Quote:
Originally Posted by martyh
George Osborne is set to charge full market rent to social housing tenants who earn over £40,000 in London and £30,000 everywhere else .This is a ridiculous idea ,all it will do is encourage people to stay on a lower wage so they keep the lower rent ,exactly what happens with tax credits.He says he wants to end the practice of higher earners benefiting from cheap subsidised rents,my council rent is neither cheap nor subsised it is exactly where the local market says it should be as I suspect most areas will be simply because that is how the LA's and associations set their rent levels ,London possibly being the exception
The other issue is why the hell should a working person receiving no benefits pay more rent that his next door neighbour who is on the dole
http://news.sky.com/story/1513430/cr...-house-tenants |
The problem (in London at least) is house prices. They are far too high, but no government will ever tackle them because it would cause voters to lose a *lot* of money, and would pretty much torpedo the ruling party's chances for several elections.
£40,000 a year is a lot of money, but on a 3 or 4 X salary mortgage (which is still, I believe, the standard) will give you between £120,000 and £160,000 to buy a house. This will (at best) buy you a flat in most of London. Not much use if you have a partner and a couple of kids. A friend of mine was in a bloody good job, earning nearly £50k, yet when it came to buying a house, she could only afford one of the rougher parts of Lewisham (which is already rough), and she could barely afford that if she went to the max her bank would lend her (3X salary). This was several years ago.
Now, you can argue that you can move. You can, but what if you need to get to work? It may not be practical to travel too far. For instance, some of my colleagues are on call in case any of our servers fail. The company may not be able to wait for two hours with a major failure while the techs travel in from some far flung part of the country because they could not afford to live in London. There is also the problems of schooling for the kids. It can be difficult to get school places. Particularly where the Government has cut funding in the local area..