To think that the council shouldn't put problem families together

[dimondjedi9]

Either side of me I have lovely neighbours, they care about their children and just generally want a nice peaceful life.
Going further down and there are many problem families, police attending regularly and kids left to run riot.
I live in a new estate and to begin with it was lovely, now it has an awful reputation.
I don’t like my son playing out because of bullying and when you try to discuss it with the parents you get a lot of abuse.
I don’t understand why the council put all these families in the same place, it creates such an awful environment.

They should just give problem families "Assured Shorthold Tenancies" so that they can be evicted after 12 months if they don't behave (exactly the same tenancy as tenants in the private sector have). That way social landlords can evict people after a "probationary" period. Why should they get more security and cheaper rents than families who behave but live in the private rented sector? Why should their kids have the insecurity of private renting whilst problem families can act with impunity and still have a secure tenancy. It just sends out a really conflicting (and negative) message that society rewards bad behaviour so why do the right thing?

no amount of facts and figures will change my mind
I'm glad you know your argument would fall to shit in the face of debate Jessikita

It's funny really, it's almost like people think the only inhabitants of council or HA properties are those who don't work (ex HA tenant, both of us worked and claimed not a single penny during our tenancy or indeed our working lives.).

Op, something needs to be done. But I don't think clubbing people together based on behaviour for better or worse is A. Workable or B. Affordable.
What needs to be done is a crack down on behaviour. I would also support a strikes system. But your initial idea isn't workable.
All you can really do is complain and keep complaining until you're blue in the face. You'll get somewhere eventually. May take a while though.

To dispel some other myths

Council housing and benefits may work in tandem but are not mutually exclusive and you don't need one to have the other. So I'd say benefits are largely irrelevant. The worst tenant damage I've ever seen was done by a working private tenant (£35,000 of damage including shit on the floor up the walls piss soaked carpets... human too not even an animal did it 😫😫).

You do not get extra priority for anti social behaviour - the opposite is true. You can lose priority and if you've been evicted within the last x amount of years they can and do refuse to house you. Particularly in areas where council houses are in high demand (which isn't everywhere, outside of cities and the SE council housing can be easier to obtain).

Also, putting kids in care actually increases the risks of several issues including likelihood to spend time behind bars, to become a NEET, to abuse or be abused in a relationship, difficulty with attachment and in general coping in society. So it would cost the government a fortune, negatively effect the children far more and of course harm the parents too (increased risk of suicide, addiction and other issues in parents who have a child removed from there care.)

in short, what a fucking stupid idea!!

grumpyfrog how would that work if the tenants have children? We really can't have kids forced to sleep rough, society hasn't declined that badly. Parents know that although the council has a duty to house the kids not the parents, in reality it doesn't work like that

If you are so bad that you can't even be housed, house the children separately. With foster families. For good.

Maybe that way they will have a chance of breaking the cycle and give those kids a hope.

also i suspect that the people who think those kind of answers are appalling are those that don't have real experience of these things. Those of us who do are realistic about the issues and understand that the current system doesn't work for anyone.

Many HA's do give AST's, mine did (a few years ago now too).
After 12-36 months you're either offered a long term tenancy, asked to leave (if you've done something wrong) or placed onto a rolling tenancy if you've done some things wrong (ie, broken something in the house but then fixed it) but nothing major enough to consider asking you to leave.
I don't know how common it is though. But worth a suggestion. I don't think cheaper rents is always the case though, certainly wasn't with mine. The rent was cheap but so were private let's in the area. I took the house because I loved it though and actually found it online among private rentals (some properties that aren't wanted or needed were offered to the public). Not because it was cheap or anything...

They did this with the village my OH grew up in. It was a nice little village albeit with a comparitively large council house level and that's the bit my OH grew up in. All the people who had grown up there were decent people, then they started using it as a dump to rid alll the little touristy villages and towns of their "problem" families. It's a no go area for most now the shop/post office and pub have closed so other than the primary school,there is nothing there at all and it's a long walk or bus ride to get to anywhere. Beautiful situation on the banks of a lovely river. Now ruined and no-one decent wants to live there so it just gets worse and worse. I have no idea what the answer is though.

Charge them? Chaotic parents often don't have any money. You can't take away somebody's subsistence benefits via a fine.

People think taking children into care magically gives them a stable life, but this isn't the case. The instability caused by being in foster care is damaging in itself and should only be considered when the instability or danger from being at home is significantly higher. It is a nice thought to pluck children from imperfect situations and give them some structure but in reality it doesn't work like that.

There is indeed a problem with anti social behaviour, but I don't think you fix it by going in heavy handed, it's inhumane to force people onto the streets or deprive them of money for food no matter how they have behaved. Even prisoners get food and shelter. People who behave in this way are generally acting out patterns from their own childhood trauma, or have substance abuse issues, poorly managed mental health conditions, etc. They need help and support and respect - at the moment they are shat on by every angle of society, is it much of a surprise that they kick back?

Charge them? Chaotic parents often don't have any money. You can't take away somebody's subsistence benefits via a fine

Charge them as in criminal charges, not financial ones. And not all problem families are on a low income or benefits, that’s a sweeping generalisation.

Foster care may not be the answer but more adoptions from birth might be. Cycle needs to be broken.

Obviously decent jobs, help and support would be nice but as long as people vote Tory, that won’t happen.

Simply taking children from families who cannot care for them may seem harsh, but I cannot see any other answer.

I grew up on a sink estate. Not fun.

My DP used to live on a sink estate it was sad because there was a community group who actively tried to keep the estate nice. They'd clean up the rubbish and keep the playground safe. But it was the families where the parents couldn't care less about what their children were up to!

These kids ran riot, throwing rubbish and broken toys in peoples gardens. At Halloween they'd smash up pumpkins, throw fireworks at houses, damage cars. Police and council did bugger all.

I felt so sorry for people who bought houses on that estate, I was so glad I didn't have to live there.

Sorry but it's possible to have a similar income on benefits to those in paid jobs with enough children and poor doesn't equal badly behaved. Many middle class families just as bad in different ways. Of course the majority of social housing tenants are very well behaved, but there is definitely a hard core minority of feral families who have lots of kids (5 kids would give a family approximately £350 per week in tax credits and child benefit alone) so even if they are subject to the benefit cap they would get a minimum of £18k per year. If their rent is low (and paid for by housing benefit), they have quite a lot of money, so not poor (not rich either but a reasonable amount). If the kids are being neglected and allowed to run riot then how is staying with chaotic, unloving parents any better than being removed from such an environment?

Perhaps the kids could be sent to boarding school instead of being put into care (I think this has already been done for some vulnerable children), so they can get a good education and some stability. Sure it's not perfect but why waste public money on police and social workers if the situation never changes. Surely in some cases it is better to remove the children from the situation before they get to a point of no return.

Honestly cactusjelly I’ve debated my view a thousand times over with various people from all walks of life, done various reading of studies etc and whilst I respect everyone’s right to disagree with me. That is MY opinion and views formed and that is what I believe is a huge amount of the problem.

And no my argument would not fall to short at all. I dispute many facts and figures and could provide contradictory evidence to most people who quote studies. You can engineer a non scientific study to come up with what result you like, particular in a social context.

An example - A poverty survey - it all depends on how you define poverty. In the UK that’s very different to how it’s perhaps definite in Bangladesh.

@Lokisglowstickofdestiny

Evict them, leave the adults to it - get the children into foster/adoptive care with people who might help bring them up to be responsible individuals.

Yeah, because the care system isn't on its knees or anything. The reason social workers are reluctant to take children into care unless things are really dire is that the care system does not have good outcomes.

Is there a never ending amount of foster carers I’ve missed because where I live the local authorities are crying out for foster carers but looking at some posters on this thread putting children in care is the best option??

I agree jessikita
I grew up on a sink estate. Lived there until my late 20's
People that worked were in the tiny minority. (Plenty of jobs in the area) the adults were feral, let alone the kids.
Scumbags that dumped rubbish in communal areas, fires, human excrement in communal areas, trees torn down, loud music, drugs, my car (alongside 6 others) smashed up for no reason, theft, alcoholics in stairwells, child abuse, elder abuse you name it.
It's no wonder no money is wasted in these places.
The kids have no hope. It was the norm to get knocked up at 16 With the aim to get free accomodation and benefits. It was a lifestyle for these people.
I'm so fucking glad I got out. (Not difficult, I got off my arse and got a job.)

Our council do introductory tenancies which can terminated or extendedz they can also now downgrade a secure to and introductory for anti social behaviour. They are quite strich, the estates here are nothing like what they were in the 90s

Bloody auto correct

MrMeeseekscando fair play to you for getting out, I applaud you. You know as well as I do, that there are estates with four generations who have simply never left the estate. I was really quite shocked, working with them, living in a London suburb, there are children who have never been on a train or a bus or even seen the Thames let alone the seaside. Their parents cross breed and inter marry to the point it beomes virtually incestuous. So many half/step siblings brought into the mix. The Tia Sharpe/Shannon Matthews cases exemplified this. No one wants to live anywhere near these sorts of people. At least the old style estates contained them together, with new housing you have one or two families with complex needs and that's your whole neighbourhood down the swanny.

We lived on a new build deveopment of about 20 houses, around 5 were owner occupied, 10 bought by a buy to let landlord and let to private tenants, and the other 5 leased to the local housing association who used them for short term accommodation.

We had a never ending procession of problem families in and out of the houses. There was the woman who sublet the garage to three Polish factory workers then did a moonlight flit, then the ones who trashed the bathroom and the kitchen of their property within 3 months and the HA had to replace it, then the ones with the motorbikes and the loud music, and finally the drug dealers. Our final straw in the street was when I brought my 3 year old home from nursery fo find a full scale police raid complete with metal battering rams and sniffer dogs in progress. They found enough heroin to indicate dealing, along with other things like mobile phones and scales. But the two people in the property each blamed each other, the Police didn't prosecute and the HA didn't care.

I'm not sure what the answer is - spreading these sorts of scumbags around more so that they don't meet other scumbags to be antisocial with?

If it's housing estates geared to families, maybe the benefits system needs to change so that it doesn't 'pay' to have more children than you could otherwise afford? Maybe if these parents had to work to keep the roof over their heads they would appreciate it more and teach their kids to respect the same? www.telegraph.co.uk/news/general-election-2015/politics-blog/11726755/If-you-want-more-kids-than-you-can-afford-its-not-my-job-to-pay-for-them.html

Large clusters of council housing is a prime way to creating ghettos. The problem is the attitude of the establishment. You put those families together and you are essentially telling them, they are fucked. They got moved somewhere where they are expected to live and create havoc together and them and their offspring have no future.
If the families were distributed and more effort was put into education and working closely together with those families, especially their children, it would look different.
If you tell or show someone you are writing them off, they will quit trying. Creating large clusters of social housing is writing a whole group of people off.

I don’t understand why the council put all these families in the same place, it creates such an awful environment. .

Because everyone has to live somewhere.

They should just give problem families "Assured Shorthold Tenancies" so that they can be evicted after 12 months if they don't behave (exactly the same tenancy as tenants in the private sector have)

They already do.

People who behave in this way are generally acting out patterns from their own childhood trauma, or have substance abuse issues, poorly managed mental health conditions, etc. They need help and support and respect - at the moment they are shat on by every angle of society, is it much of a surprise that they kick back?

Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Those loveable rogues. It's definitely societies fault. If only health care and education was free in this country, they'd really be able to sort themselves out....