To think these changes to the housing waiting list are not “cruel” but simply realistic?

[Eastie77Returns]

Our council has announced changes to the local housing waiting list from next month. There are tens of thousands on the list who will never be housed as they are not deemed to be in urgent need so they will now be removed.

The council has said they will be offered “personalised support to explore their options” which probably means advising they leave London, advances to help with private rent etc. I understand in many cases that is really not helpful but a close relative of mine who works in housing has been on the phone to me in tears because of the level of abuse she has faced from frustrated residents who have been on the list for years and are being removed.

Now a parent from DD’s school is organising a march on the town hall to protest all of this and has asked parents for support. She has been offered a council house 100+ miles outside London and is refusing to leave as her support network is here and I fully understand that. However, I do think a dose of realism is needed. There are 15,000 people on the waiting list here and a few hundred council properties become available each year. This parent has been told she does not fall into the 3 bands that will be kept on the list so she will never get a council house and she has responded by accusing the council of unimaginable cruelty

I don’t understand where she expects the council to magically just find thousands of homes and change that situation?

@PixiKitKat

I think social housing tenants need to be assessed after a period of time. I use to work with someone who between him and his wife must have earned at least £50k between them but they lived in a housing association flat that she got years ago by being homeless. I think they were wrong to continue living in that flat on those earnings as they could easily afford private rent but instead they chose to keep the cheap flat and deprive someone else who is homeless of a place to live.

PixiKitKat all this will cause is people deliberately stagnating wages and income to keep their home.

Also LA's rely on the good payers for income. Chucking out good payers makes no business sense.

The reality is, with so many people becoming homeless and sitting in expensive temporary accommodation there are people who will not get ever housed which is rubbish but especially in London where will they go, if there isn’t room to build? Or they won’t move to another area?..

I live in Scotland in a fairly quiet nice area. I have kids and a job. I am also homeless and have been for 4 years. So that’s 4 years in 4 different temporary accommodations - which you get 24 hours to move out of. 4 years of limbo. 4 years of not having anything except clothes and toys my kids, Moving far from schools and friends to areas I don’t know with neighbours who don’t want you there. Not knowing when they’ll move us again. It’s incredibly unsettling. And you don’t get a choice where you live permanently or where your temp accommodation is.

One day we will have a home that we can have our own stuff in. Can decorate the living-room instead of living in sterile ville
And no I won’t be moving anyone ins my name will be on the tenancy so never again will I be in this position.

@Viviennemary

I don't agree with social housing except for people who can't manage. It encourages dependency and entitlement. And certainly not for folk who can afford to buy their own homes. Why should brand new houses be built for social tenants.

So social housing should just be for who exactly? Why can't people live in decent, long term housing if they are working? Do you want ghettoes? So where should social housing come from then? And what do you think of the right to buy?

Removing people from the list doesn't mean that there are fewer people who need housing. But it does mean that, now they are out of sight, the social and political pressure to actually do something about it is gone. Making it much easier to ignore. And at the next election the Tories can wave statistics around about how much they've reduced council waiting lists.

@MakingM

Tbh, YABU.

A council should not be artificially cutting its waiting list because it has decided it won’t be able to house everyone. Councils should want to know how many people in their area want or need more secure and affordable housing so that they can plan to provide it - and the easiest way of gauging this is by having a waiting list for affordable, secure housing. Sounds like they are trying to hide their heads in the sand tbh.

And, no, no one should have to move 100 miles to find an affordable home.

The reality is London will find itself running into difficulty with recruiting key workers if it doesn’t get to grip with its housing problem, as will other places.

My local council did not decide they cannot house everyone. They actually can’t. They are not sitting on a pile of empty houses and deciding not to give them to people. The houses do not exist. That’s the reality of the situation and it’s situation that is not exactly of their making because:

• There is a lack of social housing here since many council tenants have exercised their legal right to buy.
• There is a lack of funding from central government.
• There is a lack of viable space to build council housing.

I could go on. They are not burying their heads in the sand. Quite the opposite. They are telling people upfront: you will never receive a council house in this borough so time to look at other options.

Obviously some of these options are unpalatable to people who have been on a waiting list for years but it is what it is. The alternative is to have people languishing for years in sub standard, overcrowded housing waiting for a council house to appear. It isn’t going to happen so those people need to make alternative plans: take up the offer of a cash sum to kick start a private rental (council is offering this as a one of payment), move further out and so on.

@FloraPostIt

Removing people from the list doesn't mean that there are fewer people who need housing. But it does mean that, now they are out of sight, the social and political pressure to actually do something about it is gone. Making it much easier to ignore. And at the next election the Tories can wave statistics around about how much they've reduced council waiting lists.

Exactly.

I made a similar point earlier. It's not about whether everyone on the list will ever get housed in the current system, with the current level of housing stock. Clearing the waiting lists like this gives a skewed picture of demand and doesn't enable future planning to meet the actual (and now unknown) demand.

@Fizbosshoes

If they'd known waiting on the list was pointless then they could have been making other plans rather than hanging on.

But surely if other plans or opportunities were available to them they would have already taken them rather than wait years for a council property to possibly become available ?

Well you'd think. But if you are told that if you stay on a waiting list then eventually you have the chance of a house, or a place on a swimming course, or a place in an oversubscribed Primary school, lots of people will sit on that list, pinning their hopes on eventually getting to the "front". However unrealistic that may be. Because they were told they were on a waiting list.

Not everyone is able to earn 40-50k and we'd soon all be buggered if there was no one to stack supermarket shelves, or care for granny, or clean the toilets at the train station, or look after our children whilst we are at work. We need people in these industries and their contribution to society is enormous! It's quite insulting to say that they are entitled and dependent when it's these people that keep us going.

I can understand the frustration. My friend (A) came from Poland with 2 young DC. She was renting privately but was then given notice so applied for a council flat. She was given a spacious 3 bed flat in London near Cannonbury; couldn’t believe her luck

Our joint friend is a Londoner born and bred living with her DM and her toddlers in over crowded accommodation. She’s been waiting years for a CH.

It sadly ended their friendship as friend B couldn’t get over it.

Meanwhile in Notting hill there's an estate being redevoloped, it's been halfway done with beautiful flats and houses, a lot of them for sale for over a million, the local tenants still living in crumbling old flats waiting for years to be rehoused, not knowing where or when they will move or if they'll have a chance to be rehoused in the new flats, , 4 brand new 2 bed houses have been lying empty for 4 years now, locals been told they will be sold, last week Kensington and Chelsea council proudly went on tv showed them handing the keys to 4 Afghan refugee families, great for them but i think you can understand the resentment, and i'm not a racist, nothing about social housing is fair

There is not enough SH but unless you’ve been in a situation where you need one then you can’t imagine the stress of what she is going through and she has every right to feel upset.

The main issues are: second home owners, homes being left empty and sky high private rent.
I think the main thing that needs to be tackled is affordable rent for privately rented homes.

I can understand the frustration. My friend (A) came from Poland with 2 young DC. She was renting privately but was then given notice so applied for a council flat. She was given a spacious 3 bed flat in London near Cannonbury; couldn’t believe her luck

That’s because friend A was homeless/going to be homeless with 2 young children. Whilst friend B had a home and wasn’t going to be homeless.

@MercyBooth

Municipal Dreams The Rise and Fall of Council Housing by John Boughton would educate some of you.

That sounds like a good book. I will put it on my list.

@toocold54

I can understand the frustration. My friend (A) came from Poland with 2 young DC. She was renting privately but was then given notice so applied for a council flat. She was given a spacious 3 bed flat in London near Cannonbury; couldn’t believe her luck

That’s because friend A was homeless/going to be homeless with 2 young children. Whilst friend B had a home and wasn’t going to be homeless.

We were continually told that EU migrants had recourse to social housing which I always had my doubts about

Sorry no recourse

They don't on immediate arrival. But if they have lived and worked here for a while they get the same as any other citizen.

So the "no recourse" ment they couldn't step off a flight and present to the council as homeless the same day. They aren't eligible for UC on arrival either.

In Berlin they have just passed a referendum on the local government taking 200000 properties back from private landlords (with no payment) to socially rent. We should do that in London.

Well did the person in question actually do any work if she had 2 children

Our immigration policies must have made the affordable housing situation much worse

I think it is really unfair on the local residents who have lived here for generations

My cousins grew up on a lovely small council estate in north London. Three and four bed houses full of families, with a big grassy area for the kids to play on. It’s now full of single people in their 70s and 80s, who are entitled to stay there. My uncle was rattling around in his house, the garden was too big for him to manage, but he didn’t want to leave as it was his home.

@woodhill

Well did the person in question actually do any work if she had 2 children

Our immigration policies must have made the affordable housing situation much worse

I think it is really unfair on the local residents who have lived here for generations

No but she possibly has naturalised with possibly 2 British born children.

But anyway, are we really the type of society who's going to let a woman and 2 children live on the streets because they hold a different passport, but now live here.

If she was holding a tenancy previously she must have had income either from work a partner or UC, meaning she had entitlement and was priority need as she had 2 children.

Out immagration policy for economic migrants from the EU benefited us massively. From fruit pickers to HGV drivers, carers, nurses and so on. We monopolised on cheap imported labour which has bit us on the ass as we pulled down the shutters. But that's another argument on another thread.

Working in housing I can assure you I have housed far far more British born families in LA housing than I have EU. This is generally because they had to find their own tenancies initially in the PRS (private rent sector) and have continued to move in those circles unless disaster/tragedy has befallen them. Same though for the British born as I worked with priority need, it's generally tragedy or something very upsetting that has rendered them homeless. Nobody is homeless through choice.

@toocold54

It's still not a great situation for your Polish friend is it? The flat may be spacious but where is the outside space for the children?

London council houses always used to come with gardens and any family should be entitled to a garden,. Flats are really not good enough.

Yes I understand to some extent but i still think the free movement has been very unfair to the working classes e.g. building industry and it has driven wages down

@toocold54 But she was offered a house, she turned it down as the area was too rough apparently.
This happens in my city too, people turning down houses as they don't like the area, or they don't know anyone in the area they're being offered (even though it's still in the same city). Then you see them in the local paper complaining that the council won't house them, or on Facebook moaning that the refugees are taking all the houses.

@SailYourShips it’s only in the U.K. where there is this obsession with living in houses. Most people in Poland live in flats in cities.

@ willithappen that is the reality. We private rent and have had to move away from family where jobs and housing are. It's not something we wanted but sometimes whilst crap, it's the only option for affordable housing. I use the term affordable with a pinch of salt. People seem to think its so easy to just move tenants into a new and bigger property just down the road from their support group but its not, we have a housing crisis. The rent in our town has been pushed up massively because of those moving outside of London. It impacts us all but if you private rent you move and pay extra of suck it up