General Chat

Housing benefits are going to be capped at £500 per week
WHO lives in a house at that rate
two grand a month thats shocking to rent a house
Nobody I know does
As a home owner this doesnt affect me or my family
I think yes something needs doing
thats a awful lot of money
been paid out by our government for housing costs
Whey to much in my mind
Maybe its time some people lowered their standards
and lived within their means

What do you think ??

I think it depends on area really... rents for a house round here come in between £500 and £695 a month...however I know that in London, the same floor space could be ( roughly) £500 to a £1000 per week.

If your work is in London, you may not necessarily be on a high income, so still be entitled to housing benefit.

The thing is at the moment, house prices (for sale) are stagnant or dropping...but rents are staying high.

the price also depends on how many bedroom there are
next door was made from a 3 bed to a 4 bed and landlord charge just over £400 a week and that is in east london

I know Rose that houses in the city cost more to rent
but if they cant afford the rent at those prices
they should move outside the city

what normal house is worth two grand a month to rent

There was a lot of talk a few years back about trying to ensure there was enough affordable housing in London for emergency workers, nurses, teachers etc in London...don't know how effective that was?

I always thought if you worked in London or with in so many miles your income was adapted accordingly.....like a brush salesman lives and works Accarington earns 25K and Brush salesman lives and works in London gets 30K both work for the same company, therefore their salaries are set accordingly, the salesman in London income is allowed for rent/mortage?

We live in the Thames Valley and houses round here rent for £500 per week and people get them and get houseing ben.....coz theres no other way to house them!!!

Totally mad But the goverment capped the benifit you get at the start of April...so goodness knows what now!

I think there is a lot of talk about some groups of people being priced out of London completely. That would alter the balance of things, never mind the balance of benefits paid out, but having said that, if you were a single parent through no fault of your own or someone too poorly to continue to work and you had a house that had a high rent but was near to friends and family and support networks, wouldn't you be upset to be forced to move miles away, never mind moving the child(ren) to a different school or to have to leave a supportive doctor/surgery if you were disabled?

I think there should be some discretion in the ruling but I suppose then it could be twisted by unscrupulous people.

The report I read/heard said that also if lots of people were forced to move/be moved from high priced rental accommodation in London, where could they go as there isn't a surfeit of rental accommodation in many places.

Lizx

Same as Kemp said really lol only as usual I said it in more words!!!

As this problem is due mainly to the councils stopping building new homes thirty years ago on the insistence of our dear govenment to save money.the whole problem is now coming home to roost,and the working population is going to suffer for it all.
If this same government clamp down hard on landlords and their prices ,things could get a lot better,instead of getting worse.
Capping rents is at best a stopgap and again the people out there are the ones to suffer ,again ,grrrrrrr. :-0
Fred.

A drop in council accommodation & a rise in private lettings has made it really difficult to find affordable living. :-(

Gone are the days you could apply for a council flat or house & work your way to the top of a list on points. Getting a council exchange is hard as well. A friend has a girl of 15 & twin boys 8. 3 kids in ONE bedroom. They wont even consider a move for her :-(

Houses round here (Essex) are being bought to be re let at an alarming rate.

The house 2 doors away is now one of them. 3 bedrooms, the living room is now a bedroom with 3 beds crammed in. (my neighbour saw this when they took in her parcel ! )
So you are talking say up to 7 people on a house share paying ££ each.
The owner buys & lets out his properties, and must be laughing all the way to the bank.

With all this capping, people will be on the streets especially in private rentals.
There must be something put in place to safeguard people as there will be landlords who will chuck out tennents.when money dries up. Another friend about 10 years ago came home to her private rented house to find locks on the doors. The landlord wasn't passing her rent on to pay the mortgage :-0

She had to bed down with her kids at a mates & was allowed to go back at a certain time to pick as much stuff up as she could carry.
She ended up staying at friends until she found another tennency and the money to afford rent in advance :-(

I have relatives who pay the full private rental for a small 3 bed semi in a town on the commutor drive to London, about 45 miles from the city.
They pay about £950 a month.
The house is on a large estate but the bigger properties there can go for a much higher price

£950 here would give a slightly bigger house but we are about 55 miles from London.



Teresa

I think this has happened because of the enormous amount that was being paid out to some families. We have all seen it immigrant families living in really big upmarket properties claiming goodness knows what in benefit. Unfortunately when they start making rules they penalise some who are really needy amongst some who are plain greedy. And I don't know what the answer is.

One of our offspring is sharing a 2 bed 1st floor conversion flat in Clapham, London, SW4 at a total rental cost of £1320 per calender month. So I can understand that a family home could cost in excess of £2000 on the private rental market.

Someone suggested that lower paid workers should move out of cities, but then they would have to offset travel costs to get to work. Whilst accepting the Brush Salesmen scenario, there are still a lot of unskilled workers in say the catering industry being paid minimum wage.

Playing devils advocate, if a landlord has purchased a dwelling with either his own money or with a buy to let mortgage, he still has to make a profit to cover repairs/letting agency fees/void periods even assuming he is paying 7% on a mortgage. It's not quite so straight forward as you might think! And there have been tales that now the Housing Benefit is paid directly to the residents, some (thankfully few) have failed to pass it on to their landlord.

A 3 bed flat for £500 pw in London SW 18 (first one I came across)

http://www.cochraneandwilson.com/SW18/London/North-Side-Wandsworth-Common/homes/beds-3/property.vtx?featured=true&p=DFBC933A-937D-4238-8FDB-C01805C33C38




Let me know if the link breaks the thread!!!

I does depend on the area you live in. For instance, my one-bed flat in Norwich is £410 a month, and that's cheap for this area, if I lived on the outskirts or in a nearby village I'd be looking at around £350-£400 a month. The equivalent in London would probably be around the £700-£800 a month at least!

As for people affording a property rental of £2000 a month, they probably could when they had a job, but one redundancy and they are scuppered. Once you're on benefits for whatever reason, moving is usually out of the question, so you have to struggle in whatever property you happen to be in. The people claiming housing benefit for those properties most likely didn't need benefits when they first chose to live there.

As for the capping, it's fine if the government are prepared to re-house these people into a more affordable property, but if their rent is £2k, their housing benefit is £500 capped, and their jobseekers allowance is (for a couple) £97 a week, then they are clearly not going to be able to find the remaining £1500 a month to pay their rent. Moving isn't an option if you don't have a spare month's rent plus deposit and tenants fees in your bank, so they get evicted. What happens to them then? It's not really a saving...

DeT. most housing benefit is paid directly to the tenant, mine is, but if there is any instance that the tenant may be 'vulnerable' in other words struggling to physically pay the rent, or is behind with their rent, then the councils will pay the landlord direct, but only under certain circumstances. What they don't want to be doing is treating all tenants like criminals and taking away their ability to control their own finances and pay the rent themselves.

from the Independent


"But Terry and Teresa Lane have already lost their home in Westminster after running up nearly £20,000 in rent arrears because their housing benefit did not cover the full cost of their rent.

The family had waited for seven years for a council house but there were none available. Instead Terry, Teresa, their son Joshua, now 22, and daughter Graciela, now 23, were temporarily housed and spent the last four years in a three-bedroom, ex-council flat owned by a private landlord. They were charged £1,580 a month and received around £900 in housing benefit but struggled to find the rest of the rent from their wages.

Mr Lane earns around £18,500 as a document controller for an architects' firm, his wife earns around £5,000 as a teaching assistant. Joshua is an undergraduate at a London university while Graciela left home because of the stress.

He said: "That is why we ended up in arrears. We just couldn't afford to find that kind of rent from our wages. I have been waiting seven years to get permanently rehoused by Westminster. An estate agent would have said our flat was in St John's Wood, which sounds posh, but it was actually in Lisson Grove in one of the most deprived wards. But private landlords are still charging ludicrous rents.

"There is going to be a new breed of poverty. It will be people who are working who get caught by the system. If the new limits on housing benefit are not adequate for living in central London, then more people like us are going to be left to struggle to try and make up the difference from their wages.

"These changes will make things more difficult for people who work – if we didn't work I'm sure benefits would cover the lot. There is not enough public housing stock so people are forced into the private sector. The Government needs to invest in public housing before they review housing benefit.

"This has had a terrible effect on my family. My son has been badly affected by the worry of it all. He has lost weight and has dark circles under his eyes. My daughter left home because of it.

"Because we are in rent arrears we have now lost all our rights to be rehoused by the council so will now have to look through the private sector. We'd be looking for a two-bedroom property now my daughter's left home so we'd be affected by the new cap of £290 a week. I think we will struggle to find somewhere at that price. We have looked further out of London but it's a difficult balance – we both work in central Westminster so you have to balance the cost of the fares."

Campbell Robb, the chief executive of Shelter, said: "These cuts are a devastating blow for the most vulnerable people in our society, and will push many over the edge into a spiral of debt, rent arrears, eviction and homelessness.

"The underlying issue which this Budget has failed to address is the critical shortage of affordable housing, which means more and more people are being housed in the private rented sector where rents are almost double those in social housing. If we are to reduce the housing benefit bill in the long term we must continue to build more affordable housing."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/osbornes-cap-on-housing-benefits-will-drive-poor-families-into-ghettos-2024372.html

Like DET have a young relative sharing a 2 bed conversion flat in Clapham - rent per month £1300.

His comment that the entire rent may be covered if they were not working is not true in a lot of cases. Most people on other benefits who are not working/unable to work, do NOT get their entire rent bill paid for them by housing benefit, there is usually a certain amount still to find every month, though I would say in this particular case, that tenant probably would have it all covered, or only have to find a few quid to make up any deficit.

But, although the figures say otherwise those in the inner cities paying the higher (extortionate IMO) rents are in fact worse off, much worse off, simply because the Housing benefit will not cover it, and risk eviction and homelessness far more than someone in my position living where I am.

And who is going to foot the bill for helping those made homelss because of the housing benefit cuts and capping? How much MORE will that cost than just helping them out with the housing benefits in the first place?

And, where are they all expected to go?
I suppose that next we will see estates of prefabricated bungalows put up as temporary accommodation. Err have we been there before?