75 Grand Discount....Right to buy is back...........

Degenerate

Graham_Devon wrote: »

I have to say, it's a shame to see this from a tory government.

You have strange expectations of the Tories, considering it was them that introduced the sale of Council housing with substantial discounts in the first place.

olly300

Jimmy_31 wrote: »

The last thing some people want is cash in the bank.

If you can afford to get a mortgage to buy your council house then you must have some cash.

Anyway most people who sell a property buy another one.

shortchanged_2

olly300 wrote: »

How would that be enforced?

Well where I live, I don't know if this happens anywhere else, there are restrictive covenants on some of the ex council houses that mean that only people who have been living in the area for at least 3 years can purchase one.
The intention of this being that these houses are not snapped up by 2nd homers or outside investors.

I'm sure that there are certain restrictions that can be placed on other right to buy houses and so there should be if they are getting them at a knockdown price.

Neverland

shortchanged wrote: »

Well where I live, I don't know if this happens anywhere else, there are restrictive covenants on some of the ex council houses that mean that only people who have been living in the area for at least 3 years can purchase one.
The intention of this being that these houses are not snapped up by 2nd homers or outside investors.

I'm sure that there are certain restrictions that can be placed on other right to buy houses and so there should be if they are getting them at a knockdown price.

..and of course, people living in scarce council houses are experts at working the system to their personal advantage... :mad:

Neverland

Jimmy_31 wrote: »

The last thing some people want is cash in the bank.

They will just keep the house they bought cheaply, rent it to people on housing benefits or immigrants four to a room and buy a nice private house with the rent money

Gr8 use of our taxes :mad:

Jimmy_31

olly300 wrote: »

If you can afford to get a mortgage to buy your council house then you must have some cash.

Anyway most people who sell a property buy another one.

Exactly, having cash in the bank is a no no for those who choose to be long term unemployed.

Even if you are long term unemployed and want to buy the house, you are going to have to answer some questions on why you have savings but are claiming maximum benefits.

Neverland

Jimmy_31 wrote: »

Exactly, having cash in the bank is a no no for those who choose to be long term unemployed.

Even if you are long term unemployed and want to buy the house, you are going to have to answer some questions on why you have savings but are claiming maximum benefits.

It wont be people living on unemployment/disability who buy their council houses

It will be people who earn good money and shouldn't be living in a council house anyway

Whenever I go round the council houses my way:
- they all have newer cars than me
- they have newer sofas
- they have big flat screen tvs like I don't have

Bob Crow, the head of the tube drivers union, earns £100k+ and still lives in a council house he has lived in for 20 odd years

It will be people like him (though he won't do so for political principle to be fair) who will benefit from this - people who shouldn't be getting a subsidised rent in the first place :mad:

Council houses aren't means tested for need AFTER you have been allocated one

Degenerate

Neverland wrote: »

It wont be people living on unemployment/disability who buy their council houses

It will be people who earn good money and shouldn't be living in a council house anyway

Whenever I go round the council houses my way:
- they all have newer cars than me
- they have newer sofas
- they have big flat screen tvs like I don't have

Bob Crow, the head of the tube drivers union, earns £100k+ and still lives in a council house he has lived in for 20 odd years

It will be people like him (though he won't do so for political principle to be fair) who will benefit from this - people who shouldn't be getting a subsidised rent in the first place :mad:

Council houses aren't means tested for need AFTER you have been allocated one

You're looking at Council housing as a kind of benefit that should be made available only to the most needy members of society. It could certainly be said that that is what it has become, but it was not always so. It was conceived as affordable housing for the masses.

Go back 30 years or so, and a young married couple starting out with their first baby could expect to get a decent 2-bedroom house from their local Council in a reasonable timescale. I grew up in Council housing through the 70s and 80s and the majority of my neighbours were ordinary working class families with two parents and at least the father in work, not "benefit-scrounging scum" as some would characterise the social housing tenants of today. The idea that council housing rent is intended to be heavily subsidised is a bit bogus, originally it was just set on a non-profit basis to reflected the average costs of providing such housing. Councils had considerable economies of scale.

What's happened in the interim is that our housing needs have increased substantially, not just in line with the considerable population growth, but above it due to the proliferation of smaller households. Meanwhile, the aforementioned working families were the ones who took advantage of right-to-buy, moving into the private sector and reducing the council housing stock, and as with the private housing sector, new builds failed dismally to keep up with demand. Supply and demand also drove up the costs of land, construction and private rents well above inflation, whilst Council rents were pegged to inflation.

So this brings us to the present, where Social housing is viewed as a heavily subsidised scarce resource available only to the most needy. Consequently, it is lived in by a high concentration of unemployed, large families of benefit claimants rather than the balance of ordinary working class families of the past. Consequently, many people now view Social housing areas as ghettos for workless scroungers and resent the very existence of such accomodation as yet another way some people live "at the taxpayer's expense".

From the point of view of someone like Bob Crowe, this is all down to Tory attempts at demographic engineering to create a larger, Tory-voting middle class. He might have a point, though personally I see it as a mixture of that along with the law of unintended consequences.

Neverland

Degenerate wrote: »

You're looking at Council housing as a kind of benefit that should be made available only to the most needy members of society. It could certainly be said that that is what it has become, but it was not always so. It was conceived as affordable housing for the masses.

Go back 30 years or so, and a young married couple starting out with their first baby could expect to get a decent 2-bedroom house from their local Council in a reasonable timescale. I grew up in Council housing through the 70s and 80s and the majority of my neighbours were ordinary working class families with two parents and at least the father in work, not "benefit-scrounging scum" as some would characterise the social housing tenants of today. The idea that council housing rent is intended to be heavily subsidised is a bit bogus, originally it was just set on a non-profit basis to reflected the average costs of providing such housing. Councils had considerable economies of scale.

What's happened in the interim is that our housing needs have increased substantially, not just in line with the considerable population growth, but above it due to the proliferation of smaller households. Meanwhile, the aforementioned working families were the ones who took advantage of right-to-buy, moving into the private sector and reducing the council housing stock, and as with the private housing sector, new builds failed dismally to keep up with demand. Supply and demand also drove up the costs of land, construction and private rents well above inflation, whilst Council rents were pegged to inflation.

So this brings us to the present, where Social housing is viewed as a heavily subsidised scarce resource available only to the most needy. Consequently, it is lived in by a high concentration of unemployed, large families of benefit claimants rather than the balance of ordinary working class families of the past. Consequently, many people now view Social housing areas as ghettos for workless scroungers and resent the very existence of such accomodation as yet another way some people live "at the taxpayer's expense".

From the point of view of someone like Bob Crowe, this is all down to Tory attempts at demographic engineering to create a larger, Tory-voting middle class. He might have a point, though personally I see it as a mixture of that along with the law of unintended consequences.

I understand all this and I would actually support my taxes being used to build more affordable homes

What I don't want to see my taxes used for is buy a few working class votes for the next election :mad:

the_flying_pig

i think this is probably a good thing but only very slightly.

i'm not sure i fully understand it since council tenants already have a right to buy & in some cases the discounts that they can buy at are pretty hefty anyway, nowhere near 50% in London {where anyone who's genuinely poor will never be able to buy anyway} but not far off in the cheapest areas.

i guess that one-for-one replacement [to the extent that this will actually happen - the ever-so-tiny problem with up-to-50% discounts is that they'll tend to only pay for half a new house to be built] is the thing that makes it good. not like-for-like replacments, i'm sure that we'll see plenty of 3-bed terraces 'replaced' by 1-bed rabbit hutches, but that's still an increase in the total amount of housing stock.