No more council houses 'for life' - thoughts?

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A large part of me thinks that with the social housing crisis as it is then this is most certainly a good thing. However, when I start to think about it in more detail I find myself wondering how this could possibly work? How much notice would people get? Would you enable them to downsize if in a house too big? When adult children have left home etc.

I do agree that something needs to be done but it does seem like yet another thing that is going to negatively impact people on benefits (his aim, no doubt!) along with cuts to housing benefit.

I personally think people should be made to move into a smaller council house if they are underoccupying.

My Grandmother is an example here, her and her husband and thier 4 children lived in a 3 bed house, the children have all moved out a long time ago, her husband got ill and the whole house was adapted it has stair lifts, walk in shower, grab rails ect, sadly her husband died so now it is just her in a 3 bed adapted house, she is very active and healthy.

We are in desperate need of an adapted 3 bed house but are stuck in an upstars 2 bed flat that somedays we cant leave becuase ds and 1 cannot manage the stairs somedays due to health conditions.

How many families are like this, how many couples whos children have moved out are still occupying 3 bed houses when they only need a 1-2 bed?

I've not read the whole thread but, working in a housing department for a council where on average about 45-50 homes come up for re-let each week and there are more than 8000 applicants on the housing register, I think that it's a good idea to review tenancy agreements and ensure that people are suitably houses. If that means someone moving to a smaller property so that a family can live in their 4 bedroom home then so be it.

Social housing is cheap compared to private rental prices and I also think that the rent should somehow be linked to income so that those really in need of subsidised social housing benefit from it.

My grandparents moved into their council house in 1937 when they got married, and raised their children there. In 1980 they were offered a brand new 1- bed sheltered bungalow in exchange for giving up their large 3 bed semi, and they jumped at it.

It was in a different area of town from where they'd lived all their lives and they were in their late 60s at the time, but they never looked back.

It makes sense, but only if what is being offered suits the person moving on.

I've read about half way through the thread, and it's late, so I'll post now. If I go over anything already covered I apologise.

I can see both sides, as someone who could really do with somewhere to live and who is struggling to find anywhere that accepts HB, I would love council housing to be easier to get.

However there are a few problems with this.

1 - there is apparently already a shortage of smaller council houses in most areas. So where would people be moved to?

2 - if you are in council housing, chances are you don't have savings, and probably couldn't afford the removal costs. Would that get paid for? Because I can see people objecting to that.

3 - in the case of the elderly, I imagine a fair amount of them will have disability aids around the houses. These will need to be removed and refitted in the smaller accommodation. Again, what is the cost of that? And, going by my nan's experience when she did move to smaller accommodation from a larger house, it takes a (ridiculously) long time to get done.

It's a difficult situation, because I can see how it would help in some ways, but cause problems in many others.

Thing is with moving the elderly is that you need to do it long before they are frail and wobbly, as it's then a terrible upheaval and likely to result in much unhappiness and chances are a shorter life. I think that sheltered housing is ideal, and generally means that you are move likely to live an independent life for longer (which most people want).

The trick is to find the right time to move, and perhaps if there was more encouragement to downsize - and the right provision too, then more older people would move, freeing up housing stock for others. I certainly wish my parents would make their mind up about moving from their totally unsuitable house, because if they wait until one of them dies (which is seeming more and more likely) then that's going to be a pretty grim and miserable move. They own their home, but don't really want to accept that in the long term it's not the right place for them.

Council housing is a little strange, given that it's not owned but is often improved by the residents. Perhaps it's time to think about some new housing models? I rent my UK home and it is gradually getting wrecked by the tenants, whilst I make no profit (lucky to break even, and I'm waiting for the housing market to improve enough to sell, although with the repairs I'll have to make I doubt that I'll do anything other than make a loss). I'd be happy to have a model where my tenants could invest a bit of TLC in return for perhaps a cut in the price at sale - it's quite scary having my main asset/liability in the hands of people who really couldn't care less about it.

I think the rent people pay on council housing should be means tested, meaning that if somebody's earnings improve the rent goes up in line with it, up to full market rate.

Plus the rules and regulations in the private rental market should improve and make the situation easier for private tennants, so you don't have to fear being kicked out at two months' notice after having lived in a place for years.

I don't see why the tax payer should subsidise the rent for people who are now earning the same or more than others who wouldn't be entitled to council housing or even housing benefit, just because they once were in need in the past.

I assumed that an individual's right to stay in a council house was already periodically re-evaluated. My partner and I rent privately and at any time, the person from whom we rent the house, could end our tenancy (with 6 month's notice). Why should someone who lives in a council house have any more right to stability than anyone else? Especially as thousands of people are currently losing their own homes due to the recession.

Prehaps people who are good incomes in council housing should be allowed to stay but charged more than the market rate for their property. Ie. charge £1000 for a house that would fetch £750 a month on the private market.

This would generate revenue that could be used to subsidise or buy or build more social housing.

It would also give people who can afford the choice to stay in their homes. Or the "encourgagement" to move.

nooka, good points

We rent but we also invest in the hosue where we can, we do that though because we want to be good tenants and not booted out first time having a rented property becomes a PITA 9we're also lucky that we can do some things for cheap, eg DH is about to put much better lighting iin the kitchen but as he is a qualified sparky can do it for free)

If we get next eyar extended I am looking at replacing the main carpet too at our cost.

Because we want to be good and because you know we want somewhere decent to live.

it's a shame there's no formal way of encouraging similar, if there were more good LLs might enter market? (we were LL's once, tenancts ripped out the kitchen! Luckily they found money to buy whole house as was on market, we had eviction notices ready though)

I think people on a good income should be charged market rentals (charging higher will push otherrs in the area up compounding the whole mess). Dad was on a decent income for a while; technoically he could ahve rented soemwhere else but had he done so he'd be back on waiting list now since the pension collapse: doesn't help anyone IMO. Better to pay as you can afford, stagged by HB amount claimed or not I think.

Also, wrt to people moving on- how much diffeence it will make will vary. My old la has masses of 2 and 3 bed homes and very little else: if you have 3 kids you might still ahve 2 and there's nowhere much to move anyone needing less so plenty of non movement still.

You'd need to know how much difference it would actually make before you could decide whether it was worth it I think (bearing in mind there will be a human cost either way- trauma of moving V trauma of being in unsuitable accom)

Need to make sure the alrgest number benefit really.

And find ways to keep people out of council / HA housing in the first palce.

Yes I totally agree that a LL should be able to choose who they let to but ATM insurances etc require that if a good renant, liked and caring, loses their job and claims HB even temporarily they should be evicted. Makes no sense at all!. if LL wants them out becuase of non paying /behaviour or whatever then yes, but if they don't? Why oblige it?

We are landlords and we set aside at least £500 a year for maintaince. If there have been no major repairs then we ask our tenant what she would like. You get tax relief on maintaince and if you do a little and often then the place doesn't turn into a dump. You also keep your tenant happy.

For example last year we put in a new kitchen. We managed to spread the cost of the kitchen over two financial years. We paid the labour cost of installing the kitchen in one financial year and cost of the kitchen units in another financial year. This was done by ordering the kitchen in the January sales with a six month interest free deal, recieving and installing the kitchen in March and then paying for it in the next financial year.

We email our tenant and ask her each financial year what she thinks is the best way of spending £300 on the flat. It keeps her happy and improves the flat. The fact that she had had some say in how the flat is decorated also gives her a sense of pride. She looks after the flat really well.

Is there nothing this bunch of idiots
aren't going to destroy? 5 years will create
ghettoes and lack of community cohesion, actually any sense of
Impermanence is likely to do the same. They really have to be stopped .

My place is turning into a dump because my tenants are trashing it, not (just) because of wear and tear! I've probably paid at least a grand for various repairs, which would be fine of course, but a bit galling when the tenants caused the damage! We have been tenting for the last couple of years and have looked after the places we have lived in because we felt responsible, and because I like to live somewhere nice. All my friends that ranted prior to buying did the same - some of them painted etc too. My place is let throguh an agency so I don't have much choice abut the small repairs, as they get done on my behalf.

Anyway, my point was that there is such a gap between council and private then something to fill that gap would be good. Not all private landlords are bastards trying to get the last penny from their tenants (I'm sure there are many like this though) nor are all tenants good.

The obvious thing would be to charge more rent for the bigger properties than the small then people would move (as they do by downsizing in the private sector to save money when they retire) but because we have these subsidised rents it can't work.

My mum is in a council house, sort of elderly persons 1 bed, she has had a new kitchen, walk-in shower, new radiators, new front and back doors (with these fancy locks so no one can get in in an emergency), new boiler and a ramp as she uses a wheelchair now (this is an extra, all her neighbours got all the other things too just in the last year or so!). She couldn't believe her luck, it was more than she'd ever had previously.

The chap next door died unexpectedly recently (he was disabled) so his wife is left in the house, she is my age, 55, so has prob 30 years or so there which means no other elderly or disabled person can make use of the house which is a great little house a stone's throw from the shops and GPs surgery. This seems wrong. A flat or similar would be fine for her.

Having recently been involved in trying to move an elderly relative into a smaller property I was shocked at how the system works. Nothing is done to try and make sure that people are in the homes they need, old, young, families or not. Councils would have more money if things were shaken up a lot!

And of course we're all tip toeing around the problem of asylum seekers and immigrants having 6+ bedroom houses claiming full benefit and then bringing their entire families over here to take up even more council properties. Immigration is a major strain on social housing too, but you're not allowed to mention it for fear of being called racist.

I think the government needs to realise that for SOME people there is no alternative to social housing.

It isn't as if our private rental market was regulated. If you can't get a council house, you are subject to the whim of landlords and letting agents.

yes, I believe that council housing should be reviewed. But what needs to be done FIRST is a change in the laws to get rid of the fixed term tenancy which is weighted entirely towards the landlord.

There is so much emphasis on owning property in this country. So, if you can't afford your own house, and you cannot get a council house, you pay inflated rents and have zero security.

If this rule comes into being without the private tenancy laws being adequately reviwewed at the same time, what we will have will be an underclass of incredibly vulnerable people, and a reoccurence of Rachman like landlords.

But of course the present government will not give a damn. Laissez-faire!

"And of course we're all tip toeing around the problem of asylum seekers and immigrants having 6+ bedroom houses claiming full benefit and then bringing their entire families over here to take up even more council properties."

No we're not "tip toeing" around it, we're not talking about asylum seekers taking up Council Houses because it doesn't happen.

Not only are Council's simply not allowed to put asylum seekers in Council Houses but it's actually illegal for a council to do so.

And you can be sure that if there were even one single infraction of the rule that people like the Daily Mail would be on it in seconds and screaming about it from their front page.

Anyone that tries to tell you, or to give you the impression, that asylum seekers take up social housing is either ill-informed or lying to you for their own purposes.

So it's not that you're not allowed to mention it for fear of being labelled a racist but that it's best not to mention it because you would be wrong.

Applauds GetOrf.

But, GetOrf, it is always a matter of balance. You are complaining that letting is too much in favour of the landlords but if letting is tipped too much the other way, in favour of tenants, then landlords will just walk away and find a different investment.
If you make letting rules too tenant-friendly then, perversely, you actually end up with fewer properties available for rent.
There is a middle ground somewhere between tenants' and landlords' needs but we never seem to find it.

"if letting is tipped too much the other way, in favour of tenants, then landlords will just walk away and find a different investment."

And if that happens then property prices might come down, due to there being less buyers in the market, and more people might be able to afford a home and therefore have less need to rent. So even more homes for home owners and less homes for renters.

Landlords are usually landlords by choice and most don't make extravagant profits at the hands of their tenants. And it's that majority of good and decent landlords that would be the first to abandon the rental market leaving it left to those who have much bigger profit margins and often far less morals.

Basically the housing/rental market is a very complicated beast any any interference by the Government to control or regulate it could have all sorts of unintended consequences.

I'm not saying that things don't need to swing back in the tenants favour somewhat, but any decisions that are taken need to be very carefully considered and not taken with the image that most landlords are evil overlords charging rent at levels far above their costs.

Cheers Expat - we usually seem to be on the same page on these types of threads.

badgers - yes there does need to be a happy medium between keeping private landlords happy and keeping tenants secure. I am a landlord myself - have a 2 bedroom flat on a buy to let mortgage, we rent it out and the rent we collect is £10 more than the mortgage per month. If and when the mortgage rates go up we will have to pay the difference. Buy to lets seemed like a good idea at the time (bought it in the halcyon days of 2006) but to be honest i wish we had never bothered. It is like a millstone.

BUT, landlords do have a good degree of power. I can ask my tenants to leave in 2 months. I think that is an appalling level of security.

Plus, letting agents, which for the most part act as a go between between landlords and tenants, ALWAYS act on behalf of the landlord. We rent our flat privately, but we did look at letting agents, and to be honest the way they spoke about tenants was shocking. They use bully boy tactics. And HOW is it right that letting agents charge sometimes up to £200 to run a credit check on a tenant. That is a disgrace and should be regulated. yes charge a potential tenant a nominal admin fee of £30 or so, but don't bloody profiteer out of it.

The problem is that there is a shocking reliance in this country on people like me, who are small time landlords who bought a house as a pension. To be honest I think it is madness that a HUGE swathe of housing in the country is reliant on small time unregulated landlords. How can this be? In other countries it is so different. In France and Germany I know there is no great tradition of private property, certainly no stigma attached to renting. And in America (I think expat told me this) the rental properties are owned by large corporations, not small time owners.

Of course under the conservatives nothing will change, all regulation (as it stands) will go, and there will be a VERY vulnerable band of people who will have little or no choice in their housing. If this carries on there will be an increase in slum housing.

"No we're not "tip toeing" around it, we're not talking about asylum seekers taking up Council Houses because it doesn't happen."

Taking the chance to hopefully finally nail down the lid on the myth of asylum seekers taking Council Housing....

The most recent figures for social housing show that 7% of new social lettings were taken up by migrants. Three quarters of those were for migrants from within the EU where you have freedom of movement. So that leaves 1.75% of all new social housing lettings were taken up by migrants from outside the EU.

Not one of those was an asylum seeker, they would have been a mix of people granted asylum or those who have been here for at least four years. Both groups would have been considered under exactly the same rules and point systems as everybody else.

So at most 1.75% of social housing went to people after who had been given asylum .

And these figure come from the Daily Mail who would dearly love to make a big issue out of this.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1301658/Migrants-given-15-new-council-houses.html

So please let the myth of asylum seekers taking our Council Houses curl up and die.

well done badgers.

So this story and countless more like it are all lies are they?

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1293929/Council-kick-asylum-seeker-2m-house-say-neighbours.html