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

Council housing can't be offered for life until there's mass building of new houses. That isn't happening and existing stock is being snapped up by existing tenants. So, lifetime tenancies won't be possible unless that changes, which is highly unlikely while so much private wealth is tied up in housing.

So, the current situation being what it is, I don't agree with permanent tenancies. Others have outlined the pitfalls upthread - circumstances changing, no longer a need for a house of a particular size, people cashing in on right to buy. The thing that needs urgently addressed is building more one and two bedroom apartments - high quality, well soundproofed with decent, maintained communal spaces. Ditto one and two bedroom houses. That way council tenants can be offered new housing as they get older or if they are young and single, freeing up larger houses for families.

Good point mrs .
This avaliability would also support the ethos of it being a resource and people would be discouraged I hope from thinking that it ok to expect a public resource to be given to them on a permanent basis .right now I doubt there may be limited options .however , if tenants have benefitted from subsidised below market value it may be possible to save what they May have had to pay at market prices and buy ?

Alfie - your situation is of course different if you had to give up work and the benefits you will get to help you and the benefits your dc will get , are totally different to the joke that is tax credits .

Are we going to have any countryside left in fifty years, I wonder

Winter swan - I have pondered that myself, I live in Scotland it's a beautiful place with lots of villages, just lovely and quiet. I hear people saying just build more houses but if we just build houses willy nilly where will the food come from? It's more complex than just building a load of houses

There are plenty of one and two bed flats in my road- but they're not empty- they're full of young families with up to 4 children.

A much better value use of the existing housing stock could be achieved by making people pursue mutual exchanges once they were underoccupying the larger houses.

"The benefits you will get to help you"

Do you mean carer's allowance? That's a pitiful £62.10 per week and that's per carer not per person you look after.

My friend gets that to look after her disabled adult son, her husband who has a serious illness and alszimers and her elderly and frail dad.

If one of them dies or goes into a home should the rest of the family have to move, despite having been in their home for over 40 years?

That's not the kind of society we should be aspiring to.

On paper this all sounds "fair" but we're talking about people not widgets. The reality of these kind of policies is that you are ripping apart what little community we have left, turfing disabled, elderly and frail people out of familiar surroundings (which may well affect their health) and uprooting children from their school and friends.

These kind of policies have huge social costs that don't even nearly balance the problems they're trying to address.

The answer is staring us in the face. We're short of afforable housing? We simply need to build more council houses FFS. I can't believe it's even a debate.

Done well, it would be an investment for the tax payer, and the knock on effect would be to improve standards and lower prices in the private rented sector, not to mention putting a lid on the crazy price rises which mean so many generations can't afford to buy where they grew up but have to move away. What's not to like?

It's not in infantilising people to build council housing - what rubbish! Is your private landlord infantilising you? Of course not.

Are you trying to suggest that 'community' is only available within council estates? If so that's pretty derogatory of those in private rentals, and trying to reframe the argument to 'turfing people out' is missing the point that this policy is to address the suitability on a fixed term basis, it is totally fair to suggest that if someone's situation has improved, that resource is then freed up so it can be available for someone else in need.

Whilst your obviously right that the answer is to build more council houses(actually all types of houses), this has been staring us in the face since the late 90's and is far more complex than just an 'evil tory' plot. Among the many myriad of problems are private companies /net immigration and most of all the voting demographic, until this demographic changes the government of the day isn't really going to tackle this situation head on.

Even when this situation is tackled head on and there is an abundance of council housing, this policy is still fair IMO

The answer is staring us in the face. We're short of afforable housing? We simply need to build more council houses FFS. I can't believe it's even a debate.

we need houses of all shapes, colours, sizes and tenures. we don't need council houses. we need houses.

lifetime tenancies are not fair

why should anyone be given a house with low rent and no fear ever of losing their home and having to move

have no problem with council houses but for those on low income and young children

not still there 10yrs later earning thousands or even 20yrs later and babies now in their 20's/moved out

def should be looked at and renewed every 5yrs

i know of many people who live in a 3bed council but only them

i know woman who were single parents and struggling get a place then years later meet someone and they move in so another income yet they stay there

and even more annoying is those in council places who have 1/2 children in a 2bed home then want more and demand a bigger home

if you want 5 children in a 3bed place then yes 3 will share one room and 2 another - doesnt mean you get a 4+ bed place

the average person who either privatley rents/has a mortgage will have only enough children to fit their home

obv we need lots more one bed flats/masionettes/small homes to then downsize people at a later date

maybe instead of these high luxury 3 + bed homes always being built, to build one bed places

why should anyone be given a house with low rent and no fear ever of losing their home and having to move

lots of jurisdictions have much stronger tenancy protections than we do in the UK. What i find odd here is that people only clamour for these protections for SH tenants. Why not everyone?

Blonde how sad that you find it " not fair" that people don't have to " live in fear".

Speaks volumes about a person doesnt it Seven. Things are changing for social housing tenants too to bring their rights down to those of private tenants so fear not Blonde You and others have got their wish.

Google Joe Halewoods blog SpeyJoe Its not light reading however. He also talks of how policies are going to close sheltered housing and womens refuges too.

leaningtoweroflego, agree with you absolutely. We've tried privatising the provision of rented housing and it has been an unmitigated, costly disaster. Every year we give over £12 BILLION in housing benefit to private landlords, while one in three private sector rental properties are substandard. Those substandard properties are costing us an awful lot, not to mention the social cost of having millions of people living in substandard homes - the drain on social services and council enforcement officers, and that's before you even get onto the human cost of people living in housing that is not fit for purpose but costs the state (yes I'll say it again) TWELVE BILLION POUNDS EVERY YEAR. How come we can afford to pay off these slumlords' mortgages but we can't afford to build decent houses for our citizens and workers?

If we capped private rents at a sensible level, at the level of social housing (which is actually not subsidised at all as the provision represents a net benefit to the treasury in rent receipts, even taking into account tenants such as pensioners who rely on housing benefit), and wiped even one year of that £12 billion bill, how many new houses would that build? And how much rent revenue would then be shovelled back into public coffers? Answer: a lot. It isn't even about what makes humane sense - although actually I think that affordable rent and a secure home isn't asking for the fucking moon on a fucking stick - it's actually sound economics.

Nobody can ever be sure of keeping their home Blonde.

Ever heard of a compulsory purchase order?

Google it!

Be nice if govts didn't legislate to deny people a secure home for no reason though, wouldn't it?

edinburgh.stv.tv/articles/1331569-charity-landlord-accused-of-underhand-tactics-to-remove-elderly-tenants/

Disgusting. Not sure what your point is though.

"Are you trying to suggest that 'community' is only available within council estates"

Not in the slightest, where did you get that idea from? I was suggesting that community is important, I didn't qualify what type of community - I meant community in general. But this policy is about council housing, and I don't notice anyone shouting about how communities are being ripped apart and I wonder why that is?

I suspect 40 years ago it would have been a different story.

It's kind of hard to build a community when everyone living in it is always two months away from eviction.

"why should anyone be given a house with low rent and no fear ever of losing their home and having to move"

Why is this such a problem for you?

Shouldn't everyone have a home they can afford, and be able to live without fear of losing it?

All your points are to do with limited supply - the intelligent solution is surely to build more housing not evict those who have a home?

Building isn't the only answer. They could flush out all the amateur btl brigade and give proper secure renters rights like in Europe.

Getting a council house in central London is like wining the lottery. Then they give a 75k discount to buy it just makes the world a more unequal place.

"Building isn't the only answer. They could flush out all the amateur btl brigade and give proper secure renters rights like in Europe."

Yes, agreed. Renters should have more rights.

I despair when people - many of them on this thread even - ask why Council tenants should have secure homes when they themselves don't.

It's the wrong question! Why on earth do people want to support a system where people are worse off?

The right question IMO is why don't we all have secure homes? And what is the government going to make housing more secure for council tenants and private tenants.

As you rightly point out, this is not an impossible problem - other countries have found workable solutions.

But people here are largely unaware of them IME.

It's got a lot to do with the fact that our right-wing press doesn't report in that kind of thing so people are generally ignorant of it IMO. Instead it repeats a mantra about the market being king, so people accept vastly inflated rents as being the "real" price (despite there being all sorts of artificial conditions pushing those prices up) and can't understand how council rent isn't "subsidised" or a hand-out.

This government are managing to pull off a massive con trick - they are restructuring our society so the rich get even richer and the rest of us pay for it. But they have the very people their policies harm arguing for them!

I wish it was generally understood that creating more council housing helps private renters, instead of people displaying this pernicious us-and-them attitude.

Building is the answer but as council houses are subsidised this puts a real disincentive to investing in more espcially when that investment may end up tied to someone who doesn't need that level of subsidy.

I live in a lovely community. Half the houses are privately rented, the rest are privately owned but the jobs are not long term and there is a large turn over of renters and private owners each year. But as I say it is a lovely community where newcomers are always welcome and supported.