How wicked of you, David Cameron.

[vivizone]

So we're going back to Victorian notions of the 'undeserving poor'. Time to re-open the workhouses.

How this man and his cronies are getting away with so much damage done to the ordinary man and woman, I do not know.

Help us all.

www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/nov/09/deserving-families-council-housing-priority

You've answered your own question, Dontmind. It is about levels of need.

Those levels of need cut across the other groupings they're trying to create.

So:
? armed forces leaver with children and disability = higher level of need
? armed forces leaver single, no medical probs (inc mental health) with well-earned pension = lower level of need

The "deserving" concept is about judging the "moral worth" of a person, rather than their level of need. This is fine for sweeties as an end of term prize; it's highly problematic for basic survival needs.

Apart from anything else, you immediately get into the Q of what constitutes deserving. In previous eras, women who had sex out of marriage were considered less deserving - in the Jeremy Paxman Who Do You Think You Are, his widowed ancestor and her children had iirc their poor relief stopped because she had had sex with the man down stairs.

The question about need can be seen in terms of "what will happen if someone doesn't get X". So a person who can no longer get up the stairs to their bathroom have problems staying clean, causing more health problems. Adapting private rental isn't likely to happen, so the most likely way out of the bind is social housing rental.

And by the way I'm at MoD breaking the military covenant about looking after serving and former forces members.

Someone above said it can be hard moving on from army housing after years of relocating. And I couldn't agree more that you should have plenty of help with that - from the army. Advice, references to get you started, decent timescales, whatever would be helpful. If all those fail, you will then anyway develop a need which puts you on the levels-of-need scale.

There seem to be a lot of attempts to shuffle responsibility off onto other people - "Ooh, businesses should offer soldiers discounts" - WTF? Just fucking pay them through taxing the businesses in the first place. You can't run a country on optional taxes, which is what charity is.

/rant

wow so sorry to bring disability in to it and and offend
I do hope when it affects you and it will, you remember your posts.
you cannot tell people they cannot post on a thread, you cannot tell them what they can post or talk about.
and this will affect disabled people anyone who thinks other wise is just plain naive

Don't quite understand sunflowers' post.

Are you saying that you have goodwill towards disabled people, but if someone tells you disabled people aren't in fact getting the support you imagine, once the cuts come in, you'll get angry with them and stop listening?

And in fact go off disabled people as a entire group?

You're sounding an awful lot like a man who likes women, but only when they don't demand equal pay or maternity rights. That just harms women's cause, after all...

Yeah it is just like chicken licken

sigh, That is so far removed from what I'm saying that I could start to wonder whether you are being contrary on purpose.
What I, and several others, are trying to say is that sometimes it's not only about disabled people. Sometimes we would like to discuss how matters related to benefits, or social housing, or low income, affects groups other than the disabled. But whenever anyone sticks their head above the parapet and says well yes, but look how its affecting someone made redundant at 51 (i.e. anyone other than the disabled) they are immediately shouted down, even when the OP is like this one, concerning a specific subject i.e. prioritizing the homeless, where there is no suggestion that the disabled will be affected at all.
Apparently, the fact that they weren't mentioned is sinister in itself, but as Outraged pointed out, if you allow yourselves to be that paranoid, then you will spend your entire lives waiting for the fall. Hence my analogy to Chicken Little (or Licken, depending on where you hail from)
It isn't that people will turn against disabled people, the problem as I see it is that they will stop taking notice of anything they're are saying, on the assumption that it's more of the same.
That's what I meant by picking your fights. I really was trying to be helpful.
And, incidentally, thinly veiled threats such as when it affects you, and it will, apart from being statistical nonsense (10million disabled people in the UK, that's 16% of the population, therefore the vast majority of people in the UK will not become disabled) are hardly likely to endear you to posters who have time and again already voiced support for disabled people.
I really don't feel I have worded this post as well as I want to, but I have to go and pick DS up from college and take him to the dentist. No doubt I shall return to a barrage of objections to my own opinion.

Parsing knows exactly what you mean but she's just being obtuse on purpose.

Of course these changes may affect some disabled people. But just in the same way that raising fuel prices will mean it's harder for the disabled to get around. Ditto with child benefit. It will make it harder for the disabled with children to make ends meet. etc. etc. But hey....it will make it harder for everyone else too.

Let me ask you this parsing. Do you want equality? Or do you want preferential treatment? Because it certainly sounds like the latter.

Happymumy those gov calc do not take into account the effect of each benefit on each other whilst they do inc pass ported benefits they won't calc the actually end result hence why they have disclaimers attached.

Everybody else

It would be very very hard to have a reasonable discussion regarding the homeless or vulnerably housed with out also talking about things like disabilities or domestic violence

As the two largest groups experancing homelessness or threatened homelessness are those experiencing domestic violence and/ or those with a disability/ caring responsabilities for someone with one.

They classic stereotypes of a BMW driving beggar, those who blah there mum up for a eviction letter,etc are so far down the list of groups it's laughable

Someone up there got it spot on. It is about need, not moral values.
So yes people with disabilities, their carers, care leavers, single parents fleeing DV... not people considered 'naice'.

I shout about the disability cuts because it's my area of experience. Doesn't mean I don't and can't empathise with others facing difficulty.

OK, let's talk about 'needs'.

Let's say you are in a vulnerable position. Let's firstly use the example of a lady fleeing DV. What's her immediate need? A safe home no doubt. Does that HAVE to be a council house? I would argue not.

So now lets apply the same logic to a disabled person and/or carer. What's their immediate need? Well this time there's a good argument to say that they have special needs which may mean their home must be adapted. Does that HAVE to be a council house? I would argue not always. Certainly it would be easier for the council to adapt a house they own. But it's by no means the only way. I'm sure many landlords would be happy to accomodate in exchange for a long term tenant and a promise to make good any repairs if the family later move out.

What we are discussing here is how to allocate council houses and who should be given priority. Having a disability or fleeing DV does not in my view automatically prove a need.

My post was completely straight and I'm genuinely trying to find out what you mean, because you're trying so very hard to ignore anything that challenges your views - like above when you said no one was suggesting cuts affecting disabled people and several posters promptly detailed cuts.

And you're at it again with:
"prioritizing the homeless, where there is no suggestion that the disabled will be affected at all"

Are you suggesting increasing the quantity of social housing? Because if not, and you are talking about reallocating a limited resource to a new set of people, this can only be achieved by taking it from someone else.

That doesn't mean you can't discuss housing priorities. Or discuss being made redundant at 51. Or whatever you like. But you're not going to get away with saying, "and this doesn't affect disabled people so please stop talking about it". Because it does.

Ditto families escaping DV and anyone else currently meeting the criteria for social housing. That's the nature of slicing a fixed pie.

To choose who gets a smaller slice of pie, we have to talk about who currently gets what.

No but having a disability or experancing DV at the same time as being homeless or vulnerably housed does and always should.

If a private landlord suitably adapted a house for a disabled tenant, iiuc the tenant wouldn't get priority for a council house!

Because they wouldn't have an unmet need.

Btw, I know that niceguy already knows fine well the difference between "equality" and "special treatment", because it's been spelled out to him before.

But for anyone else.

If you open a bank in a building with steps, you are not giving your customers equality. You are giving wheelchair users special negative treatment.

It may cost you a fortune to put in a lift or ramp. That's not special treatment for wheelchair users, it's creating equality of access.

On this thread, it's housing that some disabled people may not be able to access without intervention. This is due to the need of adaptations, low availability in the private sector and - for people whose disability impacts their work - low income.

Sorry, that should have said,
^it's housing to which some disabled people may not have equality of access without intervention"

Parsing
For goodness sake, if you're going to take a pop at someone, at least do them the courtesy of reading what they've said. My posts in this thread have been made exclusively in connection to the OP and the article it linked to. That article does not mention the disabled at all
Did you even read it?
Here's the link again to save you the trouble of looking for it.
www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/nov/09/deserving-families-council-housing-priority
It talks about a briefing suggesting ways of prioritizing homeless people, which has somehow been extrapolated into disabled people are going to be evicted from their homes and thrown into the gutter, or the workhouse, or the gas chambers, to make way for library volunteers.
They are not talking about reallocating anything, they are talking about finding homes for already homeless people, disabled or otherwise.
I have made no comments whatsoever regarding any other benefit cuts that may or may not affect disabled people.
The drama queen hystrionics about silencing the voice of the disabled is just laughable. You cannot mention anything on here without being swamped by posts insisting how much worse it is for the disabled, and in many instances, I'm sure it is, but that doesn't mean that no other struggling group is worthy of forum space.

Disabled person in private rental, cost of adaptations then gets served a section 21 a few months' later = increased cost when adaptations have to be done again.

Plus HB would be higher on a private rental. Which statistically people with disabilities and their carers are more likely to need.

Security of tenure lowers cost.

oh dear.
terrible isn't it that a lot of people actually know how badly disabled people are being affected by the cuts and how they will be affected by things like this.
you might not like people posting about it, tough,

But we weren't talking about the cuts, threesocks, we were talking about prioritizing homeless people.

Glitterknickaz we best point out who the adaptions are paid for,
by a grant(funded by the council) the grant is in the disabled persons name.
so if they are then kicked out by a private landlord, the landlord will be the only one to benefit.
in social housing this won't happen as the likely hood of the person being kicked out is much lower.
(sorry saying kicked out as in a rush and can't think of the proper term)

people will become homeless due to the cuts!!!

That'll be the article that reads:

'people with severe health problems who are accepted as homeless currently go to the top of the local queue for social housing. But local authorities now have powers to redraw allocation priorities in order to give priority to "groups who make a special contribution".

Btw, "homeless" in govt parlance doesn't just mean people sleeping on the streets. Families are given temporary shelter in B&Bs like this.

And "disabled" means "have a physical or mental impairment that has a ?substantial? and ?long-term? negative effect on your ability to do normal daily activities." (Equality Act 2010)

So these people with severe health problems impacting their long-term need for housing will all count as disabled. But not all disabled people will have severe health problems impacting their housing need.

None of us were saying that this issue ONLY affects the disabled or Carers. We were talking about how it WILL affect the disabled and Carers.

If somebody else posted about another situation, then I'm sure we would also discuss that too.

But it doesn't take away the fact that this issue WILL affect the disabled and Carers, so why can't we point that out?

It's not ignoring the OP, it's pointing out one group of people that will be badly affected by this.

And NiceGuy. While you may not see any reason why a Woman fleeing DV, or a disabled person, or a Carer should be housed in Council (or HA) housing, I can give you three very good reasons why. 1) a deposit. 2) Rent in advance. Sometimes as much as 6 months rent up front is needed for an unemployed person to be given a private rented tenancy. 3) The lack of Private Rented housing *that is available to those in receipt of HB, even if only part of the rent is paid by HB a lot of LL's can't accept the tenant due to their mortgage company or their LL's insurance company refusing to allow it.

Lots of areas have no rent or deposit guarantee scheme, my area doesn't for starters.

If you are disabled and have no savings left, or you have fled DV, where exactly are you going to get the money for a deposit or anything up to 6 months rent in advance?

The Social Fund does not give loans for rent or housing deposits. Most of these people have no access to loans, and even if they do, the interest rates are anything between 200% and 4,356%.

That's hardly manageable for somebody too disabled to work, or somebody fleeing DV, who is having to wait 6-12 weeks for the first payment of benefits as it is, is it.

How can you argue that because they aren't currently 'contributing' that they are less IN NEED than, say, a 51yo that has been made redundant and has redundancy pay with which to pay a Private Rental deposit?

I can't see how the level of NEED is equal there?