Both sides of the fence
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Comments (36)
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Comment on: Government to propose £60,000 ‘pay to stay’ limit
I'd fall into the £60k bracket, just. Between us my son and I earn around £63k a year. However we live in outer London and work in inner London so pay out around £4k a year between us in travelling costs. As Janine says, London is far more expensive a place to live than most places.
So will I be charged the same rent as Bob Crow who is on £120k+ a year or would it be a sliding scale? And as Joe pointed out how will they know who to charge unless they means test all of us at an astronomical cost to social housing providers? Who will pay for the cost of the resources needed to do the assessments, and presumably it would have to be done annually as things change.
Good in theory, in practice a pretty stupid idea once you start to look at the logistics of the whole thing. -
Comment on: Mears' social housing business going strong
My experience working in the sector is that DLOs which is what Rick and Patricia are talking about were phased out because they weren't able to deliver at the level and cost expected. So I don''t think DLOs are the answer.
Having said that my mum is currently having a new kitchen installed by Mears and the level of work is terrible. I've already had to complain twice, one because they left my mum (who is 82) with a building site for a kitchen with rubble everywhere and a loose cable as an additional trip hazard. -
Comment on: Right to buy to cover 30% of new home costs
Whilst I agree that the sums don't add up for funding new affordable homes and I don't agree with the whole affordable rents business at all I'm afraid I just don't understand Joe's logic. The tenants in the RTB homes aren't claiming HB so there is no change there. The tenants in new affordable homes will be claiming HB but they would already be claiming HB wherever they lived before so there is no huge increase. In fact if they were housed in the private sector the HB bill will actually go down.
Please lets have arguments that stack up and make sense. -
Comment on: Government wins 'bedroom tax' vote
At the risk of being shot I'll give my thoughts both as a tenant and a housing professional.
I think it is reasonable to ask someone choosing to have a spare room or two to contribute toward the cost of this if they claim housing benefit. I don't want to be supporting people who choose to live in larger accomodation than they really need whilst families are homeless or living in cramped accomodation because of the lack of social housing.
BUT and this is a big but there are numerous caveats to this. My mum waited 4 years to downsize from a 2 bed house to a 1 bed property. There just isn't the suitable accomodation available. Therefore the first caveat is that anyone on the waiting list or bidding via CBL to downsize should be exempt.
Next anyone that has intermittent carer responsibilities, be it for their own children or foster children should be exempt.
Anyone who has kids in college or the Armed Forces should also be exempt as the kids come home periodically (my son was in the Army and he came home every other weekend at least whilst he was at base).
Next there should be a year's grace for anyone that finds themselves out of work, or in lower paid employment. This gives them time to find work or find higher paid work before the "bedroom tax" is applied. If after the year has passed they are still in receipt of housing benefit then the "tax" should be applied unless they fall into one of the other categories.
The ideal solution and one I support completely would be the building of much more social housing but that isn't going to happen so we need to live in the real world.
I don't accept the arguments about rich people living in bigger properties, they had to pay for those properties, they pay to heat, light and maintain them and we all know the bigger they are the more expensive they are. They also pay more Council Tax. -
Comment on: Housing scheme launched for low wage workers
As with most of these things the theory sounds good and then you look at the practical. A family earning under £30k per year would be still be expected to find £975 a month for a 3 bedroom property using LHA rates. How on earth could a family on that sort of wage find almost £1k a month in rent??? Ridiculous.
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Posts (47)
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Posted in: Can I move my son in?
There is no completely correct answer that anyone on this site can give you as the answer depends on a number of things that your Housing Officer can confirm and your current property which you haven't specified.
Firstly it depends on the type of property. I note that you say that you have a spare bedroom so that's one tick in the box. If it is a sheltered property for example then it is unlikely that you would be given permission for your son to move in.
As far as putting your son onto the tenancy then many housing providers have a policy in place that does not allow for adult children to be added to their parents tenancy. Others require any additional tenant to be residing in the property for a period of time, usually a year, before they will consider adding them to the tenancy agreement. So this answer depends on your providers policy.
A previous poster also pointed out that you need to be careful if you are claiming benefits as you will lose some benefit if your son moves in, how much depends on his circumstances. Your HB team would be able to give you an idea of how much you would lose.
The best way forward is to start with an informal chat with your housing officer who will be able to advise you of current policy etc, and with your HB team if you are claiming HB. If you can go forward then your housing officer will be able to assist you with this, but a simple application in writing is the usual way to ask formally.
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Posted in: Advice on Board Membership
I'd say it's a clear conflict of interest. Staff members who are tenants are excluded from being a board member of the ALMO where I live via the rules of the organisation and that is entirely appropriate.
Where I work I would need to get permission to become a board member and that permission wouldn't be given if it was a board member of the ALMO or one of the TMOs because of the same conflict of interest.
So in my opinion the terms of reference of the board would need to set out that staff members are excluded and the staff member couldn't argue with the terms of reference of the board, just as it would set out who could be a board member.
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Posted in: Rent of decanted tenants still being counted as rent arrears
Hi Rick
No the live tenancy is the property the person is currently living in, I believe that the decison for that is because it is something to do with housing benefit and the tenant only being able to claim for the property that they currently reside in.
A number of decanted tenants in my experience choose not to return to their previous property and therefore it is more appropriate anyway to void the property that is damaged.
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Posted in: Rent of decanted tenants still being counted as rent arrears
nonny - re-read the post. I know we are used to tenants asking questions in ask the experts but this is a housing professional asking for advice on how to remove a decanted property from the arrears records.
Ian - the decanted property should be listed as void and therefore appear in the rent loss through voids stats rather than your arrears stats. After all it is a void and will be for some considerable amount of time.
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Posted in: WELFARE HOUSING/TENURE QUESTIONS
Hi Rick,
There are different issues here. In terms of tenure, yes an existing tenancy is binding therefore can't be changed to a fixed term tenancy.
In terms of rent - rent can be increased with a months notice. Therefore the rent for anyone can be increased quite easily.
I'm in two minds over the market rent for those paid over £100k. On one hand considering the number of people on housing waiting lists that can't afford to buy a property I think that those that earn over £100k should do the decent thing and give up their property or pay market rent.
On the other hand how do you police it? It needs more staff and how do you judge? For example if there is a single earner in the family unit earning over £100k is it fair to charge them market rent if in another home both the husband and wife work and earn £80k each per year and are therefore under the £100k per person limit? Or is the idea to have a family income of more than £100k? In that case do you count adult children in the household income and then put the rent back down if they move out and the income drops below the £100k? Again a nightmare to administrate. Is it fair to charge someone market rent for a non decent home is another question that doesn't seem to have been addressed.
In my perfect world we would go back to how social housing started. Enough properties so that anyone who chose to live in social housing could. Even better social housing was seen as something people actually wanted to move into rather than the stigma that is attached these days.