Rosa Hooses
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Comments (248)
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Comment on: Rich pickings
Life is patently unfair.
It is impossible to make things fair. Probably the 'fairest' way of doing things would be setting all rents at market level and letting HB help people on low incomes. If you combined this with building enough houses to meet demand (or somehow reducing demand) then eventually market rents would come down due to supply/demand. This still wouldn't deal with the problem of people who aren't willing to work hard, but at least it would remove some of the glaring discrepancies e.g. Bob Crow. -
Comment on: ‘Needs test all new tenants’
"Does the right to a home only apply if you earn less than £60k?"
Joe, I think the assumption is that if you earn £60k you have the right to a home and you can afford to pay for one yourself. -
Comment on: Shapps: housing supply will not meet demand
"so the silent majority lose out"
Are they really a majority? Or is the problem that whilst the nation as a whole would benefit from housing being provided to meet demand, the majority are in fact well housed and it is not politically possible to ask them to pay more tax to provide the necessary housing. -
Comment on: Freud under fire for bedroom tax ‘ruse’
Never trust anything anyone says if it is followed by "across the piece".
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Comment on: Government to propose £60,000 ‘pay to stay’ limit
You make some good points MerseyNorthBM. As you say, assessing income may not be so hard or expensive as some people think. They seem to manage it when it comes to figuring out how much tax people should pay, or (less efficiently) when assessing housing benefit claims.
If someone is in the private rented sector and claiming housing benefit, they don't expect that benefit to continue once their income increases. The potential loss of benefit may put them off getting a better job, but that problem can be mitigated by setting the correct rate at which benefit is withdrawn and the rate of tax paid on earnings. No system will ever be perfect, but it must be worth a try?
Why is it that whenever anything like this is proposed, people make a fuss about how 'people will lose their homes'. No they won't, they'll just have to pay a rent closer to the market rate.
Having said that, the govt should reinvest the extra money in providing lower rents for those who do need them.
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Posts (9)
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Posted in: Is it logical Captain?
So you mean I am talking about return on investment whereas profit is just operating profit of the business without taking into account the capital invested?
70% profit still sounds a bit high though, if you consider the costs of maintenance etc, plus of course the cost of repaying a mortgage if you needed one to buy the property you are letting.
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Posted in: Is it logical Captain?
70% profit sounds very unlikely. I seem to remember one of the reasons people first suspected Bernie Madoff was a bit dodgy was that his consistent 10% returns on investment were too good to be true...
If I bought a 200k house I could rent it out for about 12000 per year. Which is a 6 percent profit, out of which I will have to pay for repairs, admin, periods when there is no tenant etc.
I'm neither a landlord nor a finance person so happy to be proved wrong on this!
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Posted in: Council Housing is not subsidised
we are agreed that council housing is not subsidised - other than the initial capital subsidy which subsidised the building of the property in the first place. After 30 years or so, rents are in 'surplus' when the point is reached where any borrowing in addition to the initial subsidy that was necessary to build the property has been repaid.
This initial capital subsidy is a short term cost to the taxpayer, and there is also the opportunity cost of not charging the market rent, but these costs are perhaps preerable to the longer term high cost of paying housing benefit to private landlords, particularly as rent paid (either by tenants themselves or by HB) on council properties can be reinvested by the Government whereas HB on private rents just lines the pockets of private landlords.
Currently though, the Government favours short term savings, hence the decision to charge 80% market rents rather than invest capital subsidy.
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Posted in: John Healey interview
Given the shortage of housing generally, and of affordable housing, why aren’t county councils and other public sector landowners being forced to release land at nil or low cost so that it can be developed with a high proportion of affordable housing? Or at least required to consult with local councils about forthcoming land disposals?
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Posted in: Benefit reform
“The government aims to get one million people off incapacity benefits by 2015”...
“From today claimants who would previously have applied for incapacity benefit will have to apply for an employment and support allowance”...
Job done!