Local Housing Allowance is being decreased - Now have to survive on £58 per week

MissMoneypenny

dmg24 wrote: »

Or indeed, a fancy acronym for those who cannot spell?

Are you the spelling police as well, now? Don't tell me, you will be reporting me to abuse for that.

bob40

oh i see now missmoneypenny i see you have problems aswell and just scanning about i see this happening alot in threads people try to help others then you get the sarkey remarks from the trolls on this board

Macro_3

pandaspot wrote: »

The rents were definitely pushed up by lha, soon as it came in private landlords pushed there rents up in line with lha, the problem now is that only 3 out of 10 properties will be affordable for benefit claimants. The government has sort of engcouraged homelessness.

Thing is when people are in homelessness properties the rent hb pay is 3 times more the amount we would have paid on a lha property. So it then means that they won't be saving money in paying less hb they will actually be paying a lot more hb out.

I think that most private landlords are fairly pragmatic about the changes and realise that LHA was good while it lasted but has inflated rents, and I think many will be receptive to dropping rent (particularly if the carrot of direct payments is dangled before then!), and many won't enforce shortfalls between benefit and rent if the tenant does not pay.

That said I work in an area where house prices are relatively low, demand for rental properties is low and the proportion of HB/LHA claimants as a proportion of renters/general population is higher than average. In areas where house prices (and therefore BTL mortgages) are high, housing demand is high and the availability of non-LHA tenants willing to pay the going rent is high, landlords will have no need to drop prices and we might well see people losing their properties through arrears or having to move to cheaper areas.

Perhaps that's right, though? Perhaps the whole point is that someone who is living on benefits should not be able to afford a property in the very best areas, when a comparable family in full time work could not.

pandaspot

I hope you are right that landlords will reduce rents, we have a few landlords in my area who will certaintly won't reduce their rents. And they hate direct payments cause they don't want to be responsible for any overpayment.

Suppose we will have to see what will happen. Will certaintly be interesting

Macro_3

pandaspot wrote: »

I hope you are right that landlords will reduce rents, we have a few landlords in my area who will certaintly won't reduce their rents. And they hate direct payments cause they don't want to be responsible for any overpayment.

Suppose we will have to see what will happen. Will certaintly be interesting

It will be interesting, that's for sure. If you call phones ringing off the hook, huge backlogs, loads of face-to-face enquiries and unhappy tenants and landlords coupled with HB staff getting ready for mass redundancy/fighting tooth and nail for the few jobs that will remain interesting! Just as well we're used to dealing with change.

pandaspot

We won't see the main knock on till jan next year with the nine month transitional, where I work we are prepared and we dont really have a large back log at the moment. If I remember rightly we are only a week behind with work, luckily. We also informed landlords in December with surgeries, but they will still query the change over and over

But guaranteed we will have a hell of a lot enquiries after April. Think the biggest problem will be with the ndep deduction increase.

Lou76

MissMoneypenny wrote: »

I have already made it clear, many times before, that I love the idea of the welfare state; as a safety net. Too many are now seeing it as a way of life.

Many younger workers can't afford houses of their own, but you seem to think it is ok for them to pay for the mortgages for the long term, of those that don't work.

I do apologise for becoming ill and unable to work, it wasn't my intention to go from earning £29000 (26 yrs old, single, no children) a year to £50odd pound a week SSP (or whatever it was in 2003, I know it barely covered my mortgage).

At the time I was refused any help towards prescriptions (funnily enough, being ill, created a large prescription charge, which I'd never had before), Council Tax told me I wasn't entitled to any more than the 25% single persons discount I was already receiving, since I wasn't receiving income related benefits.

My Gas & Elec bills quadrupled - I was no longer out of the house 7am - 1am, I was home 24/7 and, due to my illness, needed the gas running around the clock.

My mortgage insurance, which I made sure was in place as soon as I agreed to the mortgage, as I wanted to cover myself in the event I couldn't work (not that I expected it to become a reality) - that's a laugh , was refused due to a whiplash/knee injury (which I never claimed a penny for, but was logged with my Dr) I suffered when I was 16; long before I could legally apply for a mortgage, and nothing to do, by any stretch of the imagination, with the illness I was suffering from.

All in all, I rattled up about £15000 worth of debt that year - £10000 in actual debt paying the bills and keeping a roof over my head, and the other £5000 in interest/late payment fees etc as I couldn't keep up the payments at the time.

I didn't buy above my means; I bought my flat for £30000, which was about £1000 more than my annual salary. I was offered 4x my annual salary, but thankfully I didn't go down that route. I dread to think if I had... :eek:

I'm now receiving £15 a week towards my mortgage interest, which I'm entirely grateful for, but, had I never bothered to 'secure my future' by buying a flat, and continued renting instead, my LHA entitlement [currently] would be (as a single person, no dependants) £98 a week. :eek:

See, I'm saving "you" money. You should be thankful for 'paying my mortgage' :rotfl:

p.s. when will you be paying the additional £100 a month that the SMI doesn't cover?