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.

That amount is to build all homes, only 1/4 of homes in the scheme will be for social rent. The amount from that total actually allocated to social housing will be minuscule. The last time I did the accounts for a social housing association (about 4 yrs ago) the government grant was about £3,000 per new house. I wouldn’t call that a subsidy. Private developers get more than that to boost their profits through help to buy.

And water? And energy?

Landlords are providing a service at a price people are prepared to pay. If they weren't prepared to pay then the landlord wouldn't get tenants. One of the driving forces behind high rents is the shortage of supply. The less property is available the more rents will go up. Drive the private landlords away (as has been done with changes to tax rules) and there will be less rental property available and the prices will inevitably go up. It is not private landlords' responsibility to provide affordable housing any more than it is a supermarket's responsibility to provide affordable food. I don't see people raging at Tesco for daring to make a profit.

There doesn’t need to be council housing for all. There can be council housing for all that want it.

High private rents are primarily driven by high mortgages due to lack of supply due to buy to lets. A self fulfilling prophecy.

council housing and council libraries are both run by councils.

There's plenty of room actually

Where I live - booming, but worst for economic inequality in the country - there are at least four massive new private housing estates being pout up at any one time. Plenty of room if there is money to be made

People can only be considered 'prepared to pay' for things that are optional. It simply doesn't apply to essentials, does it? If a loaf of bread went up to £5, people wouldn't be buying it because they were prepared to pay it, but because otherwise they couldn't eat.
Private landlords are taking cheap properties off the housing market, often charging their tenants multiple times the mortgage cost had the tenant been able to buy it instead, trapping people in the rental market because they can't afford to save due to artificially inflated rent, and creating the conditions they need to profit from other people. Which yes, of course, is how business works, but it's a very damaging business, that should never have been allowed to thrive to the extent it has.

But what is driving up the prices is (lack of) availability of property to rent. If there were more places to rent than people looking to rent the prices would go down because the landlords would be competing for tenants. At the moment the pressure is upwards because there aren't enough rental properties available for the people that need them.

If the government invested in providing more social housing there would be less people looking to rent privately and that would bring the private rents down too. That way the people who get social housing win because they have affordable rents and the private renters win because those rents fall as well.

I'm not sure where in the country you can rent houses out for multiple times the mortgage cost? The rule for buy-to-let mortgages is that the rent should cover 125% of the mortgage payments so that you can cover the costs of maintenance and void periods. Around here you'd be very lucky to get much more than that.

I’m so privileged to live in council housing
My home is right in the coast and is council because it used to house the grounds men council workers years ago. I have cheap rent and my next door neighbour bought their house for 400k. I feel extremely lucky.
The snobbery and nastiness on places like mumsnet is unreal and unusually down to jealously tbh.
i do get it, council housing is really cheap so I understand why people are envious, but the bitterness is unreal

Yet so many people pay private landlords profits instead, so many welfare benefits are given to private landlords
It amazes me how many people can be so judgemental whilst totally lacking knowledge.

I, like many landlords, pay 40% of my rental income to the government. The rest goes into paying the interests on the mortgage, the numerous fees, repairs, insurance etc... I make about £1k a year profit if that. I pay the mortgage through my day to day job so I hope it is paid by the time I retire.

That's why the government doesn't want to totally avoid private renting. They get much more income back from it then from any social rental without all the problems dealing with tenants.

I completely agree that if there was more affordable social housing it would have a positive effect in pushing down extortionate private rents. Maybe even to the point landlords would sell up and there would be more options for first time buyers, pushing house prices down too. As far as I can see that would be an entirely positive outcome.
As for rent and mortgage, where I live you can still buy a modest 3 bed house for £130k, on a 25 year mortgage, around £450m. The LHA figure for a 3 bed property if £600m. Only the landlords who are prepared to take tenants on benefits charge as 'little' as this. Most charge at least £850. So, while multiple times the cost of a mortgage was an exaggeration, its still significantly more.

Oh, and let's not forget the particularly lucrative exploitation that is the HMO.

If the government invested in providing more social housing there would be less people looking to rent privately and that would bring the private rents down too
No. This would lead to exactly what is happening now. Landlords would sell, and those who can't afford to buy would have even less options. The government doesn't want this. They want the tax put upon landlords which caused so many to sell because there is little or no profits to be made for many and led to the current shortage.

That may be for some landlords. But you cannot deny that a high proportion of landlords see Landlord Dave across the road renting his house out for £100 more than them per month but reckon their house is nicer so they raise the rent they charge by £150 per month. They don't need the money from the increase but if they can increase it because people are desperate enough to pay it why not?

Not even social mobility but to be able to stay put. When you’ve got five generations in the village and you’re living in a house that could be taken away. A was to ensure that my kids have a place to stay if they want to stay in the village they grew up in. I’m in Scotland so we don’t have the bedroom tax but there’s other things your house can be taken for and getting older was my fear. My families roots are in the villages for near 300 years. The deal when I bought mine was you had to offer it back to the council before you could sell it on the open market because it was a pressurised area

I'm in a SO 2 bed flat with DD13 and DDog. After splitting with XH 10 yrs ago there wasn't enough equity for a deposit on a new place and even though I've always worked FT I couldn't afford a mortgage. so I had to
Private rent at a much higher rate than a mortgage which meant I had no shot at saving either. When I hit 55 last year I took a private pension lump sum to buy a share in a SO property. So I now pay significantly lower rent to a HA and have no mortgage but also no pension.

A landlord has to pay tax on the rental income, so the net rental income has to be sufficient to cover the mortgage and potentially any voids. At 20% tax £600pm would barely cover the mortgage let alone any void periods. If the landlord is on 40% tax then the rent needs to be higher just to meet the mortgage.

You can't compare the cost of the mortgage against gross income, it has to be against net. (note to Central Gov't)

One capital city is regularly voted a great place to live and 2/3 of its citizens live in social housing. Average cost to rent is 25% of household income, the rent is set to cover costs plus maintenance and not by some specious 'market'. Low paid households get extra subsidies and so key workers can afford to live in the city and near their place of work. The city owns some 200,000 homes and subsidies a further 200,000 owned by housing associations. They invest in new homes as the population grows rather than paying housing benefits to the private sector. In this city social housing is for all, not just the poorest.

This is what we should be striving for but instead we have had successive governments where the profit motive trumps everything...

Oh yes and that city is Vienna. And it isn't the only city to take such an enlightened view on housing. Bilbao, Rotterdam and Singapore have similar schemes. 80% of Singapore's population live in social housing on 99 year leases. (Info taken from Chapter 2 of Go Big by Ed Miliband.)

Quincythequince · Today 09:10

Where is all the money coming from the build all these houses. And maintain them?

Why do so many people in this country expect other people to subsidise and indeed pay for them. Why?“

the system was screwed when the Conservative Govt. that devised right to buy purloined the receipts and prevented LAs from ploughing them back into social housing.

I'm not comparing the rent charged against the landlords mortgage. I'm comparing the cost of the rent to the tenant against the cost to that same tenant if they were paying a mortgage to live in the property.
You could buy and live in the same house you're renting for £850m at a cost of £450m, and own it at the end. However, because of the high rent, people can't save the deposit.

No, its not exactly what's happening now. A very important part is missing. The part where we build more SH. If we had sufficient SH it wouldn't matter in the least if landlords sold, because fewer people would require the private sector.

@5128gap but you couldn't, not really. You'd need to add on money for insurance and running repairs at the very least. Wouldn't be as much as the rental cost but far more than just the mortgage. And that's without big long term costs like new heating systems, replacing double glazing, new roof etc

One of the things that shocked me most about moving from rented to home ownership is how many on-costs there are.

Maybe because they subsidise them in other ways that aren’t monetary. Let’s face it if it wasn’t for folk like home carers or nursing home staff or childminders and nursery staff how many folk in better paid positions would be fucked and forced to quit work to look after their kids or elderly relatives? But do these people get paid fairly for allowing people to live and not have to do it? No. So they need top up benefits or subsidised housing because they do the job the families either can or don’t want to

SOCIAL HOUSING IS NOT SUBSIDISED BY THE GOVERNMENT. The vast majority of councils no longer keep their own housing stock, it’s passed over to Social Housing Associations who are not for profit or mutual societies. They take out commercial multi million pound loans to cover building. These are paid back through shared ownership, right to buy and rents.

Also to the landlords, you pay 40% on profits not income. Why should you get more tax breaks to pay off the capital on your assets? No one else does.