To think dh is winding me up when he says some people on benefits are getting £500 a week?

[angelos02]

I'm pretty sure he's talking bullocks? Otherwise why the fuck would anyone do a minimum wage job?

I'm glad they are limiting the child tax credits to two kids, there's no way having 4 costs 4x the cost of having one. Kids might have to share bedrooms and have hand me downs etc but that's life. Kids do get more costly as they get older but hopefully by then most families will have 2 parents working again. I have no problem with people getting a lot in disability benefits of course, i don't think many people object to that in a civilised society.

It's therefore not hb pushing up rent, cos they aren't paying it. Lack of cheap and authority housing, buy to let, and low wages are responsible.

of course it is. In your example, people have more money to pay rent. So they can pay more.

Without HB, there is a 100% shortfall.

Really babyroobs you can raise a child on £30 a week!

i dont' know how many people on here actually seek or help people seek rented accommodation but no landlords in my area accept people on benefits and estate agents won't even show you a property before ascertaining you work full time and earn at least 25k.

hb levels won't effect them in the slightest.

oh and guarantors are not accepted unless it's because you are on a probationary period in a profession and thus it would be a short term thing anyway.

i don't know where these private landlords who rent to HB are but there are none that i know of in the town i live in.

Same here Honey

Same here Honey

yes - i'm sure it must be widespread just5.

i had a ridiculous conversation with an estate agent recently where i wanted to view a flat that i could happily have afforded and started to get an interrogation about my income. told them my total income and got barked at that it couldn't include tax credits or child maintenance from an ex and it had to be via full time employment. utter madness and discrimination - they said it was because 'benefits could be lost' and maintenance stopped - err think it's easier to lose your job than have tax credits removed that you are entiteld to and if an ex stops paying maintenance there is recourse.

it was all done very rudely tbh and there was clearly no way round it. apparently NO to a guarantor and NO they didn't care if i had 20k savings in the bank to show them

i just don't buy this HB pushes up rent business. the demand is so high for rental properties here they don't even have to consider anyone who isn't FT employed earning 25k plus even for a poxy little two bed flat.

hab how do you figure that out? There is a shortfall whether you work or not in my example. Whether you are deemed able to afford £0 or £100, you'd still be paying that inflated £50 towards rent from an income around breadline levels.

HoneyBadger An excellent post. !!

There are 8.3 million rented properties in the UK, the average yearly rent is £10, 788, which suggests that the size of UK rents is around £89 billion a year.

Housing benefit paid therefore makes up 29% of the entire market, not really enough to determine prices. As others have said there are huge swathes of the market that won't even consider HB recipients, and the caps mean that many properties would be unobtainable.

A far more higher determinant of housing would be the scarcity in areas where there is demand, like London. On top of this there it must be remembered that sizeable amount of HB is paid to pensioners and not those in work.

To respond to an earlier post.

The total number of households in which both generations were workless was specifically found to be 178,742 and the number of working households is 20.4 million. So its actually 0.87 % of households in the UK where two generations are workless.

Of this, 45% have either not worked in the last 5 years or never worked, so a total of 80, 451.9 households. This makes up on its own 0.39% of all working households.

Its a very, very small number.

honey

A few years ago a service user of mine attempted to rent a house and pay the full tenancy period up front before even moving in plue all deposits and everything required.

They wouldn't let her

Housing benefit paid therefore makes up 29% of the entire market, not really enough to determine prices.

i'll assume that's a joke. given how little you have to move interest rates to affect a housing market, I think sucking 1/3 of the demand out of a system may effect prices a tad.

hb levels won't effect them in the slightest.

of course it will because the neighbours house that accepts HB now has a tenant in it.

You can't supply 1/3 of the money to a system and expect it won't affect prices. that's absurd. you have just increased demand by a massive amount.

Does it really matter if they do?

I support & meet service users in my profession who earn in benefits exactly the same as my net monthly salary - £1500.

I do not begrudge them one penny.

Then how do you explain the trend that as housing benefits have been cut, rents have continued to rise? Would you not think that the determinants of price driving the increases to rent are more important than housing benefit?

Also, the areas in which housing benefit is paid are usually those that have the lowest rents of any given area.

The entire benefits debate is driven by innate greed." If someone else wasn't getting tax credits then I'd pay less tax and have more money". "If there wasn't housing benefit I'd be able to afford a better flat/pay less rent".

The question is, what would you do rather than have these benefits?

If we paid the accredited living wage of £8.20 per hour (outside of London), then firms would merely pass the cost on to customers, so you'd pay higher prices, and probably not have anymore money in your pocket.

BTW the average weekly HB payment is £93.

Further to my point, housing benefit has fallen in terms of what you are allowed to claim, and has also fallen since 2012 in the number of claimants.

Oh and this embarrassing, sorry, my calculation was based on the number of private rentals in the UK, and the amount of HB paid.

1.6 million are in the private rented sector, this means that of the 8.3 million private rental homes in the UK. Which means that only 19% of the market is HB. So 81% is not.

Oh lets do the sums... I'm bored.

In terms of market size, the UK rental housing market is worth about £89 billion, so the contribution to the rental market housing market of HB is £16.9 bn.

Its not the driving determinant of rental prices. Sorry.

smallfox it never ceases to amaze me the mental gymnastics some will do so that they can blame people lower down the socio economic scale.

I've said before Helena, that its a very clever distraction technique by those who are actually reaping it in.

"Look at what the poor have got, don't mind me taking far more than my fair share for my efforts, look at what the poor have got, get angry"

Then how do you explain the trend that as housing benefits have been cut, rents have continued to rise? Would you not think that the determinants of price driving the increases to rent are more important than housing benefit?

other factors? nobody said it was the only driving force.

The question is, what would you do rather than have these benefits?

take your pick. higher education, NHS, better policing, primary education, parks, people with disabilities, ...

In terms of market size, the UK rental housing market is worth about £89 billion, so the contribution to the rental market housing market of HB is £16.9 bn.

hb was close to 25bn.

if you don't think a 20% injection of money is enough to move the price, well then there isn't much more I can say.

smallfox it never ceases to amaze me the mental gymnastics some will do so that they can blame people lower down the socio economic scale.

if you read my earlier post, I don't blame the people collecting it. it's a screwed up system where people need it. however, this "fix" is making the problem worse.

"hb was close to 25bn."

3.3 million people on HB are in social housing, so not market rents.

Last sum of the evening (sorry geekiness alert)

If we take the number of people in the private HB market, and multiply it by the average amount of HB paid per year we end up at a figure of £7.9 bn, so we come to a figure of 8%.

This further suggests, which we already know to be true, the HB doesn't make up all of the rent, especially in the private system.

"take your pick. higher education, NHS, better policing, primary education, parks, people with disabilities"

Well for one, many people with disabilities will be in receipt of HB. Also what do we do with those people who can't afford to rent somewhere? The streets? That comes with a social and fiscal cost too.

I'm going to stop boring people with figures now, but one last one,

A bit more digging find that the average paid to those in the rental market is £107.28. Or £5,578 per year.

If we multiply this by the the number of HB claims in the private rental sector of 1.6 million, it gives us £8.92 billion or 10.1% of the entire size of the market.

Even with this refining of the figures, then I really don't think HB is one of the main factors causing rising rents, its an effect not a cause.

If we were to have a major cut in housing benefit there would then be a significant impact on consumer spending and aggregate demand. People receiving housing benefit will have a high marginal propensity to consume because they have limited disposable income. A cut in housing benefits would save the government money, but lead to a fall in total demand. Which in turn would lead to rising unemployment and higher benefits bills.

I don't think cutting HB is the option.