AUSTERITY FOR WHOM?

[^woody^]

Disability claims are another issue I think. There has for a long time been the potential to milk claims with the various carer and support "extras".

This area of benefit is also coming under the spotlight.

If you take a "typical" healthy man, wife and two kids then the benefits they could get are not much. The problem is some people are happy to live with no motivation or aspiration and just get by. They are happy to live an austere existence

 

[Deleted member 174758]

A big drain is housing benefit - and housing benefit payments to private landlords at top rates is the culprit.

I've got my parents house that I'm doing up to rent out and recently went to a landlords forum run by the local council. Most of the talk there was about the reduction in housing benefit affecting their incomes, the fact that they had been milking the system and generally forcing up rents wasn't considered.

One of the biggest problems facing this country is the entire housing market. For years successive governments hyped the housing market to bolster the economy, aided and abetted by the banks and in particular by the building societies (The Halifax being the worst offender as both the biggest lender AND the biggest estate agent). By the time that Labour came to power we had the beginnings of a housing crises with the Tories having sold off a substantial amount of public sector housing and the price of even basic housing having risen to above the level that many first time buyers could afford, especially those in lower paid trades, semi-skilled or manual jobs. Instead of tackling this problem Labour pretty much abandoned the public housing sector to the HATs, more or less stopped building in the public sector and increased the subsidy to private sector landlords by massively increasing Housing Benefit. The result (in part) was that the housing market continued to hyper-inflate to the point at which we now have a housing shortage, a massive HB bill and the housing stock overvalued to such an extent that most people under 30 will never be able to afford their own homes whilst private landlords bleat about how much they are suffering! In a way it's a pity the recession didn't bite much harder and that property prices didn't come down to where they should be relative to incomes - somewhere around 30 to 40% of where they are today. It's alos a pity that a so called socialist government didn't spend a biy more time and money looking after the people they depend on for their votes (and who are stlll stupid enough to vote for them, or so it seems). Me? I'm in the building trade so you can imagine that I have even stringer views on this government, the previous one and the parlous state of the economy

 

[big-all]

its the responsibility of government to look after the poorest in society
providing low cost housing is relatively cheap much cheaper than private letting when you plan ahead
the trouble is since the 80 the housing stock has been sold off cheap [up to 70% off ish discount]and not been replaced for political gain
now its coming back to bite them they should take the blame for there actions

its about time we stopped blaming the fact on the people needing housing and place the blame fairly on the shoulders off all politicians for the last 30 years who have sold the housing off cheaply without building more

 

[captaincaveman1]

Well i'm picking up the keys to my massively over inflated mortgaged up to the hilt house today so I can confirm that now I have made the plunge you can expect the house price's to drop drasticley within the next few months. Dont forget you heard it here first .

 

[ellal]

Divide and rule is alive and well...

The 'undeserving' poor are probably costing us a few billion in fraud...

Meanwhile:

Linky Linky

Some people really must concentrate on where the real abuses are...

 

[AronSearle]

we now have a housing shortage

I do wonder though if we do have that much of a housing shortage, but more a south east housing shortage, and council house shortage.

With council housing, it probably doesn't help that so many people put themselves up on the list that can support themselves, I know two people in council housing that earn more than me.

 

[ellal]

With council housing, it probably doesn't help that so many people put themselves up on the list that can support themselves, I know two people in council housing that earn more than me.

But do they belong to UKIP?...

 

[raebhoop]

we now have a housing shortage

I do wonder though if we do have that much of a housing shortage, but more a south east housing shortage, and council house shortage.

With council housing, it probably doesn't help that so many people put themselves up on the list that can support themselves, I know two people in council housing that earn more than me.

A local bookie with two shops lives just up the road from me...in a council house. Built in the thirties it has a huge garden...ideal for his caravan,boat and Range Rover.
Similar private space would cost him a bomb.

 

[tony1851]

Some here have been complaining about the cost of housing (public and private) and blaming government/councils/banks and building societies etc. But a large proportion of the cost of a new house is the cost of land.
There is a shortage of land in the right locations for housing because of our rigid planning system. Take the green Belt; who is it for? If we weren't so paranoid about a bit of countryside and a few great-crested newts, we could have decent, afforable housing for all.

 

[Deleted member 174758]

There is a shortage of land in the right locations for housing

That's taking a very simplistic approach IMHO. In the North East, where there were whole villages left derelict after the collapse of the coal mining industry (and the steel mills, shipyards, etc) property prices still went up massively above inflation. Nearer to home, even in places like Burnley, where there are large numbers of derelict/empty properties, high unemployment and few local employment prospects even basic properties are beyond the reach of many first time buyers. From the 1950s onwards property became affordable as wages and standards of living rose but we appear in the last 15 years to have gone backwards again

If we weren't so paranoid about a bit of countryside and a few great-crested newts, we could have decent, afforable housing for all.

There is a point about planning - it was introduced to stop the urban sprawl that occurred in the 19th Century and which genuinely damaged the country as a whole. But it does beg the question why progressive governments have failed to address the decline in the manufacturing sector, failed to balance the economy and allowed the economy to overheat in the south to the detriment of the rest of the UK. That in itself has been extremely damaging because the north-south divide in housing costs is a throttle on labour mobility - something any economy requires

 

[Nige F]

[
A local bookie with two shops lives just up the road from me...in a council house. Built in the thirties it has a huge garden...ideal for his caravan,boat and Range Rover.
Similar private space would cost him a bomb.

Perhaps he doesn`t know about the Right to Buy

 

[tony1851]

JobAndKnock; you make some interesting and valid points.
I would disagree about the role of Planning. It was not so much urban sprawl in the 19th century that it was aimed at, but the SUBurban sprawl of the 1920s and '30s. (Much 19th-century housing being tightly-packed terrace housing, while interwar being semis at 12/scre.).
But IMO, we should be concerned to bring housing costs down, even if it meant acres of green belt being built-on.
Personally, I agree with JB Priestley when he wrote about housing; 'We should be content to make the whole country hideous if we know for certain that by doing so we could also make all the people in it moderately happy'.

 

[ellal]

Building on the green belt won't lower house prices...

For the simple fact that developers only have to build a small percentage of what is quaintly termed 'affordable' housing...The majority by definition is thus 'unaffordable'!

3/4 bed family houses are where the money lies for them!

There are plenty of brown field sites available, and a vast amount of unoccupied houses. These could provide most of what is needed, and yet it won't happen.

There is no intention of lowering house prices if at all possible, because quite coincidentally ( ) the value of the housing stock in the UK at present roughly equals the total national debt...

What do you think would happen if house prices were to say halve?

 

[Deleted member 174758]

What do you think would happen if house prices were to say halve?

Oh, we'd go bust IN REALITY, as opposed to now where we are living in a fool's paradise (at least in economic terms) waiting to slide under

 

[ellal]

What do you think would happen if house prices were to say halve?

Oh, we'd go bust IN REALITY, as opposed to now where we are living in a fool's paradise (at least in economic terms) waiting to slide under

Exactly...

So best not to take the Green Belt down with us!