Housing Benefit ending for Canal License.

[Wanderer Vagabond]

4 minutes ago, Dyertribe said:

You are conflating cheaper with inferior, the British public choose to buy things based on cost and quality, if the UK cannot match imports in these two areas then there will not be a market for items manufactured in the UK.That'll probably be because the cheapest is usually of the lower quality, which is why it is cheapest. You may need to explain your thinking to Ferrari, McLaren, Princess Yachts, and a variety of others who don't even try to compete on cost, they concentrate on quality.

 

So full employment should be defined as “no one claiming benefits due to not working”? This would exclude disability Unless you remove all unemployment benefits it will never happen since there will always be people who are seriously,actively looking for work but are 'between jobs'. I suppose that you could insist that a skilled carmaker laid off by Vauxhall should immediately get him/herself a job in their local Tesco, even if it compromises their time and ability to look for another job utilising their skills.

 

[mrsmelly]

1 hour ago, Dyertribe said:

Manufacturing has declined because other countries do it cheaper.

Full employment will never be achieved not least because there are those who do not want to work..

Who is to build this affordable housing economically?

Human nature is what it is. 

Quite right. We are now at or near full employment, it's similar to the early seventies and we will never get it below one million whilst ever we have a welfare state. Oh and NO I am not saying we don't need a welfare state.

[mayalld]

On ‎22‎/‎08‎/‎2018 at 22:46, Wanderer Vagabond said:

It's pretty d*mn expensive that is what is wrong with it. When you spend half your income on rent it is fair to say something is wrong. Unlike in the days I spoke of when builders were building houses to rent out (which was back in the 1950's, 1960's) and the rents were reasonable, today, as a renter, you are paying someone else's mortgage for them (plus a small profit). There is an old adage about 'Money goes to money'.

Here's a wheeze.

 

How about, after years of paying rent and not owning anything for it, you make it that people can count all the rent they have paid as downpayments towards actually buying.

 

I shall call it "Right to Buy"

[Wanderer Vagabond]

3 minutes ago, Mikexx said:

 

This was never an issue. No houses were ever destroyed in the process of selling them off.

 

If anything flooding the market with low cost housing actually reduced the value of houses. What has happened in the meantime is increased demand through demographics and immigration and a lack of housing stock. It doesn't matter who owns what, but by analogy, when the music stops when playing musical chairs, some are inevitably are not going to have houses if there's a shortage.

 

Do I look bothered by that, as a householder? To me, my house is somewhere to live, nothing more, nothing less, if people bought theirs as an investment the usual warning on investments is ,'..your investment may either go up or go down...' this doesn't seem to apply to housing though, which is expected to inexorably rise upwards. That is precisely the reason that the likes of Barratt, Persimmon, et al will never supply the housing that the market needs, their interest in in keeping house prices as high as they can.

 

We now have 4 million less council houses than when the inane policy was introduced, don't you think that just might have had an impact since that is 4 million people who,whilst they cannot afford a mortgage, are thrown to 'the market' where they struggle to rent at the alleged 'affordable rents'.

Just now, mayalld said:

Here's a wheeze.

 

How about, after years of paying rent and not owning anything for it, you make it that people can count all the rent they have paid as downpayments towards actually buying.

 

I shall call it "Right to Buy"

Fantastic idea, lets apply it to all property shall we?

[mayalld]

On ‎24‎/‎08‎/‎2018 at 17:46, Wanderer Vagabond said:

I could quote the Jewish population of Golders Green and claim that the country is being overrun with Jewish people (another favourite right wing target).

 

Well, I've learned something new today.

 

I always thought that Comrade Corbyn was left wing

[mayalld]

32 minutes ago, Wanderer Vagabond said:

 

Fantastic idea, lets apply it to all property shall we?

Yes, let's.

 

I suspect that private landlords might just hike the rent to offset that potential future loss.

[Dyertribe]

59 minutes ago, Wanderer Vagabond said:

 

Ferrari! That well known British company!!!

Ask British Steel, now Tata, how being reassuringly expensive affected Margam steelworks!

 

Looking for alternative employment when employed elsewhere is not impossible, people do it all the time. 

Edited August 26, 2018 by Dyertribe

[Neil2]

46 minutes ago, Mikexx said:

 

This was never an issue. No houses were ever destroyed in the process of selling them off.

 

If anything flooding the market with low cost housing actually reduced the value of houses. What has happened in the meantime is increased demand through demographics and immigration and a lack of housing stock. It doesn't matter who owns what, but by analogy, when the music stops when playing musical chairs, some are inevitably are not going to have houses if there's a shortage.

 

First, the right to buy wasted a lot of capital whilst not adding a single dwelling to the housing stock.  No-one knows the extent to which money spent on tenure transfer affected new building, but for sure some of the capital would have been invested in additional dwellings.  Of course local authorities were not able to reinvest the capital receipts from sales so the effect of the right to buy must have been a reduction in the provision of new housing.

 

Second, one of the arguments put forward by those who only saw the RTB as a win win policy was that most of the buyers would have remained in their houses anyway, whether they bought or remained as tenants, so the overall effect on supply would be minimal.  As Blackadder put it, there was one fatal flaw with this argument, it was bollocks.   Legions of tenants bought houses for massive discounts and now these houses have entered the private sector it has skewed the options for many folk trying to secure a place to live.  For example, out of several hundred former council houses in my village there are now I believe only six left.  Ironically the victims of this fallout are the offspring of those who chose to buy their houses years ago.  The geographical distribution of tenure types is a major factor in the housing problem in the uk, ie it does matter who owns what.

 

Third, once a property is transferred to the private sector it can stand empty/unused with no penalty.  The same property in the public sector (assuming there is demand) will be continually occupied.  There are former council houses in my village that are now second homes.  

 

Fourth, the dogmatic nature of the original right to buy provisions effectively prevented local authorities from reinvesting in the remaining housing stock which contributed to the falling standard of many estates and a rise in empty properties.

 

Lastly, a factor not widely acknowledged once local authorities stopped building houses was the effect on the building industry.  For many small scale builders the constant supply of council housing projects kept them afloat and allowed them the security of maintaining a workforce.  The fact that as a nation we simply don't have the skilled labour we need to address the housing shortage could be said to have its roots in the ill thought out government policies of the 1980's. 

 

 

[Wanderer Vagabond]

2 hours ago, mayalld said:

Yes, let's.

 

I suspect that private landlords might just hike the rent to offset that potential future loss.

You would probably find much the same result as we have had from the sale of council houses, the landlords wouldn't hike the rent they'd leave the market, which is pretty much what has happened to council housing, like there isn't any. Why would anyone build anything only to have it taken off your hands at a discount, worse still when the council houses were sold off, the councils were forbidden from spending what money they got for them building any more. It was a deliberate attempt at what could realistically be described as social cleansing, the scumbag 'Lady' Porter majored in the idea.

[Wanderer Vagabond]

2 hours ago, Dyertribe said:

Ferrari! That well known British company!!!

Ask British Steel, now Tata, how being reassuringly expensive affected Margam steelworks!

 

Looking for alternative employment when employed elsewhere is not impossible, people do it all the time. 

Not always easy when you haven't been given the full Auditors report before your company goes belly up and you get laid off.

 

You seem to have some sort of obsession about people who claim benefits, whereas the problems in society I have encountered have been from those not in regular employment who don't claim benefits. Several families in the area I had dealings with never considered claiming benefits since you have to jump through a variety of hoops to get them. What they found far easier was to get everything that they needed either through shoplifting or dealing drugs, no real need for benefits for them, they spent most of their time drunk or high and never had to claim a penny, where do they fit in with your definition of full employment,"... no one claiming benefits due to not working..." ? They clearly aren't working because they had no need to and are never going to. They were far more of a scourge on the town than anyone I can think of who committed the crime of just claiming Jobseekers allowance.

[Dyertribe]

1 minute ago, Wanderer Vagabond said:

 

 

You seem to have some sort of obsession about people who claim benefits, whereas the problems in society I have encountered have been from those not in regular employment who don't claim benefits. Several families in the area I had dealings with never considered claiming benefits since you have to jump through a variety of hoops to get them. What they found far easier was to get everything that they needed either through shoplifting or dealing drugs, no real need for benefits for them, they spent most of their time drunk or high and never had to claim a penny, where do they fit in with your definition of full employment,"... no one claiming benefits due to not working..." ? They clearly aren't working because they had no need to and are never going to. They were far more of a scourge on the town than anyone I can think of who committed the crime of just claiming Jobseekers allowance.

Nope, you have the wrong end of the stick. I was merely looking for a means of defining the unemployed but eligible for work, hence my reference to the exclusion of those claiming benefits due to disability. 

[Mikexx]

14 minutes ago, Dyertribe said:

Nope, you have the wrong end of the stick. I was merely looking for a means of defining the unemployed but eligible for work, hence my reference to the exclusion of those claiming benefits due to disability. 

 

I have great sympathy for anyone who turns down the opportunity for temporary work given the difficulty of restarting a claim. It was a long time ago but a housing benefit form I was obliged to complete consisted of 38 pages. Given that 20-25% of the adult population are classed as illiterate the fear of restarting a claim for some can be overwhelming.

 

Until things are streamlined and done on a PAYE type of system, I can;t see any improvement. Universal Tax Credits is another disaster area.

 

[Laurie Booth]

6 hours ago, Arthur Marshall said:

Mostly because tenants are being moved onto Universal Credit, which means their housing benefit often stops completely for months (the system is notoriously inefficient) so the tenant ends up in arrears, which odds on he'll never be able to catch up with. And then, unless the tenant requests it strenuously, it's paid direct to the tenant while HB went to the landlord - which means sometimes the tenant will use that bit of money to buy food instead and not pay the rent.  Either way, arrears mount up quickly.  Not too bad if the landlord is just renting one house and has other income, but if it's a business it's likely to go bust.

Which is a good thing for the housing market, but not for the landlord.  And most parliamentarians just happen to be landlords...

So to get homeless tenants housed again, the housing benefit should be paid directly to the landlord?

 

[Wanderer Vagabond]

15 minutes ago, Laurie.Booth said:

So to get homeless tenants housed again, the housing benefit should be paid directly to the landlord?

 

Since UB replaces Housing Benefit, Jobseekers Allowance and Employment and Support Allowance, if they then had to separate the payments again the whole UB system would probably go into meltdown (although that will probably happen anyway). A good place to start however would be to eliminate the 4 -6 week waiting period before benefits are paid, this is when people run into debt and then spend months trying to play catch up, paying off the debts they've accumulated as a direct result of a deliberate policy, and then they are blamed for falling into debt.

[Laurie Booth]

35 minutes ago, Wanderer Vagabond said:

Since UB replaces Housing Benefit, Jobseekers Allowance and Employment and Support Allowance, if they then had to separate the payments again the whole UB system would probably go into meltdown (although that will probably happen anyway). A good place to start however would be to eliminate the 4 -6 week waiting period before benefits are paid, this is when people run into debt and then spend months trying to play catch up, paying off the debts they've accumulated as a direct result of a deliberate policy, and then they are blamed for falling into debt.

So best they go back to paying housing benefits to the landlord not to the tenant?

[Wanderer Vagabond]

3 minutes ago, Laurie.Booth said:

So best they go back to paying housing benefits to the landlord not to the tenant?

You can't because it's not housing benefit anymore, it's Universal Benefit, all benefits rolled into one and paid to the recipient. if you are saying they should scrap UB altogether, there is a case to be made for that but given how much it has cost them so far, I don't think they will until it collapses under it's own complexity.

Edited August 26, 2018 by Wanderer Vagabond

[Laurie Booth]

1 minute ago, Wanderer Vagabond said:

You can't because it's not housing benefit anymore, it's Universal Benefit, all benefits rolled into one and paid to the recipient.

I'm suggesting they go back to  the old system.

[Wanderer Vagabond]

3 minutes ago, Laurie.Booth said:

I'm suggesting they go back to  the old system.

So have many since Duncan Smith came up with it, but dogma rules once again.

 

Just as a correction, I've been calling it Universal Benefit when in fact it is called Universal Credit also replacing Child tax Credits and Working Tax Credits, given it's complexity it is merely a matter of time before it collapses.

Edited August 26, 2018 by Wanderer Vagabond

[Mikexx]

21 minutes ago, Laurie.Booth said:

I'm suggesting they go back to  the old system.

 

The old Housing benefit system was a local system with local knowledge and local responsibility. There was access through your councillor.

 

The new system has none of these features and is bound to fail, or at least fail its claimants.

[Wanted]

On 26/08/2018 at 12:16, Dyertribe said:

Worked well in the USSR didn’t it?

eh? whats that got to do with my post? 

[Dyertribe]

14 minutes ago, Wanted said:

eh? whats that got to do with my post? 

Well, everyone was supposed to get the same wages, all equal etc, and it all went to hell in a hand basket 

[Wanted]

5 minutes ago, Dyertribe said:

Well, everyone was supposed to get the same wages, all equal etc, and it all went to hell in a hand basket 

yes it did, but I am unsure what that has to do with anything I have said? 

[Dyertribe]

16 minutes ago, Wanted said:

yes it did, but I am unsure what that has to do with anything I have said? 

Because your vision of Utopia was the same vision (in my mind) that the USSR had. 

Problem is not everyone is good, trustworthy, hard working and if not everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet than it is doomed to failure.  

[Wanted]

1 hour ago, Dyertribe said:

Because your vision of Utopia was the same vision (in my mind) that the USSR had. 

Problem is not everyone is good, trustworthy, hard working and if not everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet than it is doomed to failure.  

oh, I thought that might be the case, bit odd though innit? making up a version of someone else's utopia and then knocking them for it.

 

I have been pretty clear on the theology that I try to subscribe to, communism isn't it.

[Dyertribe]

5 minutes ago, Wanted said:

oh, I thought that might be the case, bit odd though innit? making up a version of someone else's utopia and then knocking them for it.

 

I have been pretty clear on the theology that I try to subscribe to, communism isn't it.

Fair enough, however my comment still stands. The bad guys will ensure it can't work.