General Chat

Gordon - sorry to read about your brothers predicament, he is one of the many vulnerable people affected by this rushed ill thought out piece of legislation - even someone tuppence short of a ha'penny could work out that you cannot move people into smaller properties if there are no smaller properties for them to move into.

It is also socially divisive to dismantle local communities, they should be spending money on building smaller social housing and build them in the areas where people affected by this Bedroom Tax live, instead of subsidising mortgages for properties which few ordinary working people could only ever afford in their wildest dreams.

Hope things work out ok for you and your brother.

Great thread I have to say. Re the bedroom tax. I was brought up in a council house from 1958. As I and my sister moved away my brother who has a mild learning difficulty remained with my parents. My father died and my mother remained in the house with my brother. When she died my brother legitimately was able to take over the tenancy. It is now 2013. My brother has lived in this house for 55 years he is now 60. He held down a labouring job for 30 years. He has since had 3 hip operations and now suffers from anxiety and depression. He lives on a frugal benefit and to remain in the house he has to find £100 a month to remain there. He has no chance of doing so. Local 1 bedroom accommodation does not exist. His immediate location is all he knows. I do not earn a great wage but blowed if I will allow him to be re housed miles and miles away given his health and mental state. I will pay. I do not in principal disagree with ensuring that properties are fully utilised in the council sector but moving the goal posts so quickly for the most vulnerable is totally unacceptable.

Great thread I have to say. Re the bedroom tax. I was brought up in a council house from 1958. As I and my sister moved away my brother who has a mild learning difficulty remained with my parents. My father died and my mother remained in the house with my brother. When she died my brother legitimately was able to take over the tenancy. It is now 2013. My brother has lived in this house for 55 years he is now 60. He held down a labouring job for 30 years. He has since had 3 hip operations and now suffers from anxiety and depression. He lives on a frugal benefit and to remain in the house he has to find £100 a month to remain there. He has no chance of doing so. Local 1 bedroom accommodation does not exist. His immediate location is all he knows. I do not earn a great wage but blowed if I will allow him to be re housed miles and miles away given his health and mental state. I will pay. I do not in principal disagree with ensuring that properties are fully utilised in the council sector but moving the goal posts so quickly for the most vulnerable is totally unacceptable.

I think tougher rules should be put in place to make the housing Associations make repairs not excuses. If they say they can't afford it ask what they are doing with all the rent you pay?, or, Why not take some of the unemployed tradesmen off the unemployment list, to train up others that are unemployed (Apprenticeship) while repairing people’s homes & fixing up some of the houses that have been standing empty for years, thus creating more jobs & housing for people & giving people a trade. Or is that too much of a simple idea because the way I see it everybody would win with it.

they all say the same thing maggie,talk about passing the buck,daughters flat is cold because the windows are always open :-(

...and no-one would want to move into a place with mould.
Daughter has a similar problem, she wants to move nearer to me.
Her housing association house was built 4 years ago and the bathroom ceiling is black.
She was told to keep the window open (talk about stating the bl**ding obvious) - it's never been shut!!

daughters flat is full of black mould which hubby has to clean down with neat bleach once a wk(children stay with me over night while its being done) three yr old has breathing problems and is under a pediatric consultant who cant decide if its an alergy to the mould or something else,housing have had a GPs letter but wont budge. she has tried a swap like maggie suggested,but no one wants to swap a house for a flat,she cant afford to rent somewhere privately because the rents round here start at £600 a month.its a no win situation for some people. :-(

I dislike this man intensely as do all of my colleagues !

That shows the other side to the bedroom tax - if, on benefit, children can share the same room, the council aren't under any obligation to move people into a bigger house unless absolutely necessary, even if they work.
Has your daughter tried a swap?

im sorry to say that i agree with the bedroom tax,around here(and i can only speak for my area)we have single girls with toddlers living in 3 bed houses,we have couples in 4 bedroom houses and so on,

my daughter and her husband have two daughters of 3 and 6m and both my daughter and her husband work full time and dont receive benefits .
her two daughters have to sleep in a tiny bedroom because the council wont re house them because the children can share a room.
my daughter pays full rent rates and can afford to pay the extra for a house,but shes at the bottom of the housing list :-(

This man and his cronies are just all out of touch eejits..... enough said :-D

And when I was in school (born 1953) the normal class size in all my schools was around 30. In many classes there were more. And my school were Catholic schools, but most of the other schools around were exactly the same.

The reason I remember the class sizes is that I still have most of my school reports which tell me where I came in class. So one year I was 31 out of 32 and the next year I came 1st out of 31.

Not so much about whether or not children need a room to work in - more a case of what are MP's doing in the House of Commons?
Shouldn't they be listening to what's going on? Shouldn't they KNOW what they're voting for?
Ironic it's Michael Gove - Education Secretary. He really should follow his own advice, and set an example.
If he can't listen and understand on the pay and expenses he's getting, why should he expect children to listen in overcrowded classrooms?

How I agree Ann.
Work ethic is a key.
Look at the last WDYTYA and the Kenyan Indians and the Uganda Ones.
They had the work bug and set out to make it again from nothing.
My grandmother was one of 13 children sleeping like sardines in bed,but they all worked.
My dad was a victim of the Great Depression and although he had a good trade as a carpenter having studied at night school for 7 years ,on a good wage down to 21/-(shillings) a week to live on.Did he sit back and moan....no he was out on his bike looking for any work.I have his beliefs and I would sweep streets if it was the only means of earning instead of moaning.
The children these days have far too much....my own family as well,even a great granddaughter of mine ...11...has an iPad and she posted on FB the other day...Im bored....
I never recall being bored .its such a materialistic society I despair for their future and sharing a room is not such a hardship and shouldn't be blamed for a poor standard of education.

My eldest Grandsons shared a room, both did well in GCSEs and A levels, both were accepted into Uni, one gave up after a month, one got a 2:1 degree, both, aged 25 and almost 24 are working, one has his own small house plus wife and baby, one has just sold his flat to move to a new area so is temporarily living with his parents and fiancée while looking for a house. Sharing a room did them no harm, their parents gave them a work ethic by example.

David Cameron and his circle of elite cronies that sit round the cabinet table seem to be under the illusion that because Dave is in 10 Downing Street that they won the last election and that Joe Public put him there, they are also under the illusion that as a result of all their scaremongering and divisive divide & rule policies, that Joe Public thinks the sun shines out their, erm, backside.

For the past 50 odd years it has never ceased to amaze me how our political leaders of all parties drift into their own fantasy world of pipe dreams, to the point they become so complacent and arrogant that they actually start to believe they can walk on water, and the longer they are in office the more hallucinated they become.

One day, I may not live to see it, UK governments will learn that in a so called democratic country where, on the one hand a small number of people earn millions of pounds, and on the other hand just under 5 million people earn less than what is described as the living wage, something will give and the millions will say - enough is enough.

If David Cameron is not prepared to change the direction of his government, I for one cannot see him doing this, if I was in his shoes, I would be wearing a stab vest, not only does he have several very ambitious individuals around the cabinet table after his job, he has the Johnson brothers plus a couple of ambitious well heeled backbenchers who fancy having the keys to No 10 on their key ring.

In addition he also has the men in grey suits lurking in the shadows, history has shown, that the men in grey suits move silently and swiftly when faced with what they see as a weak leader who has become a liability, they have even brought about the downfall of successful Prime Ministers who still had the keys of No 10 in their pocket.

This man and his cronies are just all eejits.....

Schools are full, I know lets keep the children in until the pass English & Maths....

I can read and write and my Maths is more than adequate to get me through life. I never needed exams.

Got 3 CSE's English Grade1, Art Grade 2 and Typing with Office Practice Grade 3.

When I left work 10 years ago, I was earning way above the national average, was a Manager with over 40 staff reporting to me. Some of whom had degrees, so that blows his theories out the window....

Despite all the yammering that the Tories are on a roll just look at the opinion polls of the Daily Telegraph. Week in week out they forecast a Labour majority of around 80. It is getting very late in the day for the coalition to do anything about this as people tend to make up their voting mind about a year before.

Rats know when they are a sinking ship and are quick to make other arrangements. Gove, IDS, May, Hammond all have their own agendas and any overlap with Brave Dave is coincidental.

Gove stands out as having a lot more connected brain cells than the others and that priceless asset political nous. He has managed to work out that unless education is sorted then the good ship Britannia may sink becoming a province of Uber Deutchland or even worse an EU administered bail out client. Gove hates the EU.

If in the coming weeks and months he is seen to be flaying the NUT and its acolytes remember that he is doing a very strange thing for a Tory minister by going into bat for good quality state education regardless of post code.

Why is he doing this ?

The coalition has been essentially carrying out what is called Orange Book liberalism rather than Toryism. There is a lot in allegations that Brave Dave is not a Tory but a Liberal. Tories never cared a dot about "the deficit" but have always run up deficits like drunken sailors pursuing such worthless objectives as social housing (Macmillan), education ( RAB Butler), roads ( Marples ) and so on.

Gove, the Johnson bros and others believe the coalition has (a) been a disaster as it is nowhere near Tory enough and (b) even worse will cause the return of Labour.

They are positioning themselves to be PM or at least a senior rat after Jun 2015 with Tory policies that Harold Macmillan or Joseph Chamberlain would recognise. Or even, come to that, Margaret Thatcher who was no fan of "cuts" seeing them as politically ruinous preferring growth. Oddly enough so does Ed Balls.

So there you go, the special advisers are advising.

Just see it like good olde medieval times to understand what is going on. The weak king soon to die has handed over power to foreign favourites especially the Dutch and knavish Scots. The barons are plotting in their castles polishing up their genealogy with the general objective of displacing the old regime even if it takes a temporary alliance with their worst enemies to do it.

There will be blood.

That was a very informative post RolloTheRed - I have long felt that the least well off could end up living under economic conditions of the 1920's.

Getting back to the comments made by the Education Secretary Michael Gove, I am surprised that his political/special advisors did not stop him making what to me, appears to be a bit of an own goal against his own governments policy :-S

All government ministers have political/special advisors, last year they cost the taxpayer around £6 million pounds, many earn 6 figure salaries :-|

I thought it was part of their brief to keep their Lords and Masters out of trouble, or are they just there thanks to the jobs for the boys merry-go-round ;-)

It is pushing it more than a bit to say that anybody with a bedroom for each child is "rich". Wow.

Michael Gove is right though people of any age really do need a room of their own.

The problem for the Tories is that instead of attempting to govern in a sensible and fair way they are a mess of contradictory policies based on ideology and prejudice as much as logic or god forbid democracy.

The "bedroom tax" is not only unfair and arbitrary the funds "saved" are illusory. There is no vast stock of social housing or even cheap private rents to downsize to. All that this mad idea has created is a financial assault on Housing Associations and LA Housing that may result in some collapsing (*). Pushing thousands of people into rent default also has many obvious consequences none of them good and all expensive to the state. Forced movement of people around the country is what we expect from the likes of China not a democracy.

(*) Another looming disaster for social housing is that from April 2014 HB will be paid to the recipient not directly to the landlord.

Thus we have seen the recent rollbacks on going to war, legal aid and the dire mess at the DWP, Crown Prosecutions, UK Border Force, DEFRA, HS2 and so and and on. HS2 will involve the demolition of thousands of ordinary houses, not just the well off out in the Chiltern Hundreds.

Sadly far too many of the Tory cock ups are direct descendents of Labour policies which may be one reason why Ed Milliband finds it so difficult to work out what the Labour party is for.

Whether it is politically correct or not to say so a great deal of the current problems of the low paid lay on the open door immigration policy of the last 50 years. Businesses like it as they can avoid problems of poor management and low productivity.

Brown's answer to nose diving pay was tax credits. These are in reality nothing more than a massive subsidy to employers, not workers who end up with less than a living wage. Quite how the likes of care home providers, the NHS, Local Government, supermarkets, farmers get away with this is curious.

Another inevitable effect of low wages is the exploding cost of housing benefit which has led to such absurd ideas as the bedroom tax and the current housing ethnic cleansing of central London to which even Boris Johnson objects.

In the last year Theresa May ( who I carry no flag for ) has tightened up a whole lot on the racket whereby "students" from outside of the EU ( who hardly knew where their "college" was ) worked 40 or even 60 hours a week.

This tightening has been very unpopular with business and Vince Cable is pushing at May to relax her policy. What is for sure is that it has driven the going rate for junior information technology staff up quite a bit and that visa credentials are far more carefully checked given the chances of a heavy fine.

The other reason why the UK low paid are in such dire straits is the poor standard of education which has been delivered by the DeptEd and the NUT to far too many young people for far too long. This is the inevitable result of putting the teachers in charge of teaching.

All the same the sunny days of relatively high pay for junior and middle management white collar jobs have gone and they won't be coming back.

The accumulation of short termism, prejudice and ignorance from all British governments 1951- date is such that a fix is next to impossible. Most of the EU, the USA and the BRICS are in a similar or even worse mess.

If there is to be a "fix" then for sure it will have to start with education not the NHS or overseas aid. It will also need employers such as Bombadier who provide high value apprenticeships and graduate training getting contracts rather than say Siemens on a narrow definition of best value. It would also help if British people accepted that innumeracy and lack of foreign languages is not funny or cool but a primrose path to disaster.

So we shall continue to continue and the poor will get poorer and the economy will revert to something like the 1920s.

The UK has been getting by on selling itself - first the major manufacturing companies, then financial and IT services, oil & gas, utilitiies, prime farmland and now London itself or at least most of Hampstead and Kensington. The loss of control and vast outflow of cash hurts the low paid more than anybody in the short run and near everybody's pension in the long run..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_X0NAv9K5c

:-0