More Affordable Housing Please

[GooseFatRoasties]

The shortage and cost of housing in this country has reached crisis point. Housing issues can have a detrimental effect on health and family relationships as well as a damaging influence on childrens education and emotional development. Many low income families unable to access social housing or buy are renting in the private sector. The high cost of this is causing problems. It is also very insecure, families need to put down roots as this builds communities and instability can have a negative effect on their education. Also house prices are becoming unaffordable and this need to be reversed.Therefore I am requesting if mumsnet
can start a campaign to call for:

The building of more affordable homes to buy
The building of more social homes

According to the housing charity Shelter:

"The government's proposed 150,000 affordable homes over four years is less than a third of what is needed. This will leave millions of families stuck in limbo on housing waiting lists, and push house prices further out of the reach of those on ordinary incomes.The cuts of more than 60% to new affordable housing will lead to the loss of jobs, skills and expertise that could take over a decade to recover from. Shelter research shows that for each £1 cut from housing the wider economy will take a hit of at least £3.50."

Statistics from shelter.org:

"In 2008 the number of repossessions rose to 40,000 from 25,900 the previous year, and it is predicted that 65,000 homes will be repossessed in 2009."

"Over 1.7 million households are currently waiting for social housing."

"Some homeless households - many with dependent children - wait for years in temporary accommodation. "

"At the end of December 2008, 64,000 households were living in temporary accommodation arranged by local authorities. Just over 49,000 of these households had dependent children"

This campaign is not intended to be about party politics.This is a crisis that has been building over many years and an issue that needs to by addressed by whoever is in power.

Not sure if it is within the rules. Just a request for a campaign from me.

I second the request for a campaign

Thought I'd add in a personal point of view.

DH and I are currently facing homelessness. He is long term disabled, I lost 2 jobs to redundancy (one after the other), then was hit by health problems and lost another job because of it.

We've moved from one private rental to another, finding it increasingly hard each time as rents have gone up while LHA has remained the same. We've also found that very few landlords are willing to take on HB tenants. And those that are often ask for a higher deposits, which is almost impossible with HB, especially if, like me, you have no savings behind you. A couple of landlords have asked for 6 months up front!

What makes private rental even more difficult is the fact that HB is paid in arrears, whereas rent is paid up front. So somehow you need to scrape the first month's rent together.

Now we cannot even live in the flat we are paying for due to harassment by the landlord, we cannot find anywhere to privately rent, and social housing is few and far between.

We aren't alone in this situation. I wish I could say our situation was unusual, but it's not. Many people are struggling to keep a roof over their heads, and it's about to get harder.

• LHA will be reduced for those on JSA over a certain amount of time. Which makes sense on the face of it, however it means less landlords are going to be willing to take a chance on HB tenants, just in case they are on JSA and lose the ability to pay the rent.

• Even if they can check you are on ESA not JSA, now there are new medical tests being brought in which are meant to make it harder to get ESA (many people with disabilities are already being forced off ESA), which means more people will be forced onto JSA. So it is still a huge risk to landlords.

For the landlords among you, we have been advised that if we can't find private rentals and our landlord wishes us to leave (for whatever reason) the only way we will be helped with housing will be if we refuse to leave. Not just until a court case, but until bailiffs are called. Which benefits no one at all.

So the current situation looks after neither tenants or landlords.

This is why attention needs to be drawn to this. This is why this campaign is needed.