£480 wk ben cap not enough for families in London to live on.

monetaryPMbull

drc wrote: »

The closest I could find was a FOI request regarding how many people are being paid £1000 per month and £2000 per month in housing benefit in Westminster;

It seems they are nearly all in London.

But wow yes that is shocking "6338 claims paying over £1000" and "and 1220 claims paying over £2000"

So all these people will have to move when the caps come in?

gailey_2

Forgive me if im wrong but they way I thourght ha worked was

they get a proportion paid ie £240 a week
but say there rents £480

could they not find the extra £180?

especially if

they both unemployed getting jsa or incapacity?
they would get council tax paid?

if they had kids they would get child benefit per child
if low income full tax credits.

I knew a couple with 4kids claiming as much as they could

think added it up came to something silly like nearly 3000 a month
this was everything combined
rent, ca
housing benefit x4
disability for her hubby and 2kids was £240 a month each!
kids school dinners were paid for
free prescriptions

So is it really unreasonable for them maybe to pay half their rent and ha pay other half?

I also think this wont just affect london will effect other cities like bath, york, birmingham ect.

Lived in a few places and my 1 bedroom flat in cardiff -private rent was £600 a month in 2002
lived in 1 bedroom flat in bath £650 on 2003.

now 3bed house outskirts bristol £700.a month
average prices for 2 bed house here is £550-700
3beds-£700-900
4beds+ £1000-£1200 a month.

theres are in really nice quiet residential suberbs with good links to city centre and motorway access.

so £240 a week seems like plenty as that would rent a 3-4bed house here.

I do wonder if theres a case for keyworkers having housing help as they need to be close to work.
when I say keworkers doctors, nurses , paramedics ect.

Do find the obscure cases in paper mad.

we do need to get some balance back.

ukcarper

gailey wrote: »

Forgive me if im wrong but they way I thourght ha worked was

they get a proportion paid ie £240 a week
but say there rents £480

could they not find the extra £180?

especially if

they both unemployed getting jsa or incapacity?
they would get council tax paid?

if they had kids they would get child benefit per child
if low income full tax credits.

I knew a couple with 4kids claiming as much as they could

think added it up came to something silly like nearly 3000 a month
this was everything combined
rent, ca
housing benefit x4
disability for her hubby and 2kids was £240 a month each!
kids school dinners were paid for
free prescriptions

So is it really unreasonable for them maybe to pay half their rent and ha pay other half?

I also think this wont just affect london will effect other cities like bath, york, birmingham ect.

Lived in a few places and my 1 bedroom flat in cardiff -private rent was £600 a month in 2002
lived in 1 bedroom flat in bath £650 on 2003.

now 3bed house outskirts bristol £700.a month
average prices for 2 bed house here is £550-700
3beds-£700-900
4beds+ £1000-£1200 a month.

theres are in really nice quiet residential suberbs with good links to city centre and motorway access.

so £240 a week seems like plenty as that would rent a 3-4bed house here.

I do wonder if theres a case for keyworkers having housing help as they need to be close to work.
when I say keworkers doctors, nurses , paramedics ect.

Do find the obscure cases in paper mad.

we do need to get some balance back.

I think the new cap for total benefits (if it ever comes in) is going to be £25k a year (£480 a week) I suppose claimants could spend that how they want but it would be hard to find much more than £250 a week rent.

It shouldn’t have much effect on places like Bristol where the present 4 bed LHA is £216 a week and the 3 bed is £161.

drc

I actually wonder if this is the Tories roundabout way of trying to make the UK less London-centric. It would actually be good for the country as a whole if there were several economic powerhouse cities in the UK, not just London, which causes so many demographic and economic problems imo.

wotsthat

monetaryPMbull wrote: »

But wow yes that is shocking "6338 claims paying over £1000" and "and 1220 claims paying over £2000"

Agreed but it does seem unlikely based on this that "hundreds of thousands of people are getting over £200 a week (>£867/month) housing benefit" like your mate told you.

It also seems pretty unlikely that 7558 claimants having to move somewhere cheaper is going to devastate the London property market. Not all will move; some will pay more from their own pockets, some landlords will reduce rents if they like the tenants - there's even a possibility that the changes will have the desired effect and encourage more people to spend money they've earned rather than received in benefits.

ukcarper

wotsthat wrote: »

Agreed but it does seem unlikely based on this that "hundreds of thousands of people are getting over £200 a week (>£867/month) housing benefit" like your mate told you.

It also seems pretty unlikely that 7558 claimants having to move somewhere cheaper is going to devastate the London property market. Not all will move; some will pay more from their own pockets, some landlords will reduce rents if they like the tenants - there's even a possibility that the changes will have the desired effect and encourage more people to spend money they've earned rather than received in benefits.

Aren’t those figures for Westminster not London as a whole.

wotsthat

ukcarper wrote: »

Aren’t those figures for Westminster not London as a whole.

Yes you're right. I'm not sure how expensive Westminster is but I'd hazard a guess that at these levels of HB they could find a cheaper area and still stay in London.

There's some stuff here BTW http://research.dwp.gov.uk/asd/index.php?page=hbctb

At September 2011:

The total number of people receiving Housing Benefit was 4.93 million, with 5.88 million claiming Council Tax Benefit.

3.65 million Housing Benefit recipients were aged under 65, representing almost three quarters of all Housing Benefit recipients.

68 per cent of Housing Benefit recipients were tenants of Social Sector landlords.

Around two thirds of both Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit recipients are in receipt of a Passported Benefit.

The overall average Housing Benefit award is £87.01 per week, and for Council Tax Benefit recipients, the overall average award was £15.73 per week.

3.90 million Housing Benefit recipients were single, with almost two-thirds of these being female. Of the 1.68 million recipients with at least one child dependent, 1.15 million of these were single.

drc

wotsthat wrote: »

Agreed but it does seem unlikely based on this that "hundreds of thousands of people are getting over £200 a week (>£867/month) housing benefit" like your mate told you.

It also seems pretty unlikely that 7558 claimants having to move somewhere cheaper is going to devastate the London property market. Not all will move; some will pay more from their own pockets, some landlords will reduce rents if they like the tenants - there's even a possibility that the changes will have the desired effect and encourage more people to spend money they've earned rather than received in benefits.

Sorry to be a completely pedantic but according to this document; http://www.westminsteronline.org/housingcommission/downloads/papers/Background%20Paper%208%20-%20private%20rented%20sector.pdf in Westminster, 12.9% of private rented sector households claim housing benefit (LHA) and that accounts for 4.5% of all households in the borough (Appendix 2, page 2, figure 3.1).

The figure for London as a whole is that 28.9% of the private rented sector are reliant on housing benefit (LHA). Approximately 25% of London households (of which there are approximately 3.5 million total households in London) are in the private rented sector. So approximately 250,000 households are claiming housing benefit (LHA) in London alone.

wotsthat

drc wrote: »

Sorry to be a completely pedantic but according to this document; http://www.westminsteronline.org/housingcommission/downloads/papers/Background%20Paper%208%20-%20private%20rented%20sector.pdf in Westminster, 12.9% of private rented sector households claim housing benefit (LHA) and that accounts for 4.5% of all households in the borough (Appendix 2, page 2, figure 3.1).

The figure for London as a whole is that 28.9% of the private rented sector are reliant on housing benefit (LHA). Approximately 25% of London households (of which there are approximately 3.5 million total households in London) are in the private rented sector. So approximately 250,000 households are claiming housing benefit (LHA) in London alone.

The freedom of information data says that 7558 get HB in excess of £1000/ month in Westminster.

Your table says that 4,100 are in receipt of HB in Westminster in the private rented sector.

Why the discrepancy?

drc

wotsthat wrote: »

The freedom of information data says that 7558 get HB in excess of £1000/ month in Westminster.

Your table says that 4,100 are in receipt of HB in Westminster in the private rented sector.

Why the discrepancy?

Possibly that the FOI request is from 2011 and the pdf is from 2006? Or discrepancy between Westminster's own calculations and that of the Dept of Work and Pensions. Who knows if one department talks to another?

Btw, it is not "my" table. It is a document I found online. I didn't write it .