front and back doors and they are currently in the process of replacing all the roofs

PausingFlatly

Thank you for taking the time to comment - it is appreciated, and has added to my knowledge.

However, my question still stands. Despite many people believing council (and I am aware there is a distinction between social and council housing) houses were "for life", was there ever any official basis for such a belief.

To use a present day analogy. If you were to read the press, watch TV and listen to the radio, you would be convinced that "hard working families* must be specially mentioned in laws, rules and regulations. But I can guarantee that no reading of any statute would uncover such a reference.

There have been a few occasions in recent history, when the public have been hoodwinked into believing something as "fact" because it's been reported as such, only to discover a few years down the line that the "fact" was never actually committed to in any process of law. Camerons last EU "referendum" springs to mind. A lot of people were convinced it would happen, only to be told "it wasn't a promise you realise ..."

Anyway, returning to tenancies for life ... a lot of the problem stems from the UK having a different stance on renting to the rest of Europe. My father, from a different EU country, often points out that because renting is the default, the laws and society are centred around it. Tenants get real protection, and a symbiotic relationship grows between tenant and landlord. But then rents are lower so people can invest in proper pension schemes and not have to rely on the vagaries of the real estate market to fund their retirement.

It's worth highlighting a societal factor which has a massive effect on house prices, and that's the volatility of relationships, which means that we have an undercurrent of break-ups which - even if temporary - lead to more people needing houses than you'd think. When I worked in property software, I met a few people who had invested - and done very well - on the increased divorce rates of the 70s and 80s.

I liked the comment from a PP who compared UK housing "crisis" with the US gun situation. I felt it was quite an accurate (and "atcha" !!!!) point. It's entirely possible to build enough houses in the UK. We have bricks, timber, steel and slate. Plus a veritable army of tradesmen who would like to do nothing better than assemble these things into houses.

So the fact we aren't is a political one. And it's one we are clearly happy to live with, since we have done all to change it. Now I'm not happy with it. I suspect a lot, if not all of the posters here are happy with it. But then our "democracy" is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner.

I was brought up on a private estate - as people retired they were provided with free housing on the estate. Of course that has had to stop as people live much longer, no houses were becoming available as the retirees lived on - and on.

Same everywhere really, it is life expectancy which is much of the prob.

We have bricks, timber, steel and slate. Plus a veritable army of tradesmen who would like to do nothing better than assemble these things into houses.

the problem is active resistance from certain people and nimbyism. Yes, jobs jobs jobs are waiting.

My fil is retired in a council bungalow his rent stiil isnt free though he still has to pay for it out of his pension SS

"There seem to be quite a few people in this thread who think that social housing should be so awful that it acts like a punishment for not being a home-owner."

No. Social housing should absolutely be decent, solid housing that is fit for purpose. As should private rented housing.

BUT eligibility for council housing should be reviewed regularly - every 5 years seems eminently reasonable - and there should be the flexibility for a) people to move between different types of council property depending on need and b) between different locations.

On the other hand, secured tenancies for private renters should move towards the same type of timescale - from a rolling 6 months as is common at present, to longer leases of 2-5 years.

It needs to be a more level playing field, so there isn't such a huge cliff between 'a council house for life' for those on one side of it, and 'a poorly maintained, over-priced and insecure private rented flat' on the other. More needs to be done on the private rental side to reduce the contrast, so families can move more fluidly between the two sectors as their needs change.

However, my question still stands. Despite many people believing council (and I am aware there is a distinction between social and council housing) houses were "for life", was there ever any official basis for such a belief

Lurkingdad ...I honestly don't know, but given the fact that since council housing was first built, it was always the norm to give secure tenancies (up till recently) suggests tenants were expected to keep their tenancies (if not their homes) for life

It needs to be a more level playing field, so there isn't such a huge cliff between 'a council house for life' for those on one side of it, and 'a poorly maintained, over-priced and insecure private rented flat' on the other. More needs to be done on the private rental side to reduce the contrast, so families can move more fluidly between the two sectors as their needs change.

teacher I do agree that private rental market needs to drastically improve but shouldn't private renting be improved towards the standards of council housing, not council housing brought down towards the shitness of private renting? apologies for bad grammar I am shit at writing