Benefit fraud

missbiggles1

NYM wrote: »

Lenders are lawfully entitled to consider an applicants future family planning when calculating affordability. It's not discrimination.

Would they do this for a couple of gay men?

missbiggles1

dktreesea wrote: »

Maybe we mean different things by prefabricated. I certainly didn't mean trailer park style housing or corrugated iron prefab houses. The houses I am thinking of are prefabricated concrete houses, which were built after WWII and went quite a way to solving the housing shortage of the time. Some of these same houses now suffer from rising damp and concrete cancer.


I'm not a fan of houses that aren't built to last. In Edinburgh these kinds of estates are getting pulled down, but what is going up in their place is different (certainly a lot better built given the building code up here) to what is being pulled down in the sense that most of the replacement houses are being occupied by reasonably well paid people in key professions - nurses, teachers, firemen, tradespeople and the like. Meanwhile the poor and disenfranchised, the only ones presumably who were willing to live in the properties provided to their being pulled down, are being forced out of the city.

Most of us have to live in an area which we can afford and even the poorest can vote.

NYM

sangie595 wrote: »

You should read the articles again....

I stand corrected

dktreesea

NYM wrote: »

Lenders are lawfully entitled to consider an applicants future family planning when calculating affordability. It's not discrimination.

Yes, so I have since heard. But it gives rise to ridiculous scenarios. "Oh, I'm sorry, we have declined your mortgage application because you:
a) work in the oil industry and we don't think the North Sea oil is going to last;
b) are already in your late 20s/30s/40s and still haven't started your family;
c) work for Corporation X, which we think is going to go bust at some point in the next few years"


I get the lender recalculating the affordability based on a higher interest rate than at present, but I think they are taking the "what if your circumstances change?" scenario a bit too far.

dktreesea

missbiggles1 wrote: »

Most of us have to live in an area which we can afford and even the poorest can vote.

So if, as happens in Edinburgh, high rise towers get pulled down and then replaced with a mixture of different types of home, with only 10% reserved for council tenants, what happens to the other 90% of council tenants who have been displaced from the high rise? And that's assuming the same number of homes that were demolished have been rebuilt. Not always the case for some of our developments.


Up here, housing association developments look quite well built and even at mid market rents they're good value for money, but it wasn't relatively well paid working people who were displaced when the previous estate that occupied the land was demolished.

missbiggles1

dktreesea wrote: »

So if, as happens in Edinburgh, high rise towers get pulled down and then replaced with a mixture of different types of home, with only 10% reserved for council tenants, what happens to the other 90% of council tenants who have been displaced from the high rise? And that's assuming the same number of homes that were demolished have been rebuilt. Not always the case for some of our developments.


Up here, housing association developments look quite well built and even at mid market rents they're good value for money, but it wasn't relatively well paid working people who were displaced when the previous estate that occupied the land was demolished.

Are you saying that council properties were demolished and the tenants were offered no alternative tenancy? That would be very unusual and possibly illegal.

dktreesea

missbiggles1 wrote: »

Most of us have to live in an area which we can afford and even the poorest can vote.

That's all well and good if the taxpayer - the one who is subsidising the lower paid workers and non workers so they can live in nicer areas that they otherwise could not afford - gets to live in an area and a quality home that they can afford.


Do you think it fair that someone with a household income of approx. £60k gets turned down for a mortgage while their neighbour gets to live in a similar property in the same street for a pittance of a rent out of their own pocket?


I'm all for the relatively well off subsidising the relatively poor, provided the former, paying out of their own pocket without recourse to public funds, get to live in a decent place and location.

dktreesea

missbiggles1 wrote: »

Are you saying that council properties were demolished and the tenants were offered no alternative tenancy? That would be very unusual and possibly illegal.

They weren't for the most part, offered an equivalent tenancy. Plenty were moved out of Edinburgh. Or to estates which didn't have the public amenities that their former neighbourhood had.

sangie595

dktreesea wrote: »

Yes, so I have since heard. But it gives rise to ridiculous scenarios. "Oh, I'm sorry, we have declined your mortgage application because you:
a) work in the oil industry and we don't think the North Sea oil is going to last;
b) are already in your late 20s/30s/40s and still haven't started your family;
c) work for Corporation X, which we think is going to go bust at some point in the next few years"


I get the lender recalculating the affordability based on a higher interest rate than at present, but I think they are taking the "what if your circumstances change?" scenario a bit too far.

Then you have also "since heard" the wrong thing. As I have already pointed out, this is a fallacy based on the misreading of a couple of articles that actually said something else entirely.

sangie595

missbiggles1 wrote: »

Are you saying that council properties were demolished and the tenants were offered no alternative tenancy? That would be very unusual and possibly illegal.

And we keep getting told that everything is so much better in Scotland! But that would certainly not be possible in England - evicting people without providing alternative accommodation for anything other than a breach of tenancy regulations would certainly be unlawful.