To clarify exactly what a council house looks like

[Lifegoeson5]

So many posts about council housing and 'benefit scroungers' getting 'free' housing.
I pay £150 a week for this...

I do feel pleased to have my council house and I realise I’m very lucky when there are so many people still waiting. I don’t think it should be a case of be grateful for what you’ve got if it’s not up to standard though. Why should someone be grateful to have a council house if it’s got an unresolved damp problem?

There are some very bitter people when it comes to council housing. It almost feels like people in council housing should be apologetic because someone else chose to get themselves in to a mortgage and all that that entails.

Yes personal responsibility only seems to apply to those further down the economic scale.

Anybody reading this who has bought their council house, just a question.

Do you not feel guilty about permanently removing a property which was intended to benefit the needy from the council house supply and ultimately benefitting from that financially?

I'm not being goady but I do think that Right To Buy has been a disastrous policy and nobody ever acknowledges that when they're all chuffed about owning their ex-La home.

I lived in a council flat in the early 2000 and not once did the long term repercussions of RTB occur to me. I just wanted to bag a bargain for myself despite the rotting bathroom and other issues it had. It never worked out anyway so I didn't buy it. There's a family in there now, 3 kids, a one bedroom flat. Still council. That flat would probably be an air bnb or whatever if I'd bought it and sold it on. And one less family gets a place to live. My entire street was council when I moved in in 1998 and over the following decade every house was bought, done up, and sold on. By the time I moved out they were worth almost £800k..each...no exaggeration, this was London. Meanwhile the council housing list gets ever longer and people like the family in my flat are crammed into unsuitable homes.

There is something massively wrong with this scenario.

DuckWillow um, surveys are not a crystal ball!

No one should have to live like that

For goodness sake @Keepmewarm everyone lives like that if they don’t adequate heat and ventilate their property.

@userxx haha, I’ve taken a deep breath. Just bloody annoys me! Entitled and out of touch at the same time, sitting on their £5k 🙄

Funny how the fact that quite a few HAs are charging the same or more than private rent never seems to spread quite as easily despite a lot of experiences and evidence, some of which ive posted several times on this site.

HAs are successfully charging over market rate? . Where? Why would anyone do this?

Why don’t you clean/ repair / decorate
your property yourself? Why expect others to do it all for you? I have friends in council houses which are their pride and joy and are really beautiful.

I live in a council house and we have made it beutiful redecorated the place over 3 years and had to deep clean it a few times before we moved in .
If you are able to sort the problems yourself then I would.

We have just accepted a council house it was in an awful condition they had not even put radiators in upstairs! We got an inspector out and went through the repairs with him and they are now being done so if this tenancy is new I would recommend doing this re boiler and plastering the council are responsible for this not the tennant. As for the mould it can be scrubbed off it's a horrible job but most people get it unfortunately, just because you are a council tenant does not mean you have to live in substandard accomodation, I intend to make ours beautiful.

It looks dirty and like it needs a good clean.
Could probably do with a lick of paint and a bit of filler.

Is the council meant to do that?
Anyone I know in a council house decorated it themselves

And RE the mould. I own my house and also get mould if I don’t ventilate well.

When it happens I scrub it off and start ventilating better.

Ventilation doesn’t have to mean being cold and more heating.

I now keep a £5 hygrometer that shows if the humidity is creeping up so I can keep an eye on it before the mould appears (mould will happen above 65%)

Bustergonad*

I am aware surveys are not a crystal ball. My point is that if you buy somewhere those are the risks you take. I stand by my view that too many people buy who really can't afford to. The first huge repair causes significant financial problems.. some will go under as a result.

If you can fund these repairs then you are not hard up....even if it's a struggle.

Many people who rent (particularly private rent) have no control over repairs to structure or heating etc, This is down to the quality of the landlord. So commenting with remarks like "be grateful as we've just had a bill for thousands" doesn't help.

Be grateful you can afford it as many cannot.

I gave up my council house when I met my husband and moved area. House was fine but in a bad area. I did all maintenance myself though.

Now we pay 1200 a month and I make sure I wipe windows etc.

I live in an ex council house (actually both houses I’ve paid the mortgage on are ex council). Either side me are HA houses. One house was in terrible repair by the time the current renters had it. They’re our third set of neighbours. The first had been born there (and died there ) and the second was a family who didn’t take care of the house. So neighbour v3 has loads to do when they moved in, rotten floorboards, mould & overgrown garden. They’ve made it so nice. They hope to be able to buy it one day, in fact, both neighbours want to buy.

@EntropyRising

speyejoe2.wordpress.com/2019/09/02/the-clarion-affordable-rent-scandal-tenants-overcharged-50m-pa/?fbclid=IwAR0KHLkiH9gtqwZhnw8qR856h0phcTwYjN7pUwSr5kOxssqXCSvUxSAie4I

" Clarion Housing Group has overcharged its tenants by unlawfully setting its average affordable rent levels at 135% of market rent. In a sample of 1,477 Clarion 2 bed rents the 2018 overcharging comes to £10.2 million alone and Clarion had eight times that number of AR properties at 11,903 so the total overcharge could be over £80 million for that year alone though an actual figure closer to a £50 million overcharge is likely, an overcharge of a cool £1 million per week"

Helena, your link is broken so I can't comment on the methodology by which they've arrived at 'market rate'.

I suggest that if 1,477 people were paying 135% of 'market rates', then the bureaucrats were probably mistaken about the market rate in the first instance.

£600
A month for what size house and where?

@Lifegoeson5 a dehumidifier costs but will earn it's keep! Apart from stopping mould mine has massively reduced the amount of tumble drying I do.

I've had this one for about 18 months now and I wouldn't be without it now. Quiet too (my previous machine was really noisy).

I'm guessing from the tone of your OP that people have been having a go at you? Behaving as if you get a palace for a fiver a month, or similar? Ignore, ignore, ignore. I loved my council flat, was brought up in council housing, but that was back in the days when the council were permitted to spend money on their upkeep and long before they were forced to sell of their stock. Anyone with half a brain knows council housing is not what it was, so if people are making stupid comments use it like a diagnostic tool to filter the fuckwits out of your circle. They're not worth a damn. ((hugs))

I used to be on the board of a Housing Association and we did carpet properties but we only installed white goods in properties that had been on the books too long, as a marketing tool (yes, this does happen, sometimes thee is a glut).

Go rent privately if you don’t like it?

Sorry, but £5k to plaster and decorate? I have been doing a home renovation in a very old Victorian property in serious disrepair (think all walls with damp, render off, replastered. It did not cost £5k to do the whole house, about £180 each room. I decorated the place myself. Paint is not that expensive, wallpaper picked up in sales. There is no way you should be paying £5k.

I moved from private rental into a brand new council house. It’s also an eco house and it’s unbearable in summer. I find repairs take much longer and are botched compared to the agency I rented with. Still, I count myself very lucky because it’s a nice house and the rent is very low compared to private.

£150 a week for a house big enough for 7?! Sounds like a bargain to me! Even with requiring some extra elbow grease occasionally to keep it clean. We are currently in a council property a 2 bed flat but it costs more a week than that but we are close to London. Our council property looks nothing like that.

I dont want to be rude but here in West London you won't get a council house. We have people living in storage containers. There are over 12,000 people waiting. For a 100 a week it looks ok to me. I would cut of my right arm for those problems

My daughter lives in a council house, pays full rent & they refused to put a wall cupboard on her kitchen wall at first meaning she would only have 2 kitchen cupboards, one is taken up with the electric meter, her boiler is that old it keeps breaking & they don’t have parts for it anymore, she is apparently getting a new one but because they keep managing to fix it she won’t get one soon, the valves on her pipes have been leaking down her kitchen wall & completely saturated the plaster, the paint is peeling off too, plus the valve on her boiler is leaking so she has a puddle on her floor, the roof is leaking & she has black mould in her room, the scaffolding is going up for that next week, the decor is ruined & needs doing again, she has only been there 18 months, she pays a service charge each week of just over £3 for the council to mow her lawn, it’s compulsory & they probably only cut it 4 times a year!