Should Labour abolish the two child benefit cap?

[changefromhr]

In two minds about this. Yes for those who find themselves on benefits after having more than two children (job loss, divorce etc) but perhaps not for those who choose to have more than two children when they have never worked (disabled families excepted).

https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/jul/11/uk-two-child-benefit-cap-affected-1-6-million-children-last-year-figures-show

The logic is that the benefits budget is underspent by £23 billion, that means we’re the very opposite of “shafted”. When I asked for evidence I want statistics and research, not anecdote.

The landlords won't sit on empty houses. They'll sell them.

There are huge numbers of people in rented accommodation who want to buy. If landlords start selling their hoarded houses, people currently in rented will buy them (prices will fall because rich landlords won't be artificially inflating prices due to demand). The people buying houses will vacate their current rented home so others will move in to rent.

It's not as if EVERY landlord would sell their houses at the same time. It would all be very gradual over a number of years but would re-balance the housing market.

Just as purpose built student accommodation releases "normal" family homes back into the family market in University cities. Over time students move into purpose built blocks instead, so there's a flow of multi occupancy family homes sold or rented to families instead.

There isn't "budget" sat with £23b in it. The governments' accounts/forecasts are drafted based on a certain percentage of people not claiming, just as they're drafted based on the "black hole" of tax evasion. They're drafted on the basis of likelihood of what will happen, not the extremes of if everyone paid their tax and if everyone claimed their benefits. Quite simply, there is no "budget" that you speak of. If everyone claimed that £23b, there'd be a £23b hole in public finances which would have to be borrowed, added to the couple of trillion debt the country already has and for which we're paying nearly a hundred billion in interest (more than the education budget!).

I know someone sitting on a portfolio of 70 properties, they are just starting to sell them off. The people living in the rented accommodation can't afford to buy them, they are selling them to other people.

Of course there’s a budget. 🙄

Then Govt needs to fund councils so they can purchase them.

Plymouth City Council is doing this already, its cheaper to buy homes than keep paying inflated rents & done properly, allows people to live in well maintained houses and renters have more money for their families & to spend in the local economy, which benefits the High Street.

HB support is dead money paid out by Govt into the pockets (in some cases) of the super rich, such as the person you know.

I think it's highly unlikely that the majority of people living in rented accommodation will have a deposit and income to buy their home. Some might well, but I suspect in most cases, the sale will mean the tenants will be looking for another rented house.
As supply of rented homes decreases, rents will surely go up?
And I am LOLing at the idea that landlords are 'rich' uniformly by the way. Most just get by unless they have lots if properties without mortgages. Don't get the landlord hate on here.

Councils would go bankrupt pretty quickly with this idea and we'd all have to pay way more tax.

Less extreme ideas would be for councils to forcefully take properties from people with a portfolio of 70 like previous poster mentioned. Then the council rent them out as council properties. That's dead ass less extreme than what you proposed btw.

Rent isn't going to decrease until something is done about immigration because its simple supply and demand and there's not an infinite amount of land to build more houses on.

I know I'm Mumsnet unreasonable though 🤣

Landlords don't build houses. The number of houses vs population is unchanged by private landlords. They are not performing a public service.

I agree with you.

LLs selling to the open market wont be to tenants in most cases and if values fall, they wont sell!!! they'll just increase rents to offset any losses.

The answer is to move from a private rented sector to state owned, for the reasons i ve given earlier.

True also, most LLs are not super rich, the ones i know are self employed and own 1 or 2 properties for their pensions but of course there are some "professional" ones who are multi millionaires, such as a previous neighbour, who owned half the village (i kid you not)

Lots of councils are sat on huge amounts of money, which is invested. They can't "use" it for service provision as it's ring-fenced as capital. Councils invest it as best they can to use the investment income (interest, dividends etc) which is "income" so it can be used for service provision.

The other poster's entirely reasonable suggestion is that instead of investing the capital in banks or stocks/shares, they buy housing stock instead. There may need to be a change in the law to all that to happen more easily. The council will then receive rental income from the properties they own and rent out, either to help provide services or to save and buy more properties to rent.

Our local council has been busy buying up all kinds of properties, mostly High Street retail, for the last 20 years or so, and now holds a lot of empty, semi derelict properties on it's balance sheet, which they can't sell as no one wants to buy them, and can't rent as the High Streets are typically now just money laundering places and charity shops who don't want to pay market rent. They'd have been far better spending those millions on homes and renting them out!

Interesting. I guess it depends on where you live round here houses are expensive and the council is pretty skint I can't see it working here tbh.
Just taking 69 properties from the pp friend with a portfolio of 70 sounds less extreme to me 😂 and more cost effective. Maybe not in legal fees haha

Agree with this.

Also, cap rents.

Few councils are "skint". Most have large reserves of funds which they can't actually spend on "running costs" nor services. Just checked the accounts of a couple of small city councils. One has reserves of £250 million, the other has reserves of just over a billion pounds. But that's not money in the bank. It's money invested in buildings, investments, etc. They can't spend it on road cleaning etc., but they DO have the choice of selling up stocks and shares and buying land and buildings, or selling commercial properties (shops, etc) and buying residential properties instead. We could do with government guidance (i.e. instruction) along with change of law/rules if necessary, for them over a number of years to reduce the investments of commercial property and stocks & shares and increase investments in domestic housing. We just need the political will (at both national and local level) to make it happen.

Be careful with that one. My local council owns assets such as the town hall. If they sell it off, they would lose the significant revenue that it generates and our council tax bills would go up. They are probably also obliged to hold reasonable reserves to cover the funding of statutory commitments for a time, regardless of income.

Forcefully take properties, he's running a business. I've never heard anything so ridiculous. Should the government take away any business that is profitable. 🤣

No one will do research on my community (which I believe are amongst the biggest abusers) in the fear they will be branded as racist or that the research would be hijacked by the right wing for theirs ends. As far as stats are concerned, anyone with any really knowledge of statistics and their implications would tell you that the hidden unrecorded stats are as important, or possibly more important as the recorded and reported.

and I’m sorry I can’t do the research myself right now, I’m a little busy, so can only offer my lived experience. Please don’t devalue my life experience.

And any sociologist would tell you that anecdotal evidence is valid research evidence.

So sick of people who have little lived experience in the real world (I’m assuming from your blatant naïveté) telling me to justify my genuine life experience. I don’t get my knowledge from newspaper headlines, but from the real flesh and blood people around me.

I'm kidding (kind of) 😂

I do actually think its a better idea than Councils mass buying houses and renting them out though. Way to go bankrupt within 28 days. Instead of being screwed over by high rent people would be screwed over by higher council tax

Also didn't this happen in china?

Mumsnet should love china I've already seen someone on this thread say people should only be allowed two kids anyway (not related to benefits just in general)

Due to private landlords there are families in b and b's who have been served very short notice to leave including a single mother I know. As if you are doing them a favour.

I’ve got plenty of lived experience.

Single mother then shitty relationship with more kids. Benefits, worklessness, poverty, awful sink estate in South London.

You know what she told/taught me? Not to be like her. She made some bad choices, she had some bad luck, and that combination entrenched her but it didn’t me because I wanted more and was young enough to be able to not be bogged down (no kids/debt etc).

I’ve never claimed benefits, not because I’m morally superior, but because I had a job from 16 including during study and I’m a professional homeowner owning a decent salary.

Some are like your description, many are like mine.

What I do know from my lived experience is that if there were no benefits for the third child we would’ve been starving as a family.

I don’t give a fuck if a few (because it is FEW in my experience) gaming the system benefit if the vast majority who receive it are in need.

And what about all the private landlords who are providing accommodation for hundreds of thousands of tenants? Of course they are providing a service, how stupid not to think so!
So, I will ask you now, where do you suggest we house families if there were no private landlords but without a utopia where there was enough social housing for everyone?

Housing benefit and paying for temp housing is bankrupting councils too.

....as is paying out in work benefits, if rents were lower, people would have more money in their pockets and need a bit less support.

The state cannot go around taking properties off people who have bought them legally.

So much more migration is required because we left the EU and now have to attract workers and their families from the 3rd world.

We do however need to make sure that those who can work, do work, when on out of work benefits.

This thing about landlords is a difficult one.. it’s sad what happens to the person you know. I hope she’s able to received the help she’s needs from the council to get permanent accommodation - it’s so heartbreaking for a mum to not have the basic security of a home where she can put her kids to sleep at night. But the think about many landlords, many are stuck between a rock and a hard place too.. with interest rates as high as they are, few are making any profit, and are needing to dip into their own funds to make up the short fall or face defaulting on their mortgage. I know many other leaseholders in the building I live in who are landlords but are having to sell now, (sometimes at a massive financial loss due to capital gains tax) because they can’t keep up with the payments.

Bottom line, we need more housing, better housing. Labour are working on this, but we need a stop gap till then, and it’s not the landlords anymore, sadly it’s the b&b. I’m speaking as the sister of a woman who had to live in a hostel with Only a shared bathroom as the only home she was able to take her newborn son after he was born.