Tax Credits

princessdon

Welfare recipients are hardly paying the price of housing benefit - they get the benefit - Home owners don't!

If I was to need housing benefit for my family - they would pay £112 a month (not a week) as my interest on mortgage. In fact families affording mortgages due to the interest rates mean huge savings. Given that home owners need to pay their own repairs, buildings insurance etc the cost of this is greater, yet I'd get approx £1200 a month if in private rent on HB.

Morlock

Sixer wrote: »

Yes. Well over half of it goes on pensions and pensioner benefits. And articles always focus on how much it compares to income tax, which not only excludes other personal-type taxation such as NICs, VAT, etc, but also business taxation. Both mislead the average person and what they consider to be "benefits" as an overall component of UK income and expenditure.

Exactly the point which I was going to make next. Of the £188 billion spent on 'welfare' in 2009-10 according to my source:

Elderly 41.6%
Sick and disabled 15.2%
Low income 22%
Families 18.1%
Unemployed 2.6%
Widows 0.4%
Others 0.1%

A Survey of the UK Benefit System PDF

Morlock

princessdon wrote: »

Welfare recipients are hardly paying the price of housing benefit - they get the benefit - Home owners don't!

Home owners do reap the benefits, particularly from over-inflated property rental costs, but not those who only own one house and live in that house, those that own two or multiple properties.

princessdon

No landlords (ie businessess thay pay tax and NI) reap the benefits, the regular Joe Bloggs who own 1 home and live in it will get minimum HB contributions as intrest only, regardless of the huge amount that is paid to landlords and HB claimants. It's not fair to state ALL owners get the benefit of HB being extortionate as there are more homeowners in difficulty than landlords and homeowners save the tax payer a fortune in HB.

Sixer

princessdon wrote: »

No landlords (ie businessess thay pay tax and NI) reap the benefits, the regular Joe Bloggs who own 1 home and live in it will get minimum HB contributions as intrest only, regardless of the huge amount that is paid to landlords and HB claimants. It's not fair to state ALL owners get the benefit of HB being extortionate as there are more homeowners in difficulty than landlords and homeowners save the tax payer a fortune in HB.

You don't understand the point I was making about house prices or cheap credit. And, btw, many BTL landlords make tuppence in profit - your tax pounds are spent on extortionate rents which pay their mortgage and other expenses. High or low rents are irrelevant to the non-working benefits claimant. Any increase in welfare payments due to rent levels don't benefit welfare claimants. They don't see the money and they have to live somewhere. The money goes to pay somebody else's mortgage, for free. Only the mortgagee gets the eventual capital benefit. Not the welfare recipient and not the taxpayer.

Through rent controls and/or the removal of economic policies designed to keep up house prices in a bubble and convince the population that the country's finances are more healthly than they actually are, we could reduce the welfare bill by several billion over a year or so. But that wouldn't impact welfare recipients, so it isn't even considered.

We're making choices from a reduced option of choices, for political, not practical or economic, reasons.

isamog

Well thank you to all those who were kind enough to answer with out judging. All I made was a statement, No more.