Just a quick one!, benefits are being cut, fine, but what i want to know is how can people get soooo much, over 500 pounds a week?, and soooo much a year? its not fair, some get more money than i did when i was working and earning just under 27k/year.
Where do you get your data from? It’s impossible to comment without knowing the circumstances.
Jane
You can easily pay that in London for a one-bedroom flat.
It’s going to mean mass evictions here… people who cannot get social housing because, thanks to Thatcher’s ‘right to buy’ policy, there isn’t enough social housing. So anyone paying this to a private landlord and claiming housing benefit and job seekers will lose their home.
Most of the ‘cap’ will affect people on housing benefit and paying high rents to private landlords.
It’s disgusting.
Pat x
Oh silly me. Yes of course the OP was referring to the benefit cap.
Thanks Pat.
Pat is correct of course it is rent that pushes benefits up into a seemingly high figure. It’s not money people have to live on to buy food and gas just a figure bloated by rent.
Pat is right that it will mean evictions. If the government calculates that you need £53.00 a week to live on where is the shortfall in rent going to come from? It will go back to the days when all private landlords refuse to take people on benefit. Where else are people supposed to live? There just isn’t enough social housing.
Jane
Hi again, just realised that for single person it’s £350. Luckily doesn’t inc people on disability benefits or I would be up sh^t creek without a paddle.
I live in London borough of Haringey… one of the boroughs where the cap starts today.
You simply could not get a one-bed flat around here for £350 a week in private market. So where will those people go?
And remember you have to have a rent under that figure to give you any money to eat, pay gas & electric, part-pay council tax… and then there’s public transport which is very expensive here.
It’s nuts. It won’t work. It will make a lot of people homeless.
Jane is right… we will go back to the days when ad’s for flats used to state ‘No DHSS’!
Pat x
Sorry if i offended anyone, didn’t realise it was inc. housing.
No offence taken. It’s hard to get all facts and most of the press report it with a bias.
Pat x
what i dont get is that the government give you what they say you need to live on, which isnt much, then they tell you that you get way too much, then they deliberatly push you into poverty by coming up with more ways to tax you and tell you that your a scrounger for getting the pittance they allow you to have
As a non-londoner, is there any chance that private landlords may have inflated london rent knowing the government would pay it for people on housing benefit and may have to reduce rents as there is not enough tenants wanting the property.
Just a quedtion cos I dont know.
Neil
Hi Neil, unfortunately there is such a housing shortage in London that the landlords know they will always get a tenant… they certainly don’t need to rely on people on housing benefit. Loads of people working rent privately as virtually impossible for people to buy.
When my grandson was born… in London… my son and his wife moved up to Lincoln where her parents live. They were able to buy a 4 bedroom brand new house for the same price that I was buying a small one-bed flat in London. They had been living in rented one-bed flat a paying a fortune for it.
Basically what London needs is far more social housing. One-third of our housing stock was lost to ‘right-to-buy’. A large number of these did not stay in the ownership of the original buyer… but were sold on to private landlords.
On a council estate I was working on a few years ago, private landlords owned multiple flats and were renting them at high rents. I remember one landlord who owned 9 flats on that estate.
People who had never bought property in their lives thought that ‘right-to-buy’ was a great idea and went for it. They often didn’t realise that they would then be responsible for all the repairs themselves.
Private landlords then came knocking on their doors offering what seemed like a great price… a profit… for their property… and they sold the property (private landlords were also known to offer help for tenants to buy the flat providing they then sold it on to the landlord).
What they lost of course was the long-term security of social housing… they were then stuck in the private rental market… many of them ended up homeless and were eventually re-housed again into social housing.
Sorry this is a long post… but I worked for many years in social housing and I can’t tell you how much Thatcher’s ‘right-to-buy’ angers me!!! We will never be able to get back the housing stock we lost and greedy private landlords were rubbing their hands with glee.
I accept that for some working-class families it was their first and only chance to buy their own property and they were able to get onto the property ladder. But I think, in the big picture, what we lost is a crying shame.
Pat x