Housing Benefit / Council Tax Benefit - Bed room tax?

notanewuser

wayne0 wrote: »

i spoke to hb manager at my council, regarding this...

he was a pleasant chap etc, and he explained that if i could find a 10 bed property within the LHA rates im entitled to (currently 2 bed) there would be no problem... but went onto say: "but you'll be lucky to find a decent 2 bed place around here for the two bed rate"

nice that even though the dept manager knows the lha rates cant cover the rents nothing is done eh. lol.

They can't do anything. The LHA rates are set at a particular percentage rate of the average private rental cost. This is a totally different issue to the bedroom tax, which only applies to social housing.

Dunroamin

wayne0 wrote: »

i spoke to hb manager at my council, regarding this...

he was a pleasant chap etc, and he explained that if i could find a 10 bed property within the LHA rates im entitled to (currently 2 bed) there would be no problem... but went onto say: "but you'll be lucky to find a decent 2 bed place around here for the two bed rate"

nice that even though the dept manager knows the lha rates cant cover the rents nothing is done eh. lol.

LHA rates are only supposed to cover the lowest third of private rents so it's not surprising that you would have to pay extra for something really nice.

306chris

Please be gentle as this is my first post on the site.

IMO this is just a hit on the poor to please the “middle class blind” who see people on benefits as less than human.

It has the potential to cost more than it will save. To avoid the “tax” you have a few options

1) Downsize to a property within the housing trust
2) Downsize to a property within the private rent sector
3) Increase the number people in the house to use up the “spare” bedroom

If you look at these options in turn and I can only speak for properties in the Mid Cheshire area.

1) I have spoken to the LA and Housing Trusts and they have assured me that there won’t be enough properties for people to downsize. Currently my local housing trust says that 700 households will be affected by the 14% and a further 100 by the 25% cut in HB.

2) The average price for a rental in the HT’s is approx £100 per week for a three bed house. There is no way you can rent a two bed house in my area for the same or less than £100 per week. So you move people into a two bed private rent house at say £125 a week so the housing benefit bill increases by a quarter or more and who picks up the bill. Let’s not forget that HT’s are not for profit organisations so the costs are usually lower than private, but you can’t make money from them so Tory policy means that they are bad even though a HT is effectively a “big society” bringing everyone together to make it better for everyone.

3) Take in a lodger. I have to ask is this actually practical and to be honest I wouldn’t want anyone else sharing my house especially with young children. Now this is the scary bit. I take my children to school each day and I have already talked to couples/single parents who are planning to have extra children to “occupy” spare rooms. Now surely this will mean extra tax credits and extra child benefit being paid which will incur more expense to the taxpayer. Although the real issue is a baby boom of children who were conceived for cash rather than love.

Overall I think the scheme is ill conceived and fundamentally flawed.

There is help for people who may need it for example people who have had their home adapted for disability and now find themselves stuck at that home. However my local council, Cheshire West, have said that this help will be for 13 weeks and no longer.

BigAunty

I think the scheme is flawed too.

However, the biggest flaw (apart from the lack of social housing) is that the social housing allocation from inception has inbuilt rules that compel the landlord to offer larger properties as the household expands but none that compels the tenant to downsize as their children leave home.

This means that there are tens of thousands of properties where there are a couple of emptry rooms while there are many more overcrowded social housing tenants who need bigger properties.

I can understand why couples or single tenants who were offered 2 bedroom properties as their first home are disappointed with the retrospective clamping down but because HB and social housing tenants have lived in a bubble, protected from economic realities of running properties bigger than their needs/income unlike home owners and private tenants, there are cultural problems because of the embedded sense of entitlement to a house for life.

Perhaps it would have been better if social housing tenancies were tenancies for life, not so much linked to a particular property, and there would have been more of a less selfish mindset in the tenants who until now had legitimate expectations of living in the same place, even if it's too big for them and even though the waiting lists show that others need it more.

Perhaps it would have been better if the allocation system itself, and management of the tenancy by the landlord, made clear the expectation that tenants had to downsize as much as upsize. This would mean space would have been better managed, instead of the focus just on benefit dependent households being the only ones 'punished' for living in properties bigger than their needs when there are huge waiting lists. I think around half of social housing tenants are on benefits so this means the new rules only affect half of the stock - there must be lots of properties with working tenants who have lots of spare room and no incentive to downsize because they can afford the rent. So this bedroom tax is a half measure.

Morlock

BigAunty wrote: »

This means that there are tens of thousands of properties where there are a couple of emptry rooms while there are many more overcrowded social housing tenants who need bigger properties.

How did you draw that conclusion? There is a huge difference between the number of properties under-occupied compared to those that are overcrowded, but the opposite of what you state:


http://www.parliament.uk/documents/impact-assessments/IA11-022AD.pdf

There are far fewer properties overcrowded than are under-occupied in the social housing sector. Also, the policy does not really address the problem of overcrowding, as in areas where overcrowding is high, under-occupancy rates are low.

Sheemee153

I am a newbie to the forum. I have a question about the new bedroom tax.
My husband is 67 but I am only 59 we live in supported housing with two bedrooms. they say it dosn't apply to pensioners but what happens when one is a pensioner and the other isn't will we still have to pay?

nannytone_2

as it stands, you wont be affected.

but once universal credit comes in, if you are still under retirement age you will be affected