To think you shouldn't be homeless if you have a job.

[coolncalm]

Well actually no one should be homeless but i watched a programme last night and people were sleeping on the streets in London and didn't have a roof over their heads. Isnt it a sorry state of affairs when you go out to work but you can't earn enough for a single room never mind a flat.

London is screwed and I am really sorry for all that live there. As noted, the idea that only the rich can live there means that sooner or later the rich will be doing their own cleaning and cleaning up their own disposable coffee cups.

Ideally there should be someone who runs the city who would stop buy to leave, ( a London only problem) increase social housing standards and provision by proper building and enforcement (so the anti-landlord blubberers could direct their bile at the shonky social housing providers) . They could also think about reducing unnecessary population by stopping businesses that don't need to be there from being so. This could be done by raising council tax and business rates. (There already is subsidised transport)

apparently there is no such person, though....

It's not that ALL landlords or most of them are unscrupulous - the problem is any decent landlord trying to do things properly, who has a mortgage to pay, is bound by the terms of their mortgage agreement.

So mortgage agreement prohibits a landlord from counting housing benefit as viable income. Meaning housing benefit simply becomes a filter to automatically turn down a whacking great % of low paid workers.

Then, these low paid workers who rely on housing benefit to top up rent, have no fucking choice but to line the pockets of a shit landlord screwing as much money as they can get out of their slum illegal HMO.

Mortgage insurance exluding benefit claimants should be illegal. It is just discrimination against the poor dressed up as economic prudence.

Given that a huge proportion of the housing benefit bill is paid to people who are working - a huge proportion of these people in turn could prove literally years of rent paid on time. Yet it's still legal to discriminate against them.

People will argue that if their housing benefit is stopped, the landlord runs the risk of rent not being paid. Ok fine - that risk is not limited to benefit claimants, there are millions of people in this country, not in receipt of benefit, without a cushion of savings for six months/ a year.
If they lose their jobs, the landlord also runs a risk of not getting rent paid.

Surely the return of reasonable council housing is the OBVIOUS solution?

If the problem is people earning less than it costs to live, then no, that makes no difference at all.

The reason you probably think it would help is that historically council housing has been let at below-market rents. This makes it look less expensive, but all it means is that the occupants are getting a hidden subsidy of the discount to the market rent. In an honest and transparent system, you would make sure all council properties were let a market rents, even if you had to raise housing benefit so people could afford those.

This would cost less, because not everybody getting the implicit subsidy would be deemed eligible for the increased housing benefit. But even if it didn't, even if every extra pound raised in rent was offset be a pound of housing benefit, it would still be a good thing to do, because at least the statistics showing how much benefit was being paid would would be that much more accurate. Knowing the true cost of subsidy could affect all sorts of political decisions.

£138pwk in London. It's shocking, it really is!

Things don’t seem to have moved on much from George Orwell’s ‘Down and Out in London and Paris’.

Someone upthread asked where those people sleep if they have jobs. There are shelters where floorspace, sometimes with mattresses are made available at night. I help in one as a volunteer and it can take a year for a really hard-working and determined worker to get housed, and that’s with help.

There are hostels - there was one depicted in the tv programme the op referred to - where there were a host of bunk beds closer to each other than you might see in a prison. You saw a young man ironing his uniform and putting it on amidst the mass of beds in the smalllish room. Not easy.

I'm from Ireland and it's similar here.

Our governments like to say the recession is over and we are climbing out and doing well. However, homelessness and the housing crisis is a lasting effect from the recession.

When the recession came about all them years ago, reading on online forums, there was so much blame being put onto peoples backs saying that we all partied with cheap credit from the banks and we weren't paying enough taxes. This blame was only for Ireland.

I always thought if that was the case, why is the UK suffering in a similar manner to us? The UK had a broadened tax base and lower social welfare to encourage work etc but they are suffering a recession too.

The USA also suffered a recession.

I always thought that the recession was far too deep for homegrown stuff to be reasons. There was no fix to the recession except for chasing after people and society for higher taxes and decreasing spending and services.

Anyways back to the homelessness.

The Crux of the problem, the job market for so many young adults was poor. Come on like, internships in poundland made the news. How was that right?

In my parents day, it took one person working and earning a wage to maintain a mortgage, a home, a family. Nowadays, a couple would struggle with two incomes (I suppose it depends on where and what they do).

There's definitely something not right and it goes very, very deep.

I lay the blame at decades of anti-development policy, under government by all parties, and the resulting spiralling house prices. Simple supply and demand. When you look worldwide, the cities with the cheapest housing are the ones that allow that housing to be built. They might have other problems, but that's how it is.

Increased wages won't help, landlords will just be able to increase rent accordingly, because they'll always be able to rent to the person who has bank of mum and dad for the deposit, or the one who's working 80 hours a week to just about manage.

Only a sea change in the UK's attitude to development will change things. But that won't happen any time soon because Mabel doesn't want her countryside view to change, and Dave is worried about the badgers, and Maureen needs her equity to pay for her upcoming care home place. 60% of people live in homes they own and they would be ruined by a housebuilding boom and consequent house price drop. Until that changes, housing will remain unaffordable for the poorest.

Good point safariboot. But I still think the quickest way to solve that would be for the government to commission large-scale building of decent but affordable housing, including a decent chunk of social housing.

It would be very worrying to those who brought their houses recently (including me!) to have house prices drop and push people into negative equity. But the answer cannot be to just have house prices spiralling ever higher! Large scale building with decent transport links is the only way to reduce housing costs.

The real scandal are low wages & no social housing.

This.

Imo, the only thing that will help the situation is a massive programme of building social housing. This problem isn't just an issue in London, but certainly in other parts of the south-east too.

I live a few miles from the Sussex coast and it's hard to find a 1-bed flat for under £700 a month. If someone is commuting to London from here, their fares are going to be close to £500 a month. To take home enough to cover fares and rent alone, you'd need to be earning the best part of £2k a month.

To get a private tenancy, applicants need to have impeccable references and credit history, take home more than 3x the monthly rent, have secure employment where there is a minimum income guarantee (ZHCs not acceptable) and have around 3 months rent upfront for rent in advance, deposit and fees. Even with all that, agents will often insist on a guarantor who must be a working homeowner with an income of at least 3 years rent. I've known people working in f/t jobs and on well above min wage reduced to sofa surfing or sleeping in their cars.

Anyone on benefits is stuffed as most agents/landlords won't even consider them. This is really tough on people with health problems or caring responsibilities. The sooner a discrimination case is brought about this, the better.

My job brings me into contact with a lot of people (and families) who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless. It's getting harder and harder to help them. I'm going to start looking for another job at the end of the summer, as I can't hack it any more. And our budget has just been cut by a third, and from now on we'll only take on the most extreme (ie hardest to help) clients.

I expect a lot of the homeless are immigrants

Quite the contrary among the clients for the project I work on. Only a tiny minority are not UK citizens (less than 5%). Most of those are EU citizens with indefinite leave to remain (ie, have lived and worked in the UK for more than 5 years). In over 11 years, dealing with around 200 clients a year, the only non-EU citizens I have supported were from Zimbabwe, Turkey and Malawi. The first 2 had been granted political asylum for opposing Mugabe and Erdogan respectively.

Cambridge so you would be happy to be served food in your local Pret by a homeless person who hasnt been able to wash for days.

im trying this tack because it seems some will only care when it affects them directly.

Sorry " to disappoint you Firesuit but the "subsidy" ended in 2010 This was on LAST weeks Dispatches.

This issue is housing. Wages have risen for poorest beyond inflation. And yet working homelessness has increased.
Abolish zero hour contracts and regulate firms using self employment to screw workers over, and either build social housing or introduce rent control.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/telly_addicts/3304710-Dispatches-Getting-Rich-from-the-Housing-Crisis

Why are you all so worried about how London would cope if all the cleaners etc moved away?

Seriously, why?

I love London and the diversity found here. It's my home. I don't want it turned into a bizarre banal playground for the rich, propped up by tourists, possibly always with a heaving, angry, disenfranchised group of people subsisting in slums.

I don't want London to ape Dubai, or Detroit for that matter. London is a fucking beautiful city and it is so because of the mixture of people who make a life and home here, from a whole range of socio economic backgrounds.

I was born in London in the same house my mum was bought home from hospital to, the same house my grandparents bought after they married less than a 2 minute walk from the house my nan grew up in and my grandad lived a 20min walk away. 3 generations of my family went to the same primary school yet I can no longer afford to remain in London despite not being on minimum wage

The reality for me is unless I find a forever partner I will probably die in a flat share.

I think there are a number of factors at play here but the massive shift in provision of rented housing from regulated public bodies to a largely unregulated private sector has a lot to do with it. The abolition of rent controls means no check on prices, the abolition of security of tenure means no stability and landlords not being required to provide decent quality housing means that the quality of rental stock has deteriorated. So the very way that renting is set up means that properties can be expensive, insecure and in poor condition. There is literally nothing to stop this from happening. And so it happens. And in such an environment, of course there is going to be increased homelessness, because the set up has no mechanism to require affordability, security and good quality stock.

Add into the mix contemporary working patterns which do not provide predictable, regular income, and you end up where we currently find ourselves.

You will note that both of these elements have the same root cause - private interests being enabled to operate as they please without thought being given to societal impact of their decisions.

Agree that saying "just move" is stupid. This is a systemic problem which will not be solved by giving glib micro solutions.

Yabu because you should have just put a . after homeless.

I've seen your op that no one should be so why distinguish at all?

DS1 is on a ZHC. He quite likes the work and appreciates the money when he gets it, but he's still living at home so not at the mercy of a landlord when he gets no work for a week.

ZHC is almost the only kind of work you can get if you have little experience.

Exactly, Irian. It doesn't work at all if you have any kind of regular outgoings ie rent.
When I worked a zero hours contract many years ago most of my colleagues were fiddling dole and I can't say I blamed them. Even though they were working, dole money was their only regular reliable income. Just let that sink in.

I think there's more and more grown children in their 30s and 40s even still living at home with their parents. If you're not a couple with two earning a single person usually couldn't afford rent, council tax etc. Not everyone has supportive parents, these are the ones who are very vulnerable.

I think ZHC can be good if you have more than one company you are working for.

If one doesn't have the right work one day then you can go else where .

It only becomes a problem if you are beholden to one company.

DDS ZHC pay anything from £8-15 per hour and they are 12 hours day. If she wanted to she. Could work 7 days per week at £1080 per week,

DD only works 2-3 days per week