Council tenants lose lifetime right to live in property | Society | The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015 ... n-property

From the people who brought you the bedroom tax...

The Tories are just sociopathic scum.

Wow. Just, wow.

Mark

the cons want all rented property be it council or housing association in the hands of buy to let landlords. its the only way they can tax these leases via buy to let landlords. everybody renting will just have to suffer ...

I don't see the problem, or am I missing something.

You essentially have a rolling 5 year lease on the house and after the 5 years, if you have managed to secure a job where you can afford to rent or buy your own place, you will be asked to move on and make room for somebody else who really need council housing; if you circumstances haven't improved, you carry on living in council accommidation.

Would you like to be forcibly ejected out of your home just because you got a new job?

Mark

If I had been given the housing, because I couldn't afford my own housing, then I got a job and could afford my own place, then I would probably move out of my own volition before the ejected me...

'Probably'? What probability are we talking about here? 50%? 40%? Anything less than '100%' means you get turfed out of your home, possibly before you've been able to find anywhere else to go at anything like the same price because in most parts of the country private rent averages are much higher than council rents. So you have all the hassle of moving house and end up poorer for it. You may even end up as poor as you were before you got the job. That's not a disincentive to get back into work at all, is it?

With all due respect Dave, you're in Germany and have been for years. You have no real idea of how badly the housing market in the UK is screwed up.

The UK's almost built on job extremes - how is 'social mobility'* supposed to kick in when you're still reasonably low paid, now privately renting, and somehow supposed to be saving for a deposit? And that's assuming you don't have kids or dependents.

We already know the Tories will have disabled people thrown out of their houses over a supposedly spare room (the 'rules' tend to be enforced by Tory-friendly scourge of humanity companies), so they'll happily tell people to forget life as they know it for the unknown. Oh, the company downsized? We'll put you on the housing waiting list, might take a few months...

* 'Social mobility' is just the latest Tory term to be placed alongside 'strivers', 'hard-working' and so on to further create an us and them approach to society and it's attitudes. Daily Mail-style. It's nothing but a way of degrading people while implying they should try harder and carrying out a form of twisted social cleansing. It's pure evil, frankly.

Probably comes down to how close to the deadline I found the job. If I was still in the probationary period, I probably would wait a few months.

Yes, the housing market has changed from when I lived in the UK, but when I moved out from my mother's house, it was still a struggle in the first few years - large mortgage and double digit variable rate interest.

In Germany, I rented for a long time, even when I was unemployed, I didn't go seeking extra allowances or subsidised accommodation.

It was always the assumed wisdom that mainland Europe had much bigger rental sector than the UK used to have, and many EU countries have fairly strict laws about the behaviour of both renters and landlords, along with some level of pricing control. So essentially the mainland has a much more stable rental sector than the UK, built to work in the long term.

The UK has gone from a society where owning (i.e. mortgage) is the assumed state to one where renting is the only option for many and at the same time we've pretty much entirely deregulated our rental sector and slashed the amount of social housing, and then combined it with a massive housing bubble partly fuelled by 'buy to let' mortgages where the huge cost of investment is passed immediately to the tenant in high rental charges.

Seriously, the UK housing market is an utter mess and it has gone this way pretty damn quickly - I'd say we've gone from 'a bit messed up but largely OK' to 'utterly screwed' in roughly a decade.

Put it this way Dave - if you are turfed out of council accommodation in the UK today, you have no guarantee at all of being able to find somewhere else to live. You almost certainly aren't going to be able to find more social housing and in some places competition for rental places is so high you simply won't be able to afford private rental within the limits of housing benefit entitlement. if you're lucky you'll end up living in a single room in a B&B, which isn't a barrel of laughs if you're a family. If you're single, you're pretty much on your own.

'Oh, I'd just find somewhere else' may work in many places but in many of the cities in the UK, the 'somewhere else' has a very strong chance being 'a cardboard box under a bridge'.

Most people over here want to buy or rather most want to build their own house. But a lot have to rent first and save up for the house.

My flat in Woking, in 2001 before I moved to Germany, was under 50M² (3 rooms small rooms, kitchen and bathroom), the bedroom was big enough for my bed, but no wardrobe, my clothes were in the other "bedroom". That cost me around around a grand a month at that time, which was very expensive for what it was. My flat outside of Munich in Germany was about 15% less, but twice the size. In Bramsche, where I am now, my 110M² open plan flat was around 300 quid a month, but this is a very rural area and no major cities in the area.

They have just brought in regulation in Germany for the rental market, because major cities, like Berlin and Munich are becoming very popular with startups. Landlords were trying to put up the rents in 40 - 60% jumps as people moved out and they were trying to push up rents on lease renewals as well. The courts jumped on that and put a 5% cap on increases.

This proposed change doesn't set the rules for turfing out a tenant. It merely makes them possible.
If the eventual rules say that you can't expect to hold onto a council house when household income exceeds £X, then surely the rule is fair or not according to the value of X?

It certainly isn't evil to say that millionaires cannot be expected to make way for the less well off in this circumstance.