To think you should downsize your council house if it’s just you?

[OuchOuchOuchh]

Oh my goodness I have created war at work and everyone is gunning for me.

My auntie has a huge 4 bedroom council house she has lived there since the 90s with her one son. That has now moved out.

All i said was I think it’s unfair that she’s living in such a big family home perfect for a family to bring their kids up in. Large garden backs on to the woods plenty of visits from deers and fox’s it’s beautiful! Anyway all I said is that if you haven’t purchased the property in a certain amount of time you should have to downsize if it’s just you living there.

Theres families overcrowded and can’t get anywhere then you have my auntie paying £100 a week in rent for a massive house for just herself.

please tell me if I am being an asshole! I appreciate it’s her family home but it just doesn’t seem fair to me.

Practically and for the "greater good" big family council houses should be given up by sole residents and passed onto a family that needs them.

Emotionally...it's complicated.

All of my grandparents' generation brought families up in council homes. My parents, aunts and uncles left home and they continued to live there. Then grandchildren arrived and they came to stay. My GPs maintained their homes with little assistance from the local council. They grew veggies in the back and raised chickens. In other words, there were lives lived there.

My GPs all died by 1999.

My father in law has a council house. The local council are desperate for him to downsize and give him a ground floor flat or maisonette somewhere. But he lives in London, and to be quite honest some places he's been offered, not even the cochroaches would stay. He'd like a garden or an allotment nearby to keep him active and to keep his marbles (he says). The council will pay £1k towards moving costs. But they can't find him anywhere he's willing to go to. My father in law has since been looking at a scheme for retired council folks in Kent, Sussex and Hampshire. But even then, what's on offer is poor quality or too far from a bus stop or railway station. He needs a decent hospital nearby and he doesn’t drive. He's 77, too old to learn! It's quite often the seniors holding things up, but I don't blame them.

We need to stop building high rise leasehold flats in the South East and instead build 3/4 bedroom homes for social rent. IMO.

Yes I agree but we need to change the system rather than relying on people choosing to do the right thing.

Contracts with councils for social housing should be for suitable housing, not for a specific house. This would enable them to move people to more appropriate housing as their circumstances change.

There should be no right to buy. And more housing should be built with a view to our current and future needs - i.e. more 1 beds.

Where I live this is not true. The council don't care about exchanges as it's housing stock that is shady tied up. They only care about EMPTY stock going to the right capacity family. I could swap with a single person in a 1 bedroom flat. Even though I have a 5 bedroom house and a daughter. They council would approve it.

You don’t pay the same because private rental and mortgages are at the mercy of the markets. The solution to that isn’t saying everyone has to be ripped off because some people are, is it? People chose to pay over the odds for houses. The housing market is massively inflated. Council tenants aren’t to blame for that.
Why don’t you think people should be allowed long term security in their homes? Would benefit do you think it will have to have to make social and council tenants nomads in their own country? How do you think this idea could possibly be fairly administered? It’s a terrible and inhumane idea, so knowing this government it will probably be policy by next week

I agree with the sentiments but many years ago I worked in local government housing. They built a small estate of 15 bungalows on the edge of a small town and were encouraging single people in family sized houses to downsize. The press and hostility we received from locals made us out to be the devil incarnate for 'pressurising' old folk to move away from friends and family. We had protestors outside the offices calling us names as we went into work. It was horrible.

In the end the majority went to older people rehoused from isolated areas and sub-standard private housing.

Much easier said tha done.

Sorry if already mentioned but didn't the bedroom tax come in to incentivise people to downsize in Ops situation?

Absolutely this.

It isn't absolutely this at all. That is not what council housing was for. The government have massively failed and as per it's the normal people just trying to live their lives getting shafted

Only those in receipt of benefits

How is downsizing "getting shafted"? The ones getting shafted are the younger people who don't have a hope in hell of a 3 bed council house or affording to buy their own. An old lady moving to an appropriately sized flat is not a tragedy, it's common sense.

I think RTB was badly managed. I don't blame people for buying their council house when the opportunity arose - its a way of getting on the housing ladder....but there was no way the housing stock could be replaced at the same rate for new tenants.
DH previous flat was an ex council flat in London. It was first bought in the late 1990s for 60k. He bought it in the early 2000s for and sold it a few years later. It sold last year for over 500k.in the block, when we were there only 1 flat was still owned by the council. There were several blocks in the road, I'm sure with a similar ratio of privately owned v council owned. There just wouldn't be the space to replace that number of flats.

Isn't it funny how when the chips are down we turn on each other? In the few years after 2008 there was endless benefit bashing and complaints about similar complaints about people in council houses. It's not so long ago that very wealthy people were taking huge hand outs from the state to protect their own personal wealth from the effects of covid and lockdown. Then there is the vast corporate welfare that exists in this country or wage subsidy to business because so many employers refuse to pay a fair wage or to offer secure employment.

What our government and the shady multi-million pound deals made for supplying ppe that directly benefited those choosing the suppliers, also see Rishi Sunak's links to Moderna which has just done a 10 year deal with the UK to deliver vaccines paid for with public money. Sunack personally stands to gain massively from this deal, those profits will come from taxpayers money. Not saying we don't need vaccines but we shouldn't have a pm who is benefiting personally.

What I'm saying is that we are angry with the wrong people, the OPS aunt having a couple of extra bedrooms isn't the issue but it's very convenient for those who are robbing us blind to have the "little people" fight amongst themselves rather than have them pay attention to what is really going on.

I agree, we were lucky enough to have a council house years ago, our neighbour was a very, elderly lady living in a 3 bedroomed house with a garden. She couldn't access or use any of the bedrooms as she'd been unable to get upstairs for years. She had carers who came in and helped her use a .commode

Moving her when her dc had moved on would have been kinder and far.less traumatic, at least in a flat or bungalow she'd have been on one level so able to access a bedroom and have a wet room. This lady hadn't had a.shower or bath for years, the best she got was a bedbath.

Your last paragraph made no sense to me sorry.
The difficulty with your reasoning is that the tenant is still meeting the terms of their tenancy so long as they pay the rent, don’t engage in anti social behaviour, etc. How many people inhabit the house at any given time is not a term of the tenancy agreement.
I’m no expert on contracts but to be honest I think that it would be a pretty unenforceable term in the private or social rented sector to say you can only keep this house if you have x amount of people living here. It’s actually bonkers to suggest that could be an enforceable term. A judge would laugh in your face.

And go where ?

How dare older people desire space, proximity to nature and to have some propriety over houses and gardens they have loved and nurtured? Make ‘‘em live in bed sits the lot of them!

Meanwhile parents should feel free to keep popping out babies they have no space for.

That comment wasn't just downsizing. It was about council or HA homes in general.

Is it fair that investment bankers make millions while carers get minimum wage? These are not isolated issues. All interrelated and create situations where those who do jobs which have no benefit to society can afford to buy and are not under anywhere near the same sort of moral scrutiny as those who do the bulk of minimum wage work that society depends on and who are most likely to be in precarious housing.

Swap older people for younger people and then read it back.
How did the older people get the houses in the first place? By having kids they couldn't afford to house privately... the irony.

It’s not her fault people are choosing to keep having children that they have no space for!! I own my 2-bed house, we already have one child and won’t be having another until we are in a bigger house! That’s called being responsible. Relying on a bigger council house to have more children is not.

Because some people are suffering, everyone should? Nice attitude.

You could focus on wanting to improve things for private tenants, but its just easier to try and bring council tenants down I suppose.

The birth rate is falling we need people to have more children, no one is saying that older people don't deserve homes but younger people deserve homes too why should they be deprived of a chance to have a family life?
'Popping out babies' is a horrible misogynistic phrase, is your name Andrew Tate?

Succinctly and eloquently put.

Why just council houses? Why not private renters and owner occupiers? There are families who would like their houses too.

And why are we making individuals take the hit for the government’s near destruction of the social rented sector? Why not blame the government and campaign for them to build council homes again ( which are not sold off)

You are a total asshole (to use your words). Your auntie has paid the required rent on her home for may years. Why should she now have to move because there has not been sufficent investment for others.

Its her home. Councils should however put in place incentives to encourage people to downsize but absolutely she should never be forced to do so.