What does a 62 year old man on just above minimum wage do when served with section 21 eviction notice and cannot afford anything on the current rental market?

[Mxflamingnoravera]

I have a friend aged 62 who has been living in a pretty awful but liveable one bed flat for six years. He works full time in a call centre on little more than minimum wage. The flat was recently assessed by the local authority as part of a new local licensing scheme for private rental properties in our city. It needs a lot of work done on it and today he was served with a section 21 order because (he was told) the builders say it's too much work to have him stay there whilst the place is brought up to standard.

He has looked around an there is nothing under £900 a month in our city. He cannot afford this. He has no car and cycles everywhere. So he needs to live fairly close to his workplace.

He is devastated, he cannot live in a shared house at his age. He is a very private, shy man, has few friends and no family.

I'm at a loss to know how to help him. He cannot live with me, i have no space and do not want a lodger.

There is literally nothing affordable in our city. He is looking at homelessness in January. What happens to people like him?

Cheapest carpet will be a foam back with no underlay. Get an independent company around. They will be cheaper than Carpetright.

Not a good idea to put foam carpet down without any underlay as some will sticks to whatever is underneath and be a pain to remove later and some will disintegrate into a black powder and be easier to remove if there is underlay. You can get paper underlay and when we were broke we used old newspapers, although there are less free papers around these days.

He has been advised to use a carpet company by the HA. They've quoted for it and his loans from the credit union will be used to cover it. His dad was a carpet fitter so he know about carpets and underlay! But thanks anyway :)

Dr has signed him off for a few more weeks, his work are keeping in touch and talking about a phased return when he returns.

The next few days are the worst, once Xmas is over things will start happening. He's alone over the next few days. I've had to hold firm on my boundaries for my family and I've made suggestions of places he can go for Xmas day but he won't take them up.

He really needs some counselling to deal with his past and this would be the ideal time to start. But he'll get there when he's ready and I think he will be ready once he has his basic needs sorted.

It’s a pity he won’t take up any suggestions, but it sounds like his work is being supportive. Another week and hopefully things will be looking different, and perhaps when he finally is securely housed in a decent place, as you say, he may agree to counselling.

What an incredible friend you are, OP, he’s so lucky to have you support him in finding his new place. Keep your boundaries firm and hopefully once Christmas is done and he’s moved in he’ll become even more self-sufficient and you can just enjoy the friendship again rather than worrying constantly about him.

This sounds better than sharing.

@VitoCorleoneOfMNMafia
I totally agree with you about how this situation has come about. Watching the news this week and hearing how many children in families are homeless right now, living in hotels and grotty B&Bs and having to keep moving every few weeks.

This whole situation has been caused by the sale of social housing, very little replacement housing being built and buy to let mortgages which created a new market in private renting that didn't exist 20 years ago.

What we need is rent controls, minimum standards for property renting and halting buy to rent mortgages because it was always going to go tits up when interest rates went up and landlords realised it was not the get rich quick scheme they thought it was.

You can probably guess my politics, what is interesting is that my friend has now become genuinely concerned and curious about politics and is determined to talk when he returns to work about the way large profit making business get away with paying low pay because they know the taxpayer will pick up the bill for the gap in minimum wage and what a real living wage should be. It makes my blood boil. He used to be a non voter he's now got the ID he needs and says he'll never not vote again and will be reminding his younger colleagues who don't vote of how important it is. In this area we have one of the lowest voting turnouts in the UK. The poorest people don't vote because they feel that nothing changes.

Glad to hear that there is light at the end of the tunnel for your friend, OP. He's had a very difficult time, not only recently, but having to live in what sounds like sub-standard accommodation for so long. Hopefully 2024 will be a fresh start and a much better year for him. A phased return to work with some counselling sounds like the best solution, and he clearly has a considerate employer.

I agree with what you say about the sale of social housing. Selling off the supply without replacing it and relying on the private rental market to take up the slack was never going to be an effective solution to a lack of affordable rented accommodation. In effect, the BTL boom is over. The incentives have been changed / removed, and many private landlords are selling up, and fewer new ones are coming into the market. I do believe there is a place for private rented accommodation, however, but with strict guidelines on standards, and perhaps a shift towards specialist companies rather than individual landlords. Privately built social housing can work successfully, and it takes some of the pressure off councils.

Where I would disagree is on the question of rent controls. Generally this has the effect of reducing the supply of rented accommodation, since landlords (corporate or private) don't want to take on the risks and costs of ownership if they are not able to increase rents. What happened in Berlin is an example of this. You make a fair point about low pay, however. Rents would be more affordable if wages were higher, and there would be less reliance on tax payers to make up the difference. As always it comes back to how to generate sufficient economic growth to enable companies to pay more and / or take on more workers.

Right to Buy has been withdrawn in Scotland and Wales. I was a housing worker in 1997 when the Blair government came to power, lots of us expected it to be withdrawn, but it wasn’t. Too big a vote catcher! I actually knew one council tenant who didn’t buy on principle. But most who could afford it were temped by the ££ signs.

I watched the programme about homeless families too, it came as no surprise. We need to be educating our young people about the cost of housing, and the shortages in many areas, before they have dependent children. It’s so much more important nowadays, as although councils have a statutory duty to house certain people, they just don’t have the properties. The breakdown of family units has added to the shortages, instead of one home, many now have two.

I think I can guess your politics. On that assumption, my politics and yours differ, generally.

But I am totally onside about massive intervention and change in the housing sector. I am for the most part a free market capitalist. But housing isn’t like other markets.

The first thing I would do is stop anyone owning more than one property unless they’re a very tightly regulated landlord. Such businesses should be prohibited from selling property other than to a tenant or another regulated landlord. BTL should end pronto.

That said, I wouldn’t reverse the law and policy on council house sales. I’d move the obligations into the private sector and regulate it to Kingdom Come.

My own views are slightly left of centre and on housing I would bring in the following

Right to buy ending unless you have lived in a house for 15 years plus and paid 80% of the rent (or more) without recourse to public money- no selling for 5 years if you do buy and a maximum of 35%discount

All new developments have to have 20% social housing and shared ownership and be a mix of flats and 2/3/4 bed houses

Massive tax and investment incentives given to pension funds and insurance companies for 'build to rent' at a rate above social housing but less than 'market rent' - tenancies up to 5 years if wanted.

Less land in city's being given permission for expensive student complexes .

Bring in government owned shared ownerships of 25 to 50% initially on the open market - rather than just new builds- Labour brought it in in 1997 (called DIYSO) problem was it was just too popular.

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We need to build more social housing. Right to buy was a disaster. Build enough social housing and there is no market for substandard private housing. Tax incentives for lending money to councils to buy or build more housing, tax penalties for land banks if land is not built on within, say, 3 years. Recognition that social housing is not going to be spacious and some may need to be communal accommodation with shared facilities.

Would the parents be included in that or would the communal living with shared facilities be for those who havent reproduced as usual 🙄

And how would those shared facilities work in another pandemic

Right to buy was a disaster.

It wasn’t. People forget how terrible local authority housing provision was (and is). Direct labour and political preferences were curses for social tenants. Nothing got done.

I know several council tenants who bought their properties decades ago and did so because they wanted to have control and responsibility. They all stayed in the properties and improved them, passing them on only after death or necessary moves to sheltered housing.

The problem is BTL and a lack of socialised regulation in the private rented sector.

Right to buy is tempting just to keep the HAs cowboy contractors out of the flat

oh hang on no that wont work now As part of the new Social Housing Bill if you are an owner occupier in a block of social housing the HA can still force you to have checks done by their contractors

@WhatsTheUseOfWorrying and I knew the opposite, people who bought at very low prices, and as soon as they were allowed to, which wasn’t very long back then, sold on for huge profit, which to us and others who had saved and bought our houses, it seemed morally wrong council tenants could do this.

Right to buy may not have been a disaster on an individual level but it definitely was for the country. The city I live in is buying back ex-council houses and a very high percentage of temporary accommodation is ex-council
stock leased from large companies who bought it as investments, the rent is extortionate and has to be subsidised by welfare benefits for many households so the taxpayer paid for the housing stock, and now pays to rent it back at an excessive price. Families who could have had low cost secure housing have high cost short term housing - find me winners here apart from profit making companies that don’t pay tax….

@Swirlymist hence my comments below too- and I know family members who lent other family members money in order for them to buy and sell on very shortly afterwards - despite them getting housing benefit for very large numbers of years

Sorry- but no! And I'm not a Tory

Shared facilities work the same way they do for private tenants, who are not going to want to see those in social housing substantially better off.

My husband was raised in social housing, things got done. Local authority housing was not always terrible, sometimes it was considerably better than private rentals. Some of it is still considerably better than private rentals and the majority is better than private rentals of similar cost.

Right to buy enabled the growth of btl by reducing competition. Some of us recognised at the time it would be a disaster for the rental housing market. A few families benefited financially, renters in general did not.

I think with Right to buy it was obvious all along that it would be great for the individuals concerned who benefited from it but terrible for society as a whole.

Not that Thatcher believed in society, anyway.

I don’t know why future governments particularly Labour ones didn’t stop the policy & build more social housing to at least replace what was lost.

@Twiglets1 because its a vote catcher. Also, council housing hasn’t always been allocated on a ‘needs’ basis. There was a time when people had to show that they could afford a council house, as they were often more expensive than private rented housing. For many people, council housing was aspirational. Buying their home, at a bargain price was the bonus!

When I was a child in the 1950s, professional people like teachers often had council tenancies. I remember my manager, in a very well paid job in the public sector in the 80s buying his three bedroomed house, in a nice area. He could easily have bought on the open market. Right to Buy was often out of the reach of the poorest tenants, or they were in poor quality, unpopular properties.

Properties built or adapted for people with disabilities, also those specifically for older or other vulnerable groups could be deemed ineligible to be included in RTB, so most local authorities can usually house older people more quickly than the general population, as has happened in this case.

Now we’re into the NY, I hope that @Mxflamingnoravera has some good news about her friend’s housing situation.