Bedroom tax/ universal payment

[shetlandpeat]

Part of the reason is we have not collected all we could have.

[unlinkedstudent]

^^

Would you not agree that Labour wrecked the UK economy and any other party coming to power, in 2010, was going to have to tackle the mess that they inherited.

Would you not agree that Labour created many hundreds of thousands of public sector non-jobs in order to keep their union paymasters sweet?

 

If Labour were so wonderful in their policies, of steering the UK towards the mess that Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Greece and Cyprus experienced, how is it that they lost the 2010 general election?

 

Get real ! You can't spend what you haven't got.

 

[JustMe]

The point about this "tax" or whatever you like to call it is that it is completely unfair to people who cannot move since in many cases, their council or housing association has no smaller properties to offer them. Principle that people living in social housing should not get paid to have spare rooms when they are claiming benefits is reasonably sound

 

Now I am sure some of you will say that they could move into the private sector. Does the phrase "no DSS" mean anything to you?. It is what landlords say when they do not want tenants on benefit and if you check the rental adverts you will find plenty say just that. Same way as adverts used to say "no Coloureds" or "no Irish" before that was made illegal.

 

On the wider debate of people claiming benefits rather than working and some hinting that benefits are too high. Well I think the obverse is true. Wages, at least at the lower end of the pay scales, are too low. At least the minimum wage has done something about that but there are plenty of working people who would be pretty much as well off on benefits. That is of course wrong and our next government needs to figure out how to make people better off by working without hurting those who are unable to work or who could work but cannot find anyone to employ them.

 

Am sure some will be thinking that anyone can find a job but this is not true. The old (over 50 in some areas), ex cons, the unhealthy, people with no experience of work and even those with the wrong postcode will find it hard to impossible to get a job. Locally I guess the people helped by COPE come into that category and of course those living in more remote parts of Shetland. Need answers for this.

[unlinkedstudent]

of course if we are going to look at social care then the first truly social care was supplied by the monasteries which central government put a stop to.

 

this was replaced by arms houses and the first workhouses these were backed up with parish relief. this extended to the speedham system. similar to our tax credits. this resulted in reduced wages and an increased in demand on the poor rate payers.

 

with the onset of the late Georgian early Victorian period the poor were looked on as a threat/ times of revolution. the richer classes and landed folks objected to the rates bill going up and that is how the victorian workhouses came into affect. at the same time the richer people in society had a nice little earner by enclosing the common land. insuring the poor in the country had to head to towns.

 

it was a very good threat to keep the new factory workers in there place. the only alternative to slaving in the factories was the workhouse.

 

strange is it not that its happened time and again. the poor have a reasonable support system and the rightwing clamp down on them and always they come out of it with a lot of the workers assets.

 

we seem to be heading into one of these reactionary periods were you really don't want to be poor.

 

Is this is in response to my earlier post? The housing estate I referred to was the Boundary Estate. It was built to replace slums. It is regarded as Britain's first council estate (it wasn't an almhouse and it wasn't a workhouse). Yep, I did refer to it as 'social housing' but here's a link (apologies if link don't work - I got the flu right now and not feeling great):

 

http://boundarylaunderette.wordpress.com/boundary-estate-a-history/

 

Re means-testing - I do recall in Newham that if council tenants own other properties regardless of whether in the UK or not, they have to advise Newham Homes accordingly. I do recall one particular neighbour of mine being particularly upset that the £450,000 house he jointly owned with his son in a neighbouring borough fell under this and he couldn't understand why he should give up his council flat. I think it came to light because of council tax payments (his son had given his dad's address for where bills should be sent and the boroughs must have liaised with each other perhaps?)

 

I'm well aware that the majority of claimants are genuinely entitled to them but I don't believe that those who do fiddle the system should be ignored.

 

However, re means-testing those in social housing to ascertain if their circumstances have changed - where would people go to buy/rent?

 

Part of the problem is landlords but only partially. Take a 2 bed flat in East London. Now there's a huge difference between the type of tenant you'll attract if the 2 bed is in a new docklands development 2 minutes walk from Canary Wharf and one ex-council flat 15 minutes away. The person interested in renting the flat close to Canary Wharf wouldn't be interested in renting the other one. It may take some time but as the bedroom tax starts to take effect, I do envisage some private rents will start to fall - tis the old supply/demand scenario.

[unlinkedstudent]

The point about this "tax" or whatever you like to call it is that it is completely unfair to people who cannot move since in many cases, their council or housing association has no smaller properties to offer them. Principle that people living in social housing should not get paid to have spare rooms when they are claiming benefits is reasonably sound

 

They don't all necessarily have to move though, do they? I did say in the other thread that they could take in lodgers, just like many working people do elsewhere in the UK and just like generations before us did, in order to get by. Perish the thought though, that children of the same sex would have to (gasp, shock horror!) share a bedroom.

[Distortio]

Witness the fact that George Osborne's driver parked in a disabled bay which brought the story headline front page news despite the fact that we are about to be nuked by North Korea.

 

really? i wonder which knee-jerk hysterial newspaper you're reading? not that their rockets could reach us anyway, but even the south koreans aren't worried about it, they've heard it all before.

 

Yesterday, it had front page news about Nick Clegg going on a skiing holiday and an inside story showing a photo of another disabled parking space where George Osborne was alleged to have parked on a previous occasion. There was absolutely no mention in the paper that the totally incompetent Ed Balls had been nicked for speeding and had his licence endorsed; something potentially more injurious to the public than a bit of mis-parking.

 

i suspect that's not because "mis-parking" is particularly dangerous, but because osborne has been backing policies which are targeting the disabled, and that this would seem to further demonstrate, if anyone were still in any doubt, that things like laws and rules do not apply to toffs.

 

As regards the number of bedrooms in Ian Duncan Smith's house; so what?

 

well, considering he wants to reduce money from the public purse going to people living in accommodation with a spare bedroom, and given that his MP's salary of £134,565 is paid by the taxpayer along with £86,536 in expenses, i think it's fair to question the fairness of this. interesting how people get outraged at the reports of someone on benefits getting £26000 (rare for it to be that much, but people love hate figures, despite the fact most of that £ would go directly to landlords anyway) but don't bat an eyelid at the much bigger sums going to those at the top.

 

I am fairly confident that there are many on the Labour front bench who have spare rooms in their houses but haven't taken homeless or under-privileged people in from off the streets. These are the same under-privileged and homeless people who would have been in the same situation under 13 years of a Labour government.

 

not sure what point you're making here. but i'm fairly confident there will be MANY more made homeless as a result of these con-dem policies.

[daveh]

^^

 

You can believe what you want but the fact is you can't spend what you haven't got unless you brow and borrow again. This is what Labour did to get us into the mess.

 

Incidentally, like the Daily Mirror, you also failed to mention Ed Balls speeding. If you are happy to put the UK economy in the hands of the idiotic Balls, then you are going to deserve all that will inevitably happen when the country ends up bankrupt. I must remember to tell you so if the disaster of a re-elected Labour government were to put him into number 11.

[Distortio]

^^

 

You can believe what you want but the fact is you can't spend what you haven't got unless you brow and borrow again. This is what Labour did to get us into the mess.

 

Incidentally, like the Daily Mirror, you also failed to mention Ed Balls speeding. If you are happy to put the UK economy in the hands of the idiotic Balls, then you are going to deserve all that will inevitably happen when the country ends up bankrupt. I must remember to tell you so if the disaster of a re-elected Labour government were to put him into number 11.

 

yeah, ed balls was speeding. so? so was nicholas soames and michael fabricant. and chris huhne. i don't see the relevance. for the record i think a re-elected labour government would be only marginally less disastrous than this tory led one.

 

also labour didn't get us into this mess exactly, they just happened to be at the helm when greater powers than any given government of the day were found to be failing criminal organisations. yet they hold so much power the govt was forced to hand them billions and billions of public money just to keep the appearance of a functioning economy going.

 

arguably the country is already bankrupt. just like most countries. http://www.economist.com/content/global_debt_clock

[daveh]

You can put whatever spin you want on it but it is simply fact that Labour spent far, far beyond the government's means and encouraged others to do so. Any growth they achieved was done so on the back of mountainous debt. It is only by luck and the coalition's actions that we haven't suffered like the Greeks & Cypriots.

You can and probably will vote for more Labour mismanagement in 2015 but I and many millions of sensible people won't.

[shetlandpeat]

You are quite wrong in saying it is all the fault of one group, quite frankly, the 100% being put onto Labour is a tad unfair. You only have to go back a few years to see the boom bust cycle, take 19th October 1987, that bust part of the cycle followed a boom. The shrinking of the labour market did not help post 2008 after the bankers gambled away fortunes for the country to bail out. Less taxes were being paid, and as we know, in many cases not enough by some.

 

Another thing to point out is the Tories, under Camoron, when in opposition supported some of the spending. They too did not see the bust coming, Vince Cable was the only one who mentioned it.

 

They say the structural deficit is 8% (4% cyclical deficit) and its caused by Labour overspending at what £90bn a year since say 2002 or so. This gives people the misleading impression that Labour were VERY bad at controlling spending. This is not the case!

Actually the strucural defict caused by govt overspend is only 3% of which 1% was borrowed to invest leaving only around £25bn a year overspend which although it is an overspend, is barely any different then throughout most of uk history govts! If that hadnt happened it would only be enough to stop six months worths of cuts or one year under labour’s plan…significant but a drop in the ocean really!

The other 5% comes from a reduction in the long term growth rate potential of the economoy so it is really a cross between the cyclical and strucutral deficit and this is the majorty of the deficit. This part is caused by labour error, but not by labour “overspend†but by attemtping to operate an economy on financial services which artifically inflated the currency, making exports close to impossible and forcing the uk out of cync.

Dave

 

Labour have owned up to this mistake which was there “big mistakeâ€. It is this that is the root of the problem but the coalition (also the conservatives agreed with the ecnomic model Labour had followed after all it was Thatcher that first started it!). I agree though that Labour should own up to the “overspend†but that means they can put it in the context described above.

[daveh]

Labour have owned up to this mistake which was there “big mistakeâ€. It is this that is the root of the problem but the coalition (also the conservatives agreed with the ecnomic model Labour had followed after all it was Thatcher that first started it!). I agree though that Labour should own up to the “overspend†but that means they can put it in the context described above.

Oh, so that is alright, then.

They can disastrously run the economy for 13 years, set up the FSA which completely failed to see what was happening with the banks, sell off much of the nation's gold reserves at car boot sale prices then say sorry and all is ok again? Brown stated that they had stopped the boom & bust cycle and he was wrong on that also.

It is the current government at any one time that makes the policies and implements them so the buck stopped with Labour as regards the mess that the coalition inherited; full stop. Whichever party was formed after the 2010 election was going to have to deal with the economic problems and was likely to only have 5 years to do so.

Labour, in opposition, have opposed every single public expenditure and give every indication that, whatever the debt and deficit situation will have improved to in 2015, if they win the next election they will resume their spending splurges and creating public sector non-jobs again. Liam Byrne, when the election was lost in 2015, left a note to say that there was no money left. Not a very funny joke at the time and still isn't but it shows what a shambles the Labour cabinet was.

Labour ran away from dealing with the pension timebomb and it has been left to the coalition to make some tough decisions. they have made them because it is right to do so and not to win votes from the gullible.

[paulb]

unlink hope you feel better soon.

 

i happen to agree if there are council tenants/ha that own another property unless its a special case ie elderly going into sheltered accommodation they then should no longer be entitled to social housing.

 

my kids have always had to share its not hurt them. thou it getting to the point were they are leaving home so they may get a room each in the near future.

 

not so keen on the lodger route. there are risks there.

 

the not treating foster cares as special cases is plainly short sighted. same with the disabled.

 

now if you say have an older person that is living alone in a family home. they should be offered there choice of area and compo for the move. this would open more family homes than down sizing folks from a 2 bed flat/to a 1.

 

an alternative us to convert some 3 beds into flats.

[unlinkedstudent]

unlink hope you feel better soon.

 

So do I and thanks.

 

Hope by now that you have clocked the post where I copied from the other thread, etc.

 

I don't think any of us can think back TBH though and remember any scheme put forward by any Government that didn't have problems, can we?

 

Again, I'm with Dave though - oh, how I remember how high inflation was in the days of Labour being in control before Thatcher ... mind you, I never did approve of going into the Common Market ... folks, we can be here for decades arguing the toss about the rights and wrongs of capitalism but given we don't have the power to overthrow every other Government in the world, we're stuck with it. Whether we care to like it or not, GB is simply not attractive to many companies wishing to set up shop here. Hell, we've even got problems getting crops/veg and the like picked by GB nationals because allegedly we're work-shy and don't work as hard as some of our foreign counterparts.

 

All parties have their faults. People in the private sector haven't had pay rises for several years. Yes, we all deserve a good standard of living but at what cost? Speaking of costs, wars cost a fortune ...

 

... as DaveH said, we can't spend what we haven't got. It was absolutely ludicrous that past Governments went cap in hand and borrowed from the IMF.

 

Hopefully, the shortcomings in the delivery of the bedroom tax will be addressed but it will never ever please everyone. The idea in principle though, I'm in agreement with.

[shetlandpeat]

Liam Byrne, when the election was lost in 2015, left a note to say that there was no money left..

Yer, what ever. One of the reasons I find you post lacking, it would be pointless quoting all of it.

So, now you have banged the drum, take some relaxing herbal infusions and try not to hit the same part of the drum.

 

Really, enough will ever be done as it is subjective.

 

Now that the Tories are too calling it a bedroom tax, it really is not necesary. The reason given was to encourage folk to give up houses they had which were deemed too big for them, to free them up for families who were over occupied, though, when asked several times, councils will not release over occupancy figures because of data protection because of the ways the info was collected, but they can tell us how many underoccupy. The freeing up of houses could be done contractually without the need to burden folk more with further losses to their income, then, the option could go the other way, if you want to occupy a house say with a spare room to accommodate visitors, then you pay a levy on the additional.

 

It just hammers folk into corners they cannot escape from.

[daveh]

^^

Actually, I find your posts to be mind-numbingly dull and extremely ill-informed.

 

I will have my peppermint tea now but will leave you to digest this superb article whilst I do so:

 

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danhodges/100210874/labour-is-panicking-over-welfare-its-flying-by-the-seat-of-ed-milibands-pants-except-ed-isnt-wearing-any/