Hot on the heels of the energy prices crisis comes the revelation that a growing number of people aged below 30 are being forced to pay unaffordable amounts in rent.
40 per cent of them are now paying more than 30 per cent of their income on rent – a five-year high, according to figures by property market consultancy Dataloft.
The data suggests under-30s are now paying more of their earnings on rent than any other working-age groups.
It seems rents are increasing because fewer houses are on the market after landlords decided to sell properties because of rising taxes, charges and maintenance costs.
As a result, people are offering more than the asking price to landlords, just to secure a property.
The government reckons it has taken action via a £37 billion support package to help households with rising costs.
It also says plans announced in June would ban landlords from evicting tenants in England without giving them a reason, and give renters more power to challenge unjustified rent increases and poor conditions, providing renters with a “fairer deal”.
But you’ll notice there’s no effort to provide more rented housing to lower the costs.
And this leads us to a vital question: are the Tories poisoning their own future?
I was listening to the A World To Win podcast in which author Phil Burton-Cartledge suggested that the Tories are in decline because they rely on older people voting for them – but this isn’t a consequence of age but of the social circumstances surrounding age.
Older people vote Tory because they have accumulated property – but property acquisition is starting to break down: “If you can’t get younger people onto the housing ladder, then the Conservatising effects of property will not have the same consequences.”
Host Grace Blakeley added: “The housing crisis, combined with issues around employment, progression and wages, the cost of childcare, have forcibly extended a lot of people’s youth such that, whilst you can say there’s always going to be plenty of old people, actually a lot of Gen Xers and Millennials will be young in attitudes as well as in living standards for much longer.”
And here, it seems, younger people can’t even think of buying a home because they can’t even afford to rent.
How are the Tories ever going to get these people to vote for them, when the Tories have taken away all their hopes of social status?
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Rent: are the Tories really going to reverse the hated changes imposed by Margaret Thatcher, that made tenants practically powerless to stop landlords walking all over them?
The instant This Writer saw that the Conservative government is planning to allow tenants to reclaim their rent from “dodgy” landlords, I questioned it.
There has to be a catch, right? This is the Tory Party – the party that puts landlords over tenants and would return us to Rackmanism and rack-renting at the flip of a coin.
Maybe Michael Gove is trying to make himself look good ahead of the now-inevitable Conservative leadership contest…
Whatever the reasons, I remain staggered to be able to relay to you a decent policy from the Conservative government:
Tenants will be given new powers to claim refunds on their rent from landlords if their homes fall below standard in the biggest shake-up of the private rented sector since the 1990s.
The Government published it’s long-awaited ‘Fairer Private Rented Sector’ White Paper with reforms which are set to be brought into law under the Renters Reform Bill.
If they become law, experts say the White Paper’s proposals will directly improve the lives of millions of people and become the most radical thing to happen to the private rented sector since Thatcher’s deregulation and the introduction of Buy to Let mortgages in the early 1990s.
Measures include:
Abolishing “no fault” Section 21 evictions: S.21 allows a landlord to evict their tenant with just two months’ notice without having to give them a reason. In recent years this sort of eviction has become a leading cause of homelessness and there have been reports of renters being evicted when they ask for basic repairs.
Overhauling tenancy agreements: The Government is proposing a shift from assured shorthold tenancy agreements (ASTs) that generally run for six or 12 months to open-ended tenancies.
No more rent hike clauses: The Government wants to end arbitrary rent review clauses which allow landlords to hike up rents without justifying them.
Improving basic standards of rented homes: According to the government, 21 per cent of private renters are living in “unfit” homes which means they are damp, mouldy and contain electrical hazards. The White paper proposes to make the Decent Homes standard law in the private rented sector, which means homes must be free from serious health and safety hazards, and landlords must keep homes in a good state of repair, so renters have clean, appropriate and useable facilities. But how will cash-strapped local authorities enforce this?
New housing ombudsman to make landlords accountable: the aim is to enable disputes between private renters and landlords to be settled quickly, at low cost, and without going to court, with powers to compel landlords to issue an apology, take remedial action, and/or pay compensation of up to £25,000 in the form of refunds on rent.
Ban on landlords refusing to rent to benefit claimants: Landlords are not supposed to discriminate against people receiving benefits (known as No DSS) or families but they do. The white paper promises to make it illegal for landlords or agents to have blanket bans on renting to these people.
The right to keep pets: Private renters the right to have a pet and say that landlords cannot “unreasonably deny” them this.
The big irony of all these reforms is that landlords (or alleged landlords) like Philip Davies and Christopher Chope have filibustered (talked out) attempts at rent reform in Private Members’ Bills – but will probably support this.
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Lawyers for victims of the Grenfell Tower fire have told the inquiry into the disaster that residents were “bullied” and “stigmatised” for raising safety concerns.
Michael Mansfield QC, representing a group of survivors and the bereaved, said Kensington and Chelsea Borough Council regarded the 24-storey block in North Kensington as an “eyesore which required cosmetic surgery to make it more palatable to its elegant and wealthy neighbours”.
So it provided a refurbishment between 2012 and 2016 that was only a “superficial facelift while neglecting underlying deficiencies”.
The council, along with the body that ran Grenfell Tower and oversaw the refurbishment, the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (TMO), ran a complaints system for residents that was “outdated, cumbersome, not simple and was used to shut them off, lock them out essentially”, said Mr Mansfield.
He said the council and TMO had a “culture of indifference”.
Edward Daffarn, a member of the Grenfell Action Group, wrote a series of blog posts about safety issues in the building and raised concerns with the council – such as a fire door with a broken closing mechanism.
This was pointed out in 2015 and the door still wasn’t working on the night of the fire in 2017, allowing smoke into a central area on one floor where two people died.
The inquiry heard the council described Mr Daffarn’s blog posts as “scaremongering”.
Another lawyer, Stephanie Barwise QC, read an email from council worker Laura Johnson, sent during the building’s refurbishment, saying that a councillor would not want to attend a public meeting of people “moaning about minor issues”.
In fact residents had correctly identified issues such as gas pipes in hallways, problems with fire doors, power surges, a failed ventilation system and access for fire engines.
London Fire Brigade warned in the months before the fire that cladding could be dangerous. The inquiry heard the council simply forwarded the letter from the fire brigade to the TMO, saying: “FYI.”
James Ageros, lawyer for the TMO, said: “The TMO does not accept that it ever adopted a dismissive attitude toward residents or indeed toward their complaints and concerns.”
He said the inquiry should consider whether the TMO could have been expected to see through the “deceptions” of cladding manufacturers about the safety of their products.
Hundreds of other building owners and management organisations had not been able to “untangle this subterfuge”, he said.
In its submissions, the council apologised for its failings in monitoring the TMO and said “the council could have, and should have, done more to stop it happening”.
It’s a big buck-passing exercise, isn’t it?
The council apologises and says it should have monitored the TMO; the TMO doesn’t apologise and says it could not have been expected to see through “deceptions” by the manufacturers of the cladding.
My opinion? Residents are right to blame them all. The council, at least, has admitted a failing. The TMO should have recognised any false claims by the cladding manufacturers; that’s part of its reason for existing and the council should have realised this wasn’t happening.
And residents were ignored – until they died.
And now, residents at other blocks with similar cladding are being penalised for living in places where the landlord made the wrong decision because the Tory government is ignoring their concerns.
History repeats itself. The UK is run by people who want to take your money and do nothing in return – especially people in government.
We can vote them out – for example at the local elections in May.
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Keir Starmer: He is systematically betraying the Labour voters who installed him as leader – and stabbing rented housing tenants in the back.
If the secret to great comedy is timing, then Keir Starmer must be one of the biggest clowns in the United Kingdom.
And the joke is on the party members who supported him.
Having won the leadership of the Labour Party on a “continuity” platform that promised to continue the work of former leader Jeremy Corbyn in restoring the organisation to its historic values, Mr Starmer has now decided to reject those policies and claim that Mr Corbyn’s leadership is the reason Labour lost dozens of northern English constituencies that voted to leave the European Union.
I mention the EU referendum because it was previously accepted that it was Mr Starmer’s policy on Brexit that confused voters and sent them to the Tories, whose own policy risks a catastrophic “no deal” Brexit but was at least clearer than Starmer’s.
It is perfectly understandable that the new Labour leader would want to shift the blame for himself – albeit transparent; obviously he doesn’t want his leadership to start in acknowledgement that the policy he forced onto Labour’s last election manifesto kept the party out of government. It makes him look a fool.
And attacking Corbyn’s leadership also gives Starmer – now known to be a ‘Red Tory’; a supporter of policies that put him at the far right of the Labour Party with the so-called Blairites – an opportunity to ditch all of Mr Corbyn’s progressive policies in favour of a return to the neoliberal consensus that led to the financial crisis of 2007/8.
So he gave an interview in the Financial Times saying Mr Corbyn’s leadership was the top topic of conversation, without acknowledging that residents of the 40 constituencies he visited (and he doesn’t mention how many were among those that abandoned Labour) might find it uncomfortable telling the architect of Labour’s disastrous Brexit policy that he was a dunce.
More believable is his assertion that people believed Labour had overloaded its manifesto with promises to re-balance power within the UK, nationalising several utilities, providing £300 billion of shares to workers and promising an extra £83 billion in tax and spending – but in fact, Labour’s policies were fully-costed and the most controversy arising from its spending policies was a plan to compensate the so-called WASPI women for pension losses triggered because the Tories had raised the state pension age without providing adequate opportunity for those affected to make plans.
Still, when you’re using a position of power to betray everyone who put you there, any excuse will do – and we’re starting to see the results of Starmer’s rightward lurch now.
He has appointed right-winger Bridget Phillipson as Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, who was previously known for attacking Labour’s 2017 election manifesto for offering too much to voters. The offer was hugely successful and reduced the Tory majority of the previous two years to a hung Parliament.
According to a leaked letter from Phillipson to other shadow cabinet members, all policies that involve spending will now require the approval of both Starmer and the shadow Treasury team before they are even put into the planning stages.
Clearly, Starmer wants an “out-Tory the Tories” spending policy of the kind that led to then-Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Rachel Reeves promising to be “tougher than the Tories” on benefits, in just one particularly out-of-touch policy from the Miliband era.
The first sign of right-wing betrayal arrived over the weekend, with Starmer’s decision to betray tenants of rented properties:
Starmer’s policy comes in response to a current Tory promise to help tenants and may be summed up as follows:
Extend the three-month ban on evictions to nine months; introduce no-fault eviction ban now; protect tenants from being made bankrupt by their landlords for non-payment of rent; grant renters at least two years to pay back any arrears accrued during this period; speed up and improve the provision of Universal Credit and consider a temporary increase to the Local Housing Allowance to help prevent risk of homelessness.
Joe Halewood, in his excellent SpeyeJoe blog, shreds just two of these proposals. He states:
In the simplest terms the rented properties that are ordinarily available will now NOT be available and we have a chronic shortage of rented housing supply being the direct and inevitable consequence of any ban period. We also see a huge increase in demand for rented properties… The ban creates a massively adverse systemic problem for all forms of rented housing on the day a ban ends and the longer the ban the greater the s**t [that] hits the fan.
For example:
Let’s assume the current 3-month ban is not extended for the purpose of illustration as to what it will mean from 26 June 2020 and the day after the ban ends.
I begin with domestic violence and abuse (DVA) and the 3-month ban on housing moves also means that:
Those who have already fled DVA to a refuge have been unable to move out of refuges as there is no supply;
Those who wanted to flee DVA in the 3-month period have not been able to flee as refuges are full and nobody is allowing sofa surfing in the COVID19 period which is also government guidance;
The 3-month ban period that coincides with lockdown has created even more DVA cases than in any ordinary 3-month period; and
Government has announced that all DVA cases will be treated as priority need for homeless persons which infers a safe and settled rehousing will be found and will lead to more DVA cases coming forward in that expectation
26 June will see a huge increase in DVA cases requiring rehousing either in a refuge or directly in safe and settled accommodation which is the phrase government use to sell this priority need change. There will be no refuge provision available nor will there be any form of accommodation never mind safe and settled other than temporary and often dingy unsuitable B&B type provision. DVA survivors will also have to stay longer in this dingy unsuitable B&B type provision as the 3-month eviction ban has massively reduced supply of all forms of accommodation.
Those fleeing the horrors of domestic violence and abuse will be warehoused more and for longer than they were prior to the 3-month eviction ban and it will take years, literally, for the already appalling position we had for DVA immediately prior to the 3-month ban.
On the proposed no-fault eviction ban, he states:
The number of single person homeless in England is not less than 140,000 each year yet just 13,000 are rehoused by social landlords to escape homelessness. 130,000 and 90%+ single homeless persons are rehoused by private landlords and who operate Assured Shorthold Tenancies that can be ended by the so-called no fault eviction (NFE) which is the landlord not needing to give a reason to end the tenancy.
The private landlord rehouses the perceived high risk single homeless tenant because if the tenant is a problem they can get rid easily and without the need for a reason. Yet take that ease of NFE away and you have the same high risk homeless tenant whom the private landlord is unable to get rid of easily. Such a tenant becomes an unacceptable too high a risk tenant so private landlords as an obvious and correct business decision do not rehouse the single homeless person.
Crunch the numbers. IF the private landlord takes just 10% flight from the much higher risk single homeless tenant they rehouse 13,000 fewer per year. These 13,000 will need to be rehoused by the social landlord and see their numbers have to go from 13,000 to 26,000 per year. To wit, just 10% PRS flight means SRS landlords have to DOUBLE the number of properties they now give to single homeless persons.
It’s an unsustainable position.
Joe goes on to say that the social media are already full of how right-wing Starmer’s new policy is, and that it “ignores context, fact and any notion of commonsense or efficacy”.
Let’s take a look:
Terrible policy.
63% of private tenants have no savings.
In London, single tenants are spending up to 85% of their monthly salaries on rent.
If their income collapses, a two year rent deferral means pushing them into debt – and stops them spending, which is bad for the economy https://t.co/ebL3ZsbbKQ
I am surprised at the people who are surprised that New-New Labour won't support tenants. Don't you remember the expenses scandal? Do you really think it was only Tory MPs who were implicated? Did you forget a Labour MP going to prison? Patience, comrades. Our time will come. 🌹
— CrémantCommunarde#ActivistLawyer ⚖️ 😷 ✋ (@0Calamity) May 9, 2020
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Votes for rent: How many people are tenants of private landlords? Enough to unduly influence an election if they are coerced into voting for a candidate they don’t want; a party whose policies would harm them?
I find this tweet extremely disturbing:
Our landlord came by the house and got really angry at the Labour placard in front of our house. Everyone who actually lives in the house is voting Labour.
He wants us to take it down. Somehow this all feels very symbolic. #VoteLabour votelabour2019
When I first moved to Mid Wales, I was told that it had been a common event for Conservative-voting landlords to visit their Labour-supporting tenants during a general election and blackmail them: vote Tory or be kicked onto the street.
I asked whether that still happened and didn’t get a clear answer.
So when I saw Grace Krause’s tweet, alarm bells rang in my head.
Are landlords blackmailing their tenants into voting for a government that intends to harm them?
If so, that is to be stopped.
The Tories won’t stop it – they love a bit of corruption if it favours them.
So let me appeal to anybody facing this kind of coercion: DISOBEY. Vote Labour and report your landlord to the Electoral Commission for trying to influence the result of the election.
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Monument: The charred shell of Grenfell Tower [Image from the Evening Standard].
He took his time – and we can all see why, can’t we?
It’s a lot of work, helping the police investigation and public inquiry…
The housing boss responsible for running Grenfell Tower has finally stepped down more than six months after the tragedy.
Robert Black, former chief executive of the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation, quit just before New Year despite being under intense pressure to go since the fire.
Although he stepped aside from the top job in August he had remained on the company’s books on his full salary of around £150,000 a year.
The body said he had spent the intervening months concentrating on helping the police investigation and public inquiry into the fire.
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Harriet Harman seems to have caused confusion by mixing Labour’s lack of opposition for the Welfare Reform and Work Bill with the party leadership’s reaction to the proposed cut in tax credits.
A Labour MP named Helen Hayes contacted This Writer on Twitter after the disastrous vote on the Welfare Reform and Work Bill, asking me to read a blog article explaining her reasons for abstaining after our party’s “reasoned amendment” failed.
According to this piece, it seems she found reason to support certain parts of the Bill, namely the provision of three million new apprenticeships, support for troubled families and reduced rents for council tenants.
She opposed the abolition of child poverty targets, the reduction of Employment and Support Allowance, and the shrinking of the benefit cap in London.
She voted for the Labour leadership’s “reasoned amendment”, in which changes to the Bill were proposed alongside reasons for it. When this failed, she said she abstained because she wanted the elements she supported to be enacted.
She went on to point out that the Bill will not become law until it has been discussed, line by line, in the Committee Stage, sent to the House of Lords for detailed consideration there, and returned to the Commons for its Third Reading.
Finally, she pointed out that the Bill does not include the proposed cuts to tax credits, which are to be implemented in the autumn via a Statutory Instrument which Labour vehemently opposes.
It is impossible for This Writer to agree with Ms Hayes.
Yes – new appenticeships, support for troubled families and reduced council rents are potentially good moves. But the other elements of the Bill are disastrous for the people the affect.
If the Labour leadership had wanted to adopt a principled position, it would have required them to say that the offer is tempting, but the price is too high – and to reject the Bill, as it is, in its entirety.
Ms Hayes suggests, “It would be much harder to hold the government to account for delivering high quality apprenticeships and an effective troubled families programme, if I had voted against the principle of these proposals”.
Yes indeed – but it will now be much harder to stop the government from abolishing child poverty targets, cutting ESA and reducing the benefit cap – across the who of the UK – now that most of the Labour Party allowed those thing to continue along the legislative process unopposed.
Furthermore, This Writer would have been more impressed by Ms Hayes’ article if I had not read almost exactly the same sentiments in words by fellow Labour MPs Andrew Gwynne and Peter Kyle.*
Both of these gentlemen mentioned the elements that Labour supported and rejected, the stages through which the Bill had to progress, Labour’s “reasoned amendment” and further amendments to be made later, and the fact that tax credits are not part of the Welfare Reform and Work Bill.
The elements were arranged in different ways, and each article was clearly written by each individual MP, but it seems clear that they were all working from the same starting point.
Oh look – Karin Smyth, the new Labour MP for Bristol South (This Writer’s original home constituency) has written a piece that is, again, startlingly similar.
Is it paranoia or healthy scepticism that prompts This Writer to suggest that someone in the current Labour leadership has issued a bullet-point list or factsheet to all abstaining MPs, showing them how to defend their indefensible position and claim that they came to this decision by themselves? You decide.
Or perhaps the author of such a document would like to step forward and admit the attempted deception?
*Apologies to the kittysjones blog for using it to highlight this; the articles by these two were the very first blog pieces I read after Helen Hayes’ article, and the similarities were too pronounced to ignore.
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The Tories seem to be suffering from cognitive dissonance – an attempt to believe two opposing ideas at once.
Not only have they forced people to pay an unwarranted and crippling ‘bedroom tax’ for living in social housing with more bedrooms than they have decided – arbitrarily – are necessary (and let’s not forget that these were the only homes available for most tenants, due to the appalling shortage of social housing created by Margaret Thatcher’s ‘right to buy’ policy)…
Not only that, but they are planning to make the situation worse for social housing tenants in the future, by extending ‘right to buy’ into housing association properties!
Let’s make something perfectly clear: Housing association properties are not government assets. They belong to private companies whose commercial well-being depends on rental income.
Many housing associations – if not all – have been hit hard by the Bedroom Tax, which makes it more difficult for tenants to meet their rent-paying obligations.
This means that the proposed sale of housing association properties – at discounts of between £77,000 and £102,000 would cripple those organisations’ ability to replace the stock they would lose.
This is a policy designed to deny cheaply-rentable housing to people who need it in the future. It is also designed to boost the more expensive private rental market; according to Tax Research UK, half of all former council properties sold by right-to-buy tenants are now in that sector.
It would also lead to a rise in house prices, as people taking advantage of the offer move to sell their homes on, at a profit. This will make housing less accessible to the poor, and the buildings more available to private landlords, who can then charge higher rents – possibly to the very people who just sold the properties.
Meanwhile, the Labour Party Manifesto, launched yesterday (Monday), includes a whole section on “Building new homes”. On page 46, it refers to “getting the public sector building again. We will build more affordable homes by prioritising capital investment for housing and by reforming the council house financing system.”
Does this mean Labour will be encouraging the building of more council houses again?
That would be terrific.
Especially for the hundreds of thousands who have been pushed towards poverty by the Bedroom Tax.
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Homeless: The Bedroom Tax has forced the eviction of an ever-growing number of social tenants. How many people have been evicted because of Local Housing Allowance?
It seems every debate on the brutal Tory Bedroom Tax has lately been overshadowed by some ill-informed commentator claiming that the Labour Party cannot oppose the measure because it imposed its own version of the same thing on the private rented sector, years ago.
Such a claim was made on the Vox PoliticalFacebook page yesterday (Thursday) and Yr Obdt Srvt promised to seek out the facts.
Thanks to today’s debate on the Affordable Housing Bill, there was no need to look very far.
As mentioned in the debate, Labour imposed the Local Housing Allowance in order to stop private tenants from abusing the Housing Benefit system by moving into accommodation that was larger than they could afford – remember, private rented accommodation is more expensive than social housing – and forcing the taxpayer to fund the difference.
Labour’s measure was imposed only on people moving into privately rented accommodation after the LHA law was enacted.
So, for example, a single person might choose to take a place with two bedrooms. Before LHA was brought in, they could claim housing benefit on the property and rely on the taxpayer to stump up for the extra space. LHA means they get the money required for what they need – and they have to pay for the extra space. This is fair because moving into the larger property was their choice.
As with ordinary housing benefit, if a tenant’s circumstances change for the better, the amount of benefit payable is reduced. Why should a private tenant expect preferential treatment?
It seems that private landlords, who have been charging more than they should, have been angered by the imposition of the LHA and have chosen to wage a propaganda war against it, claiming that it is the Bedroom Tax by another name. Note that they are not against the Bedroom Tax, because it drives social housing tenants to the private sector.
Compare that with the Bedroom Tax. The Tories have imposed a charge on people who are living in social housing that was allocated to them on the basis of their need and the accommodation that was available; it is not the tenants’ fault if the only available accommodation was larger than they needed (more appropriate dwellings had probably been sold off under a previous Tory government’s ‘Right To Buy’ scheme).
The Conservative Bedroom Tax was imposed retrospectively – that is, it affected people who were already sitting tenants rather than those moving into accommodation. It was not intended to combat abuse of the system but was simply a way of robbing social tenants of help that they needed.
And the Bedroom Tax was imposed in the knowledge that the amount of alternative accommodation available to social tenants who needed to downsize in order to avoid the charge was only a fraction of what was needed. These people were trapped by this cruel legislation and driven into debt – in stark contrast to the Labour legislation which only affected people choosing to move into accommodation that was larger than they needed.
There is a huge difference between the Local Housing Allowance and the Bedroom Tax.
Any claims that they are similar must be rooted either in stupidity or in politically-motivated malice.
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It seems the government has actually imposed a ‘welfare reform’ that could give benefit claimants an advantage (for a change)!
Joe Halewood, over on the SPeye Joe blog, reckons the move to Direct Payments for social housing tenants will give them far more power – if they are willing to grasp it.
He writes: “3.4 million or so social housing tenants have their rent paid through Housing Benefit. This goes directly to the social landlord with the HB money never passing through the tenants hands. Landlords like this arrangement and have become accustomed to it. Tenants like this too as they have never had to worry about paying rent if on benefit.
“To put that into context the coalition admits 1.4 million of social housing HB claimants are not affected by any welfare reform policy by being pensioners and so this DP change will affect the other 2 million social housing tenants of working-age who claim HB. Eventually that is 2 million rent accounts each week that will be affected and 2 million rent accounts with rent payments no longer guaranteed. Social housing has just over 4 million tenant households so DP sees a change from roughly two in every three rents being guaranteed by Housing Benefit to just 1.4 million being guaranteed out of 4 million or about one in three.
“The coalition says in its spin on DP that it wants to make tenants more responsible by paying them directly so that they can pay the landlord. This is an issue of control between tenant and social landlord with the current system seeing landlords in control of the payment of rent: Yet that changes with DP which puts the responsibility and the control of rent payment with the social tenant – and that is a monumental change as the social tenant finally becomes the customer is what DP means.
“Social landlords’ service levels vary significantly and tenants currently have little clout in forcing their landlord to undertake repairs or the like. Yet that changes dramatically with DP as the tenant becomes in control of the payment of rent. If and when the tenant has any form of beef with the landlord he can potentially, and will in practice, withhold rent. It makes no difference that social tenants withholding rent while awaiting repair has a highly dubious legal basis as tenants will withhold rent for this reason in far greater numbers.”
There are problems with this – the social landlord can try legal action if there is a belief that the tenant’s complaint is unfounded – but if large numbers of tenants all acted at the same time, they would be swamped.
It is an interesting spin on the usual story fed to us by local authorities (who currently pay Housing Benefit). They say DP means tenants who are unused to paying their own rent will find it hard to keep up payments because they will be tempted to use the money on other necessities (for which they don’t have enough).
The suggestion that they will use the money as leverage to force landlords into complying with their legal responsibilities is far more empowering – and no doubt exactly what the oppressors in the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition don’t want.
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