How "housing benefits" work in the U.K.

[SanVito]

@t-bonham@scc.net

Yes, but why is it so short?
Here in the US, that would promptly inspire a lot of builders to start adding more housing, to fill this market need. In a few months/year, there would almost be a glut of available housing. Is there some reason UK builders aren’t responding to this shortage?

There’s a whole bunch of reasons:
> Lack of land - it’s pretty hard to find land for building as much is protected as ‘green belt’, ie preserved for agriculture
> Getting planning permission
> Lack of small builders and skill shortages
> Large housing contractors building slowly to control house prices - if they release too many houses onto the market at once, prices will crash
> Government no longer builds council houses, so relies on the private sector (see above)

@t-bonham@scc.net

That brings up something else I don’t understand about UK housing. What is it with people there renting for years & years? Why do they keep throwing money away on rent each month instead of buying a house?

Here in the US, renting is mostly confined to poor or uneducated people, or young people just out of school and getting started on their own (and sometimes the elderly, who need to move into care facilities for health reasons). But when people get into their mid-20’s, and especially as they get married and start a family, they will be actively working to buy their own house. Maybe just a small ‘starter’ home, that they will move on from later, but one they own. The idea of people in their 30’s or 40’s, but still renting, makes Americans wonder what is wrong with them.

Home owning is still the dream of pretty much everyone - we don’t have the culture of, say, Germany, whereby renting is deemed a perfectly acceptable option for life. But the combination of rocketing house prices and tougher mortgage rules (a consequence of the 2008 crash) makes it considerably harder to get together the deposit for a house (usually 10%), and meet the stringent mortgage qualifications to enable people to buy anything other than a rabbit hutch.

[Melbourne]

@Baron_Greenback

of the council estates where I live are actually OK - a mix of bought and rented these days of course - but the four-in-a-blocks in particular are really, really solid apartments, much better built than the new-build hutches that folk pay a hundred or two grand for locally.

Built for the council on a “cost plus” basis, where the builder used the best quality materials to build strictly according to plan, and got a % of material cost. We’ve got old state housing built that way here. Plain, small, and very solid.

@GreedySmurf

The issue o& who the housing benefit is paid to, is a massive oversight to me, I can’t fathom why it is not paid direct to the landlord.

This isn’t just residential. Paying direct to a goods or service provider always leads to fraud, and inserting supervision of the provision is one of the ways to reduce fraud.

Of course when you get to government provision of health, or housing, or aged care, or education, there is always politics involved, and it’s not clear if you are gaining more from eliminating landlord fraud than you are loosing by introducing benefit fraud. I don’t have an opinion on that. But it’s not odd: If the landlord isn’t fixing the leaks, it’s the resident who knows.

[StarvingButStrong]

@Melbourne

This isn’t just residential. Paying direct to a goods or service provider always leads to fraud, and inserting supervision of the provision is one of the ways to reduce fraud.

[snip]

But it’s not odd: If the landlord isn’t fixing the leaks, it’s the resident who knows.

That’s a good point, but you could give the tenant control over the money being paid to the landlord without actually giving the tenant the money. Either require the tenant to sign off on the landlord being paid each month OR let him file a form or something to withhold the payment until the hot water gets fixed or whatever.

Yeah, you might (well, probably will) get some shenanigans where tenants deny the payment out of spite or something, but without the incentive of keeping the money themselves, I’d think that would happen a lot less often.

[SciFiSam]

In the UK you’re not allowed to withhold rent because of repairs anyway. So having the rent paid direct to the tenant doesn’t make any difference there anyway.

[alphaboi867]

@Nava

Not forever (leases have terms), and which exact rights are transferred varies with location…

Yes. I should’ve added a caveat along the lines of “per terms & duration of lease”.

[Nava]

@SciFiSam

In the UK you’re not allowed to withhold rent because of repairs anyway. So having the rent paid direct to the tenant doesn’t make any difference there anyway.

Withholding rent because of repairs and because of disrepairs are different things. Your link talks about both:

1. “I won’t pay until it’s fixed” - not allowed.
2. “I fix it and withhold rent equal to the amount I paid” - allowed within certain parameters and being careful to follow a pretty specific procedure. This applies both to repairs and desired improvements.

The situation is similar in Spain and France.

[SciFiSam]

Yes, but as the link also says, the landlord may use that as a reason to evict you, you have to do it in a particular, time-consuming way, and it’s an extremely risky tactic for a tenant to use.

Private tenants don’t really have any rights not to be evicted. Being on housing benefit (well, Local Housing Allowance, since it’s a private landlord) doesn’t give them any more rights than anyone else, in case anyone thinks it does. A really tenacious tenant can hold out, like the woman in the OP, but holding out means a bad reference (making it difficult to rent privately again) and a ruined credit rating. Then they will always be evicted eventually. In the vast majority of situations landlords have the upper hand.