We hear so much of the “bulging benefit bill, so I’d like to deal with a couple of anomalies in the simplistic media analysis that surrounds this.
The housing benefit bill is certainly huge. The Government’s choice of dealing with this is through austerity, and they thus burden inner city councils with the fallout. Councils will have a statutory duty to find temporary accommodation for people who would no longer be eligible to receive housing benefit under Tory plans. So taxpayers will have to pick up this tab – yet again.
It is no secret that housing benefit is also known as the “landlord benefit”. Private rentals in inner London has been left in the hands of the free market economy and unregulated, it has been allowed to grow like tumor, incapacitating and bleeding hard working people dry.
What we should be doing is to find genuine ways of reducing the cost of private rents. Council rents in Camden, where I am a local councillor, are on average one third of private rents. If council housing can yield surpluses which is reinvested in the upkeep of the homes, this means private landlords could be made cut their profits from up to 300% to say about 150%. That’s still doubling up on council rents.
The net effect of this is that the housing benefit bill would be halved without creating mayhem by breaking up neighbourhoods.
Meanwhile, we can’t give up the fight to scrap the Welfare Reform Act – sign my petition here.
Hard working, Tax payers, where have I heard that from before.
The ‘taxpayer’? We are all tax payers, in fact the poorest pay the most! Yet this government chooses to pour out this line in gallons.
It’s a problem labour cannot get over or the left, it poor old tax payers.
The simple fact labour MP’s did enough to try and not pay tax now Labour MP’s want a 35% pay rise.
But in the end this housing shortage can be laid straight at labour’s feet, open door immigration and not building social housing.
OK – the benefit bill is high; it’s a fact which cannot be denied. But if the government STOPPED paying up to £5K a MONTH HB for migrant families living in MANSIONS or other LUXURY HOMES, especially in London, it would cut the costs drastically. My RENT is under £4K per YEAR.
And with regard to the comment above, Mrs Thatcher started the “housing shortage” by encouraging people to buy their COUNCIL homes without having new-build programmes in place. Don’t get me wrong, if I had had the wherewithal to buy mine some time ago, I would have. But let’s place the blame where it should really go! I do agree however, that immigration has made things much, much worse. It’s a sad day when the indigenous population of the UK – a good majority of whom have actually PAID into the system – come second to people who have just landed in this country. And before anyone jumps, that is NOT a racist statement – it is FACT!