£30,000 bribe to leave your council house

PasturesNew

What they've forgotten is that a lot of their target audience will have their eye on that upper savings limit of £16k for receiving benefits .... so as tempting as the £30k is to some, the majority will spot that if they just sit still they get to keep the larger house and benefits for life.

mvengemvenge

PasturesNew wrote: »

What they've forgotten is that a lot of their target audience will have their eye on that upper savings limit of £16k for receiving benefits .... so as tempting as the £30k is to some, the majority will spot that if they just sit still they get to keep the larger house and benefits for life.

I'm wondering if the govt may find some way of 'side-stepping' this problem by tweaking the rules just for people in this situation?

jackie_w

mvengemvenge wrote: »

Hmmm, strange for The Times to rush it onto the front page, then?

Hi,

My sister was offered £10,000 to move out of her council home, and this was 11 years ago. She used the £10,000 for a deposit to buy her own house. She wasnt in a large home, just a 2 bedroomed house, it was only her and her husband. The only condition she had was that she couldnt move into rented accommodation. She had to put the £10,000 down to buy a house. So, she moved into a house that cost her £35,000, she had the £10,000 deposit to put down. She had to stay in the hosue for 2 years, if she left the house before the 2 years was up, she had to give the £10,000 back, if she sold the house after the 2 years were up, she could keep the £10,000, plus any equity that was on her home.

This type of scheme was also offered to all her neighbours at the time too, and they were in the same type of houses.


Jackie

vivatifosi

Where I live there is a different problem, which I wouldn't be surprised to find is commonplace. There are plenty of older people living in larger council houses (say 3 bedrooms plus) who would be happy to move to a smaller home, but there is a shortage of suitable smaller homes available to exchange to.

£30k wouldn't get them anything where a one bedroom flat is still over £100k and the seaside (another suggestion in the article) is miles away so they would lose their family support network so won't go there either. That's before you even get to whether you can tweak the savings allowance.

The only way you could overcome this situation here would be to build more smaller homes for the people to move to, but our council is already under pressure to pass its council houses to a housing association because it can't afford to maintain them. If it can't afford to maintain the houses that it has already, then how on earth will it find money to build more?

Its as though NuLab is opening its mouth and announcing policy without thinking through how it would work. Still, nothing new there eh?

whathavewedone

This seems like an unnecessarily convoluted way of solving the problem.

Surely it would be easier to:-

1. Give the money to the people who are about to be repossessed to help them keep going until things pick up;or

2. for councils/housing associations to purchase the homes from repossessed people and then rent it back to them and;

3. Completely review the whole system in relation to social housing.

I would have a system where council tenant's circumstances are reviewed every 3 years and if they no longer meet the criteria then they have to (i) move or (ii) pay a market rent or (iii) buy the house at the market price and (iv) all money gained from council house sales would have to be used to build more social housing.

I just think it's fundamentally wrong to pay people money to move out of council houses that are too big for them or that they no longer need because they can afford to live elsewhere.

It seems nonsensical to give money to people who don't need it so that their houses can be given to people who do genuninely need them rather than give the money to those in need so that they can stay where they are. I would have thought it would make more sense for the banks as well rather than selling a load of properties for less than the amount of the loan and not getting the balance back for donkeys years if at all.

airhostess

There are loads of overpriced new build flats & houses lying empty all over the country. Can't the Govt strike a deal with the developers and house people in them instead?

mower5

airhostess wrote: »

There are loads of overpriced new build flats & houses lying empty all over the country. Can't the Govt strike a deal with the developers and house people in them instead?

Often the new builds don't meet the minimum size requirements for social housing, 1-2 bed boxes built in the last few years for the btl market are not good enough.

My relative was offered one of these deals over 10 years ago, it's a non story. The big story is the sale at knock down cheap as chips rates of the council houses, the failure to reinvest the sale money into new housing stock.

plumbskill

It costs between 50 & 60 k to build a house [materials & labour] and as the councils own the land anyway, it makes more sense to build more housing to keep the builders employed and without the need to shuffle people around or give them 30k to move out

Kez100

Should be buying places cheap or if not building them cheap with this money.

thriftybabe

Aspiring wrote: »

Reward them for their poor money management, do you mean?

Oh come on they did this with the banks. Why shouldn't they just throw good money after bad. The rest of us can just watch what we are doing, budget, scrimp and save and get no reward. I am not bitter, i am not bitter, I am not bitter!!!!!:mad: