In fact, more than six in ten social housing tenants go without essentials to pay rent, as The Conversation‘s article shows.

But I wanted to highlight this because, while I’m not a social housing tenant and don’t actually have to worry about the rent (at the moment), I do have to go without some things in order to pay for others.

(I spent the winter in the “eating or heating” trap and it was very nasty indeed.)*

So this topic is important to me and I wanted to highlight the problems people are facing:

We surveyed more than 1,200 tenants across 15 neighbourhoods in England, and found that 9% were in rent arrears. However, this figure dramatically underestimates the number of tenants who were finding it difficult to pay their rent: 61% had gone without essentials, such as food and heating, in order to pay it in the last year.

The financial situation of tenants has become more difficult in recent years due to a combination of cost-of-living increases, including rapidly rising food and energy prices, and real-term reductions in salary due to increasingly precarious employment. Some 43% of tenants we surveyed regularly ran out of money before their next wage or benefit payment.

I haven’t actually run out of money before being paid – yet. But my instinct is that it’s just a matter of time.*

Nearly half (46%) of tenants had made the difficult decision to cut back on their heating expenditure so they could pay their rent.

I try to limit my energy expenditure to £15 per week – which means I actually have only around £8 to spend because of the standing charge. During January and February I have regularly exceeded that limit.*

They reported a range of strategies for keeping warm without using their gas or electricity, including sitting in sleeping bags, wearing thermal clothing and thick jumpers indoors, covering themselves with blankets and fleeces and using hot water bottles.

Yes – I’m a blankets, Oodie and hot water bottle man.*

Those who did use their heating reported putting it on for just one hour.

I spent the winter – until last Monday (February 17) – with no working mains-attached heaters in the flat. They were broken and I had to wait for new ones to be installed. This meant I had to rely on plug-in radiators that ate up quite a lot of power, so I generally kept them on for an hour at a time. Sometimes I used them several times a day – and in different rooms.*

Now, the storage heaters are helpful – but I only use the one in the living room, because of the cost.*

Tenants also reported using their electricity minimally, not watching television, boiling the kettle if I need to do the washing up and sitting with the lights off

I boil the kettle to do the washing up.*

Some 43% of tenants reported that they had cut back on their food spending.

There were also many examples of participants doing without nutritious food because it was more expensive than processed food. These tenants were very aware of the lower nutritional value of the food they were buying and lamented not being able to afford the fresh food they preferred.

My food budget is £20-30 per week. It’s so expensive now – especially if one is trying to live healthily. Obviously, when I had the flu in January I didn’t eat well at all – just dry bread and water in the first week, then chicken soup in the second, and back to proper meals in the third – but that just meant I lost around 21lb in weight over the first three days, and more in the weeks following, and haven’t made that back yet.*

The article goes on to say that many tenants prioritise the rent over their health and well-being because their social landlord is “on my back” if they don’t pay it. In my case, I have to find the wherewithal to fund the website, which isn’t paying for itself at the moment because of interference from the social media platforms, as I have described many times in other articles.

It suggests that the government should support a “minimum income standard”,

a level of income that allows people to “thrive” and not merely “survive”. The government should use this standard to determine benefit rates and the national minimum wage, alongside measures to provide people with greater job security.

Social housing landlords must rethink how they understand tenancy sustainment. It shouldn’t just be about how long tenants stay in a property, but about the quality of their life while in it.

Sure, great – but can you honestly see a UK government supporting that?

I can’t.

Life in the UK is all about getting money off us, not giving it to us or helping us to make it, and successive governments – both Labour and Tory – have been part of that agenda.

Thousands of people have died – to blank indifference from those in authority; they really couldn’t care less.

But there may be hope. This “minimum income standard” strikes me as similar to the “Universal Basic Income” that was going to be trialled in some parts of the UK. Whatever happened to that?

Source: ‘We’d just switch everything off’: six in ten social housing tenants go without essentials to pay rent

*If, reading this article, you become concerned about This Writer’s well-being, please consider making a donation to Vox Political via the PayPal box below. Also, please subscribe to the mailing list (there should be a box in the sidebar on the right) to make sure you receive notification of all the articles I publish – the more people who read them and see the adverts, the more I receive from advertisers. Finally, there are new editions of the Vox Political books on the way, with fabulous new covers, and I’m sure they would look fabulous on your shelf, so look out for the publicity drive when they arrive!

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