The good old Mumsnet Council housing debate

[QuandaleDingle]

You know all you people who demand that council tenants have their long tenancies taken off them and have their rents increase ??

Why don't you INSTEAD demand that the government makes shitty insecure private renting better ? And becomes more affordable and secure.
Or even better than that, build more council homes so anyone who wants or needs one can have one.

Rather stick the boot in on council tenants out of some sort of spite and ...jealousy ? I also think snobbery comes into it

It's a race to the bottom for some peeps🤦‍♀️ I'm not a council tenant btw but I have been.

I can just imagine the doctors (on their drs salaries) jostling for position in the queue to live in a council house slap bang next to their surgeries.
Utopia indeed! 🙄

A GP doesn’t need subsidised housing.

Not everyone needs to be subsidised!

Why suggest subsidising people who don’t need it, but would take advantage of it anyway.

@Newrumpus Libraries are great. I'm confused with how you think using a library and living in a council house are comparable but okay? 😐

I live in a new build HA property in a very nice, sought after town. My rent is sensible and much lower than comparable private rented. I get repairs done relatively easily although it's mainly sorting out new build snags as it's so new.
There is a lot of jealousy in the area from people who never applied for a house here. They assumed they wouldn't get one and people have moved from quite long distances to be here. There was a local link priority for applications. There are single people and couples in 2 bedroom properties.
I work in a senior professional health role and have a good wage but following a messy divorce I was never going to be able to buy my own place.
I feel privileged to have a beautiful house with a garden that is secure for me and my children. My previous private rental was poorly maintained and was owned by a local businessman who holds an enormous portfolio in the town and doesn't treat any tenants well.
There should be more estates like ours, more opportunities for quality homes and secure tenancies. The vast majority of people who live here work and the ones that don't are SAHM's with a working partner, disabled or retired.
I proudly tell people I live in a council house.

Private landlords needs more regulation, no question.

But the alternate to a poor private housing isn’t council housing for all.

There is something in between.

The rule where one person or a couple can remain in a 3 bed house because their family have grown up and left needs to be better enforced. I know a single man in a 3 bed house because his father died and no one else lived there. Crazy.

Did the pandemic teach nothing. The most valuable people then were the ones on shitty pay doing jobs the more affluent don't/ won't do. Presumably you are happy to pay the cleaner, shop worker, carer, etc 3 times the current going rate, so they don't need benefit to pay someone else's mortgage on their investment property.

People like GP s used to live locally and if the surgery was in a SH estate they lived in SH. There was plenty then and they did often have owned homes elsewhere but if you look at older hospitals they tend to be beside estates that provided SH for nurses and doctors. It fosters investment in communities and would be ideal if there were no shortages.

@GeorgeorRuth so you don't think that quality, location or extent should come into it? So a 5 bedroom house set in an acre of grounds with stables or a penthouse flat in Central London with access to pool and gym should be capped as the same price as a 2 bed flat in Hackney?

Not everyone who rents does so because they can't get a council house.

Where is the money cominv from? Thats almost amusing this week. Suffice to say, its not going to cost £65 billion is it?

That doesn’t really answer the question.

We are in dire financial straits, and all and Co appear to have made things worse.

Doesn’t change the situation as it is now though does it.

Why should anyone who wants it, get a council house?

What is the social and economic justification for this?

Was meant to say KK and co appear to have …

The big problem is 2 bed vs 3+ bed. I’m in London and have seen people with one child get housed relatively quickly, usually 12-18 months. The problem comes when they have more DC and end up waiting years (if they ever get it at all) for a bigger place. Then you get into the ethical arguments. Should they have had more children than they could accommodate? Should an older person be turfed out to then accommodate them? Is having more than one child a “luxury” that only the better off can afford?

Yes there are cases where women are say fleeing DV with maybe more than one child, but they actually get priority. I know because I was in this situation myself. If you’re in a refuge you place highly on the waiting list because the refuge space is needed for others.

As for high earners in council accommodation. That’s rare. My earnings are ok. Professional role but frontline public sector so the pay isn’t huge! Yes, because my rent is relatively low, I have a reasonable amount of disposable income but not enough to rent privately. But it seems there is a view that people in SH shouldn’t have any disposable income at all. Why is that?

My cousins grew up on a small council estate in North London. Nice area, leafy, parks. Their road was 3 and 4 bed semis and there was a big grassy “roundabout” at the end of the cul de sac where the kids used to play out. The houses had good sized gardens and it was a great place to grow up, and a great community. These houses are now largely inhabited by one or two old people, who can’t cope with the gardens, and it feels rundown and unkempt. These were fabulous family homes and surely should be again, with the old people encouraged to move and families brought in.

@Quincythequince social I've covered.
economic.
(Local authority, HA work a bit different)
Simplified a council house works like this,
£100k to build (borrowed from central)
First 10 years income repays the loan, house is new/warranty so repairs covered.
after that rental is repair, maintenance, tenants levy other social incentive and infrastructure plus a small capped profit.
it pays for itself.

£100k to build (borrowed from central)

Yes, for one house, sure.

I get the basic maths.

But we are talking about building potentially millions of homes, so now let’s do the maths.

Doesn’t seem so great now does it.

Look at that level of borrowing….to build houses for many that don’t need it?

Where is the justification. There is none.

But let’s also talk about the lack of schools, GPS and general infrastructure in many places too.

Gotta build all of these too if building new homes as well, and we are already short in those areas too.

Where is the money coming from?

More schools, GPS and other basic components of infrastructure are needed before council houses for all.

Sure it wouldn't be a priority for now We should just look to solve the crisis and build enough to get people housed who need it and people who are stuck in bnbs.
the money we save in emergency housing costs can then go to the social project.

People need to stop seeing local authority owned housing as a benefit for the deserving poor, and a stop gap until they can do the 'right thing' sort themselves out and buy their own home.
This was never the principle behind it. The idea was to provide an option for affordable housing that people could choose to take up if they couldn't afford, or DIDN'T WANT to buy.
Too many people drunk the kool Aid and now believe home ownership is both desirable and the default, and if you don't own property you must endeavour to change that at the earliest opportunity.
And where has that led us? To a severe shortage of affordable homes; to people unable to move out of the family home until years after they want to; to social housing estates stigmatised, neglected and deprived as limited housing must be disproportionately allocated to vulnerable people, with little mix of demographic; to a disproportionate number of tenants on benefits, so yes, unable to pay rent (hence the oft referred to subsidies); to an exploitative private rental sector where by to let landlords push cheaper properties further from the reaches of people who would like to buy, and do many other issues to numerous to list.
Of course it's possible to build more social housing. The decision not to is entirely political because keeping SH as a scarce resource supports a certain political ideology.

Ok, so we don’t actually disagree with housing for those who need it.

I’ve said that that’s a priority.

That wasn’t the basis of your position though.

The vitriol spouted about LA & HA tenants living in homes where they are not bursting at the seams stem from the high private rental prices.

I pay £400pcm on my 3 bed council home (built in the 70's). When we moved in (2016) our neighbour opposite was paying 500pcm private rent for a mirror image of our home but with a much better interior and kitchen. They moved out and the current occupiers are paying £750pcm.

A smaller 3 bed mid terrace home at the end or our cul-de-sac fully refurbished is paying £950pcm.

There were 14 3 bed council houses built in my cul-de-sac in the 1970's. 4 of them are still council. 2 familes bought their council house in the 80's and still live there. 5 are now private rentals charging double the council rates and the remaining have been sold on.

It is not subsidised. Housing associations take on commercial loans to build housing due to the lack of government funding, they fund themselves via selling homes they build under shared ownership and rents received and they do make a surplus. They work on economies of scale. If you are talking about people who receive housing benefit, not all housing association tenants receive that and it’s a separate issue. Don’t make claims you know nothing about.

Private rents due to inflated house prices or greed have really skewed people’s perception of what is a reasonable rent, therefore social rent looks subsidised but it’s not.

I know, that's why I said my utopia would be the old principles.
As for affordability though you surely must see that not building is a false economy. The money spent on emergency housing and topping up private rents would be better spent on social housing and infrastructure instead of vehicles for profit in the private sector.
years of labouring to the private sector mean we will have to pay double whilst we build but the current system isn't sustainable.

It's subsidised because the capital investment comes from the government. If the rent had to cover the cost of building/buying the property as well as running and maintaining the property then the rents would be higher.

www.gov.uk/government/news/86-billion-for-affordable-homes-to-give-boost-onto-housing-ladder

FWIW I think we should be investing far more into social housing and it should be much more widely available to those who need it. The number of people waiting to be housed adequately is a disgrace. But it is subsidised (as it should be).