Preparedness for when

maryb

And when they have bought it it presumably gets rented out.
When my girls were young and I needed someone to collect them from school and give them tea I had a series of au pairs. I started with French and as the recession of the early 90s gave way to boom found I could no longer find au pairs from Western Europe. As the decade wore on (I have a six year gap between my two so needed childcare for a long time) I had Czech, Hungarian and eventually Lithuanian au pairs.
To start with they all did the traditional thing of staying for a year, enrolling at the local college and doing their Cambridge English certificate and then going home at the end of the school year. But the later arrivals wanted to work during the evenings as waitresses and were most put out when they found I couldn't guarantee to be home promptly at 6 pm. Then all three of the last of the series stayed on for two years after their stint with me, working double shifts as baristas in the day and waitresses at night, sharing grotty flats with fellow nationals and living as cheaply as they could. Their boyfriends were doing the same so between them they were able to stash enough cash to give them a good start when they went home.
I thought it was enterprising of them and they did work hard but I thought at the time that it was all very well for them to put up with awful work conditions and insecurity juggling shifts, but it made it the norm for others who would have no end in sight and who would have to live like that long term.
That was before the introduction of tax credits to top up starvation wages. Which, of course entrenched low pay and was paid for by guess who? Hint, not Sir Philip Green or any of the other Sirs fawned over by the Blair government and given ludicrously generous tax deals on the grounds that they created jobs, which had to be subsidised by the tax payer.
You couldn't make it up!!

jk0

I have an old iron I inherited from my granny 25 years ago. I knocked it onto the floor yesterday, but managed to find most of the bits and glued it back together. I was pleased to see it still worked.

Now I'm sure most of you have woven cotton covered leads on your irons. Mine has lost a lot of the cotton, but still had the black plastic sheath over the coloured wires, so I was not overly concerned. I even glanced at some of the thin bits yesterday when reassembling it, and it looked okay.

This morning I was just ironing my pyjamas and I heard a bang and saw a spark jump from my pyjamas to the lead. It knocked out the 32A breaker for the kitchen sockets, the RCD, and also a 50A breaker for the voltage reducer.

Looking at the lead, I can see the live conductor is exposed, and of course the path to earth was made from the iron sole plate through the wet pyjamas. I'm so pleased it wasn't through me!

GreyQueen

maryb wrote: »

And when they have bought it it presumably gets rented out.

Yup. Immediately in most cases.

Also fun things happening like us renting a flat to one person who co-incidentally has about four other adults move in with them. The one person is often not working and having their rent paid for them, and their friends who are just staying a short while according to them (very hard to prove otherwise with restrictions on fraud investigation) are living scot-free and able to work cheaply and undercut the wages of those who are running their own households and paying their own way.

Oh, and the noise and the stench from the overcrowded flats (you can tell I've had personal experience of this, can't you?) is vile and horrible for the neighbours. I really do think this country is being taken advantage of and that we must be a pan-European laughing-stock. And the social housing issue is just one of the reasons I've already voted Brexit.

maryb

How can a recently arrived singleton get a social housing flat? Surely they wouldn't have any priority?

[Deleted User]

Sorry for sparking the debate, It's not even a comfort to know that this is happening elsewhere, I feel for all of us who are having the same thing imposed on the areas they live in, it's just not fair.

I do understand that this drive for new housing is to give people homes (that's what I think it's for anyway) which is a good thing. What makes me angry, and before I'm accused of snobbery again I have experience of JUST THIS happening here in the village, is that the building firms who buy up our green spaces DO NOT provide housing stock that allows young people to get their first homes or move on to a smaller family home from rented accommodation because it's not profitable enough so they apply for and are granted permission to build the type of expensive large houses that will give them maximum return and those can only be afforded by people who are already on the housing ladder. I have no objection to people moving into the village into homes that are already here, I wouldn't want perfectly good properties to be left empty and fall into dereliction I just can't see the justification in building more of the same and removing ALL the green spaces that make life here pleasant for us humans and forcing the considerable amount of diverse wildlife that co exists here with us into a smaller and smaller area just so that people upgrade their dwellings. IF there were houses being built that first time buyers and second time families could afford to buy I would still feel sad that the green and open areas were gone BUT I would understand the need for and approve the building of 'HOMES' that would make it possible for a new generation to make their own lives and homes here where they have been born and grown up.

NewShadow

maryb wrote: »

How can a recently arrived singleton get a social housing flat? Surely they wouldn't have any priority?

GQ will have a better answer, but basically it's because they're already in the system.

Refugees are supported by the home office - found temp accommodation and given a type of benefits to live on.

The home office then helps them find perm accommodation and navigate the system.

If you or I were looking for social housing, we have to meet exactly the same criteria, but we have to do the forms and chasing ourselves - meaning we miss out because we don't play the games well.

I'm not familiar with the criteria, but a refugee supported by the home office is considered destitute and homeless, and is not required to show a connection to the area they're applying to (therefore can apply to multiple).

This could mean a single mum at 'risk of homelessness' is a lower priority than a young male refugee who is actually 'homeless' in the town the single mum grew up in.

[Deleted User]

maryb wrote: »

How can a recently arrived singleton get a social housing flat? Surely they wouldn't have any priority?

Presumably because, like anyone else without a roof over their head, they are literally homeless, so the Council are obliged to find them somewhere (be it a bedsit, flat or whatever) to live.

maryb

I didn't think councils were obliged to home single people, with no dependants unless they qualified as vulnerable, they just had to advise them. And an EU migrant can't be a refugee, by definition they are safe countries

jk0

maryb wrote: »

I didn't think councils were obliged to home single people, with no dependants unless they qualified as vulnerable, they just had to advise them. And an EU migrant can't be a refugee, by definition they are safe countries

You'd think so, wouldn't you? However, didn't I read recently that they won't return Greek criminals as Greek prisons don't respect prisoners' human rights?

Presumably, by extension, if the EU migrants wouldn't get the handouts in their home countries we would bestow on them, it would breach their human rights to expect them to return.

It would be laughable if it wasn't costing us money.

[Deleted User]

CAPELLA you aren't alone in switching between the decision to leave or to stay in the EU. When this first arose I was so certain that I would vote stay, DD1 teaches History and Politics and we had a long and very useful discussion which helped me reach that decision. Since then many other factors have been tossed into the melting pot and so many opinions valid enough to be considered have entered into the debate that I'm still undecided. On an emotive level I fully want to take back decisions about the nation that can be made to the benefit of that nation and vote leave for the independence and leave Europe to make their own way in an increasing melange of legislation, rules and overcrowding particularly if many more countries want to be admitted to the union who aren't technically European countries in the first place. On a non emotive level I am aware that there are some advantages to being part of a big co operative of nations particularly in terms of security. I WILL have to make a decision but I STILL don't feel we've been given cold actual facts, all I see is name calling and shouting 'My side is the right side' from both camps so confusion and indecision still reigns supreme!