Indicative Local Housing Allowance rate rises for Thanet released by government

23 Comments

1. Not enough. The most vulnerable are still at serious risk of losing their homes.

   • Hopefully Labour will plant lots of money trees.

   • Stop bringing so many people into the country that earn very little, do something about the huge numbers seemingly quite happy to langusih on benefits, make academic attainment something to strive for rather than mock, build more houses, accept that higher standards cost more to provide, stop taxing landlords disproportionately and retrospectively.

     Plenty of factors that need addressing to rebalance the housing market and value of people’s work, just ladling ever more cash at the basic problem will achieve little improvement as the NHS has shown and keeps showing .

     • You must have gammon for every meal

2. A superb mechanism for transferring public money into private bank accounts.
   Build more local authority housing. That’s the way forward.

   • Not in Thanet. It’s full!

   • Luckily there is a superb mechanism for transferring private money into public money in many forms of taxation of the working population to pay for this.

     • No. That’s not private money: that’s public money. For the Public Good. Paid for by the Public.

       • So in your view how much tax should those that create wealth pay in order to support those that absorb wealth and what levels of support should those reliant on the state receive?

   • I agree with Ms Quot.

     Build more council houses, and stop the right to buy.

     • Don’t you like farms?

3. Landlords have got greedy, folks are facing homelessness, Going into debt to line landlords pockets. Their mortgages havent risen as much as a steady 14% increase a year on rents. We dont build enough affordable rent and social housing property after a long pause its hard to come back. With over 3000 families sitting waiting for new properties, stopping new developments suits homeowners with pockets buldging cash but not the poor in need of cheaper property. Its a selfish attitude. We allow developments off that allowance in certain cases. We have baron land supposed to be for top quality farming thats not producing but it looks nice from afar. We have a dead airport not making money which could be part developed into housing 2 to 3 years ago. The new road that was put into maintain traffic to the airport is perfect to promptly shut the airport afterwards? Got a new train station worth £40m, you can’t walk to it? This county has fallen stagnant through lack of good leadership. The waste of money in things like dreamland and give it away to private firm after millions ploughed into it. Tradegy what’s happening over lack of public care. Our landlord has charged so much more we’ve got to give them all the heat allowances amd cost of living grants to cover some of the profit and find the rent. Going food banks because rents took food budgets not fun.

   • Why can’t you walk to the new train station? I did exactly that last week.

   • Hoow many people are actially homeless rather than the 3000 who would like cheap housing? I’d like cheaper housing but i’m never going to get it. Who is going to provide the land and finance for the 3000 homes you feel should be built? Once you’ve made life much easier for those eligible for social housing , what do you feel is fair for those that aren’t and who are paying the taxes to support social housing provision.
     Why not campaign for taxes of private landlords to be reduced to the level paid by social housing providers and the savings taken off of the rents, either let the landlord do it, or get the taxman to send a cheque to the tenants each year.
     At the end of the day everything needs to be paid for, when all taxes and grant funding etc are taken into account including the likes of the Decent Homes Standard ( a 40 billion grant to social housing providers from the tax payer so that they could be bought upto a decent standard that was unaffordable necause the rents were too low) you’ll find that social housing is more expensive than private sector rented housing.
     And the private sector doesn’t get the easy ride the social sector does, imagine the putcry against private landlords had Grenfell happened in the social sector? TDC has properties that don’t comply with the 2005 fire safety order act, uses some very convenient assumptions via the surveyors it engages to avoid it’s responsibilities, remamber the 100 plus properties that had no gas safety cert?
     The private sector undoubtedly has issues, but there are around 400 pieces of legislation avaialble for councils to deal with them, but the social sector has many issues too and these have proved to be far more significant in terms of the ultimate failure ( to protect life) than the private sector.
     A tenant of mine locked themselves out this morning, i drove over and they were back in within 40 minutes. Do you expect that from the council? Does the council provide flooring and white goods? Does the council ensure properties are in good decorative order for every new tenancy? Are all council properties EPC C rated? I can do things cheaper , but I don’t want tenants that prefer to save money over having a decent place to live.
     Electrical Installation Comdition Reports, Fire Risk Assessments, Alarm testing, Gas Safety Certs, Energy Costs for Communal Areas, insurance, ever rising levels of legislation and compliance.
     It all takes time and money to ensure its done to a decent standard, it’s been decided that landlords should pay far more capital gains tax than others and that goes back to the day it was bought, so effectively retrospective taxation, many landlords saw the capital gains at the time of eventual sale as the real profit in buy to let, that’s been pretty much removed so now a property needs to earn more on a year by year basis, as ever the customer is the one that foots the bill.
     There’s a big wide picture that needs viewing in its totality.

   • Big M, your knowledge regarding mortgage payments is rather off the reality for many landlords. In my case payments increased by over 1000% in 3 years. My mistake has been not increasing rents slowly over the years of low interest rates, of course tenants don’t remember the 8 years of rents not changing but soon complain when it comes as a couple of big increases. But lesson learnt and it won’t happen again.
     In addition the government decided to create a piece of legislation called Sec24, which limits the amount of tax relief you can claim on interest payments. In my case this amounts to an extra £50 a month per tenant in order to have enough left after tax to cover the extra tax. Notionally the idea was to prevent landlords being too greatly leveraged and so be vulnerable to interest rate increases. But i’m only leveraged at 25%. It was also to placate the baying mob who felt that landlords had unfair tax advantages in buying property, which would be all well and good if either homeowners paid capital gains tax or it was done away with for landlords.
     Not that any of this matters, landlords will adapt their business models, but that means increased rents which are hardly good for tenants.
     In the last 15 years landlords have had the costs of
     Council tax during voids
     Selective licensing. ( where applicable)
     Fire risk assessments
     Data protection
     Legionella risk assessments
     Minimum energy efficiency standards
     Increased energy costs for common areas
     Tenant fees ban
     Electrical installation condition reports
     The current proposed renters reform bill
     Interest rate rises
     Section 24
     Increases in capital gains taxes

     To name those that spring to mind. There’s no issue with any of that if society deems it necessary, but it all comes at a cost and the customer ( the tenant ) is the one that pays. As an example i have a tenancy that commenced in 2005 at £450 pcm, 3 years ago it had increased to £550, this march it will be at £725 ( 2 bed, 20 year old flat, epc C)
     Over that period inflation alone has been in the region of 70 % (so £765), which takes no account of the costs listed above. In reality the indicative LHA rates still lag inflation over the last 20 years.
     So is there really an issue with rents or should the spotlight instead be on incomes?

4. It will be a distasteful concept for many here but, we need people to be successful & to make money. This is far from a selfish attitude.
   The only income any government (from any party) has, comes from taxation.
   Be that PAYE on wages, tax on rental income, tax on interest on investment or VAT.
   Tax is the only income. Simple maths says there has to be more coming in than going out. Everything that is given away has to be paid for.
   “Affordable rent and social housing” properties are no cheaper to build or maintain. They are paid for by the many for those that are less fortunate.
   Again. However harsh it may sound. Anything that comes from a food bank is not free. Someone would have had to pay for it (& tax paid on any profit made to produce it).

5. ‘There’s a big wide picture that needs viewing in its totality’.What does that mean?
   What we have is some rentiers justifying their business and explaining that they are the good guys. Well, maybe and in some circumstances, but not renting basic housing on a short term for the poorest in society.
   So called ‘assured’ tenancies are anything but for the tenants.
   Both private and social landlords are renting out properties in a deplorable state, which could be termed ‘Dickensian’in standard, something I hoped we would never see again.
   We need a reset in the housing market, so that investors of all kinds both institutional and small can invest for a fair, but safe return.This is what was advocated by John Major and several others.A housing bond, that would acquire building land or use existing public land,to build large numbers of prefabricated,energy efficient homes, in large numbers. I would do away with s106/CIL ‘affordable homes and the right to buy, and enact a development land tax at the beginning and end of each housing development.
   As for taxation, who likes paying it, but it is a necessary requirement for a civilised society.
   Here’s a proposition for you! How about handing out honours to those paying tax above and beyond what they can get away with.Much better than the current dishonourable roll call of honours for those who spend their lives avoiding tax.

   • It means that the simplistic complaint that private rents are too high has to be seen in context of all the factors that affect the private rented sector, and compare those costs with those that affect the social rented sector with all the grants and support they receive.
     Any argument is pointless if its not taking into account all factors.
     As hasbeen shown in other threads, the social rented sector have historically evicted way more tenants than the prs, which perhaps suggests lifetime tenancies are no more secure.
     Similarly it seems odd that the whole of the private sector is judged on the actions of a minority of landlords but that if someone were to make comments about migrants/unemployed/ criminals/travelers etc etc, based on similar statistics they’d be declared as discriminatory and that you can’t judge the whole by the actions of a few. Social housing hasn’t been judged on that basis post Grenfell, Lakanal or Awaab, which is odd given the result was a total of 79 fatalities or is safety good management a moveable goal depending onnwho provides the housing?
     The overall returns from BTL have been upturned by Sec24 and changes to CGT, do that in any business sector and it will change , renting has done so by shrinking in size and increasing rents, it’s hardly rocket science.
     Taxation is a function of modern society , but there comes a point where the levels of taxation discourage people from trying and instead they either leave the country or decide to fall back on the state. Legally minimising the amount of tax a person pays is just sensible, give the state ever more and it’ll just be ever more wasteful.

6. If your statement is correct why is Servo or G4S not striking the Houthis in Yemen?
   I think most of us know the answer there.
   As for Grenfell and Lackanel house, it was true that the buildings were owned by councils, but who clad those buildings and who wanted the fire safety regs minimised to help business, yes, the private sector.
   As for tax.Those in the PAYE system cannot ‘legally minimise ‘ tax.
   Yes government can be wasteful, but no more so than the private sector.
   What is happening in Broken Britain is profits are privatised and liabilities become public.
   After the self inflicted banking crisis and the huge support that businesses received during COVID, I think the privatisers need to remain silent.
   The truth is that the private sector relies heavily on the public sector for contracts, financial support and financing.
   Finally, was contractor for the Horizon IT system a public body or a privately owned business.The answer is of course a private company, and the misery they caused is still reverberating in the country.Before you state that the Post office was a govt body, you should reflect that the reason why it acted as it did, because it was trying to operate on a ‘commercial’ basis.
   Our economy is a balance of private and public ownership.It is time to alter that balance.Less Southern water and South Eastern, more TFL and Great British Railways.

   • Two posts failed the moderators for some reason

     • There’s nothing pending in moderation

7. Let me get this right. The new LHA for 2024/2025 is £577.83 for a 1-bed private renter in receipt of Housing Benefit.
   I downloaded details of all 73 of the 1 bed properties that were avaiable to rent online in Thanet. I was shocked to find that only 2 were available at £575. The remainder fell into the following groups 2 x £650, 2 x £675, 2 x £695, 26 between £700 and £800, 21 between £801 and £900, 8 between £901 and 1,000 and 10 over £1,000.
   The 30th percentile is £725, quite a difference.
   Who are these people that HMG uses to work out these figures? Could they be the same people Mr Bates (of Post Office fame) encountered.

   • The method used takes rents from a multitude of sources, though any sensible person would just go straight to the deposit protection schemes and take the data from them , you’d get date of tenancy, amount paid , landlords details , the cross reference with council tax to get how many bedrooms.
     The problem with looking at adverts is that these aren’t necessarily the rents paid and you can’t base data on just a snapshot of today but need to include existing rents. Otherwise costs would just rocket.
     Your 30th percentile may well be correct for advertised rents for new tenancies but not representative overall.
     The system is deeply flawed but then it was a blatant electionbribe by Gordon Brown and originally set at the 50 percentile.
     But until such time as you deal with the countries lack of housing nothing will change especially if we keep migration levels as they currently are. Also deal with the low skill low wage poor per capita productivity we have.
     We have too many that don’t want to work , a tax burden that must be near the peak for a functioning economy and we’ve borrowed to the hilt. The only real option is to stop bringing more people into the country, everyone work harder and expect less out of life.
     None of those will happen so we’ll keep rushing headlong into the train wreck awaiting us.