U K Tenants Insecurity Explains Our "obsession" With Ownership

[Imminent_plunge]

The Anger of the priced out Generation,

When I bought my first home 24 years ago I needed to go on the night shift to pay for it , night shift paid a 50% preminum. I remember an older woman saying to me i do not envey the young of today and I could not understand her point. Today i do not envery the young for the above reasons.

[EUBanana]

Another good point is the damage its doing to communities. Whole streets and developments are suffering "death by excessive BTL" little more than dormitary blocks where tenants come and go, never able to put down roots, or get involved with the community.

That's actually precisely what Thatcher intended by making everybody owner-occupiers. People would have a greater stake in their community as they would own a slice of it.

It's just proof that Conservative governments are as prone to unintended consequences as Labour ones.

[Guest sillybear2]

Correct. I guess one of the features of the brand of parasite capitalism that we are living under, is that we eat our own children.

"Hey, if I don't eat them somebody else will"

It's collective madness.

[iamdamosuzuki]

The Anger of the priced out Generation,

The Generation coming into their adulthood now are not just priced out of the housing market , they are now totally at the edges of what we did have as a society.

They have so little , very poor job prospects, very little security of jobs and homes, if they could afford anything to put in a pension they have seen those destroyed, many are lumbered with massive debt after being encoraged to do too many degrees.

The way things are going a few very bright highly educated people, or those who's parents have the right connections are going to be in the top jobs with good pay. The rest are going to be on minimum wage most if not all their life , with long periods unemployed and working for benefits.

The ones with good pay will buy houses the others will have to wait for their parents to give up the ghost and leave them money. For those who's parents do not own a home or sell it and spend the money instead of leaving it for their kids will have nothing.

No wonder this generation drink and drug take to excess. There is no alternative , no wonder so many young girls just get themselves preganant . We knock people for doing this and reling on the state to pay for them , but what alternative is on offer.

When I bought my first home 24 years ago I needed to go on the night shift to pay for it , night shift paid a 50% preminum. I remember an older woman saying to me i do not envey the young of today and I could not understand her point. Today i do not envery the young for the above reasons.

+ 1

I was young a tthe start of the 90's and that was enough of a nightmare. There are more jobs now, but the vast majority seem to be paid below a level where doing anything other than surviving is impossible. Pension arrangements are going to be non-existent for a start. tragic

[miko]

Another piece on this topic , maybe the tories have slashed the school's budget as they have decided that there is no point in spending billions educating the Children as as soon as they reach adulthood they are going to chuck them on the scrap heap. Better off having them uneducated.

[Meat Puppet]

Security of tenure wouldn't matter so much if you had massive institutional investment in the private rented sector. The previous government tried to get this going a couple of years ago but no one stepped forward as they all ran the numbers and realised that with prices this high and yields this low it is a non-starter as a business.

From my experience of renting in the US as long as you pay your bills it is a dream. Do what you like with the place, everything fixed immediately, swimming pools inside and out, gyms, etc. That's what the big apartment management companies provide, but for it to work they need a good yield.

[Guest sillybear2]

Another piece on this topic , maybe the tories have slashed the school's budget as they have decided that there is no point in spending billions educating the Children as as soon as they reach adulthood they are going to chuck them on the scrap heap. Better off having them uneducated.

Do modernist PFI paper buildings make up for crap teachers?

[miko]

+ 1

I was young a tthe start of the 90's and that was enough of a nightmare. There are more jobs now, but the vast majority seem to be paid below a level where doing anything other than surviving is impossible. Pension arrangements are going to be non-existent for a start. tragic

Yes the start of the 90's was a bad time and a nightmare to be leaving education and entering the work force. However that was a ressesion that passed over a period of a few years , this is more than a ressesion . A few years passing is not going to sort this out the basic fabric of our working society has been ripped out , the money funnelled to the top has grown at an alarming rate the rest are left with less, wages have been reduced, cost like housing and bills have gone up , those that work are doing more for less, the pensions have been destroyed, mass immigration has hit the workers again and again, people ( yes their own fault no one made them do it ) have become swamped with debt, the govenment is also swamped with debt , this is going to take a generation to sort out.

However to sort it out we need leaders that are going to bite the bullet and act on the countries behalf. Labour f---ked it up and so far nothing this new lot say gives me any hope that they are going to do anything but add to the misery. So far they have attacked pensions wanting to reduce what people get from their company pensions. and making others wait longer for their state pension. The other cherry Ian Duncan Smith came out with was he was going to make it easier for people to move for work, so moving form one unemployment black spot to another unemployment black spot is going to created jobs. They are also getting the young to work like slaves for their unemployment benefits. Adding to society they call it , no lining the pockets of the rich.

[miko]

Do modernist PFI paper buildings make up for crap teachers?

No so they will have no new buildings and crap teachers.

[nickincash]

If a landlord gets the dates wrong on the form, uses the wrong form completely, or fails to secure the deposit in a protection scheme/fails to pass on the details of the deposit protection scheme, the landlord has to start all over again until he gets it right.

Yes - the date of leaving must be the last day of a rental period (usually calendar month) eg in my case the 4th of the month.

The LL must give at least two complete rental periods notice.

eg notice given on 6th January must have a leaving date of 4th April (so nearly 3 months notice in this example).

If the LL puts the wrong leaving date then the notice is invalid.

[alexw]

That's actually precisely what Thatcher intended by making everybody owner-occupiers. People would have a greater stake in their community as they would own a slice of it.

It's just proof that Conservative governments are as prone to unintended consequences as Labour ones.

Nothing of the sort, maggies intentions were to bribe voters which cheap houses and tax cuts arising from the income from the selloff, and to engineer a society that would be more likely to vote conservative by turning them into good little capitalist home owners (i.e. those who owned their own homes were more likely to vote conservative, and those who were long term council tennants were more likely to vote labour).

Of course labour have tried the same with for example its non-job creation scheme......

[Guest sillybear2]

Selling off homes was immaterial, it just changed the notional ownership on a bit of paper and shifted all the maintenance costs onto the householder, it produced no net change in the number of homes. The real travesty was not using the funds to build more homes and tying up the planning system.

Edited July 21, 2010 by sillybear2

[Lucifer]

Another piece on this topic , maybe the tories have slashed the school's budget as they have decided that there is no point in spending billions educating the Children as as soon as they reach adulthood they are going to chuck them on the scrap heap. Better off having them uneducated.

Thats exactly what they've been doing in the States for the last 20 years, don't see why things should turn out any different here..

[Dorkins]

They are also getting the young to work like slaves for their unemployment benefits.

This will never happen, ever. It is just right wing ideological guff. There are 1.5 million people claiming JSA. Does anybody seriously think the government would be able to organise a 'volunteer' army of 1.5 million people? What on earth would they get them to do? One full time street sweeper for every 40 people? It's not going to take long to get round 20 houses each day, is it? Who would pay for the equipment and materials they would need to do the work? Are we going to pay for their travel to and from work, and the food that they eat while they're there? Who's going to look after the kids while they're out earning their £65 a week? How many full time, fully waged civil servants would they have to hire to administer the scheme and be foremen of the work gangs? Making people work for their JSA would cost a lot more than just handing over the cash and leaving them to their own devices, I'd imagine it might cost double or even triple in the end.

[miko]

Thatcher also wanted the council houses sold off to keep the workers with mortgages more compliant.

Dagenham was one big council estate , most people who lived there worked in Ford's. Ford's went on strike and the council waited for the rent when they had gone back to work and the people could pay the arrears. Ford's were always on strike.

Since 1980 and the Ford workers bought their houses , they have only had one two week strike, the numbers working there has now reduced from about 18,000 to 2,000 .

Worked in a good job myself and they wanted to bring in over time pay at flat rate not time and a half anymore . The ones who wanted to agree it without fighting the company were the young ones with nice new big mortgages. The older ones without the debt wanted a fight.

[Guest sillybear2]

This will never happen, ever. It is just right wing ideological guff. There are 1.5 million people claiming JSA. Does anybody seriously think the government would be able to organise a 'volunteer' army of 1.5 million people? What on earth would they get them to do?

Organise and participate in live televised gladiatorial games until the death, the ultimate Big Brother.

[miko]

This will never happen, ever. It is just right wing ideological guff. There are 1.5 million people claiming JSA. Does anybody seriously think the government would be able to organise a 'volunteer' army of 1.5 million people? What on earth would they get them to do? One full time street sweeper for every 40 people? It's not going to take long to get round 20 houses each day, is it? Who would pay for the equipment and materials they would need to do the work? Are we going to pay for their travel to and from work, and the food that they eat while they're there? Who's going to look after the kids while they're out earning their £65 a week? How many full time, fully waged civil servants would they have to hire to administer the scheme and be foremen of the work gangs? Making people work for their JSA would cost a lot more than just handing over the cash and leaving them to their own devices, I'd imagine it might cost double or even triple in the end.

I think that you are very wrong there , it is already happening , new deal or something they call it , spoke to a women this week who's twenty year old daughter is working for her dole. It cost's the govenment nothing , they provided her with nothing she is just farmed out to a charity shop that is apart form 3 staff totally run by free unemployed workers.

[Dorkins]

I think that you are very wrong there , it is already happening , new deal or something they call it , spoke to a women this week who's twenty year old daughter is working for her dole. It cost's the govenment nothing , they provided her with nothing she is just farmed out to a charity shop that is apart form 3 staff totally run by free unemployed workers.

I'm sorry to hear that. Well, at least I hope our new fresh-thinking liberal leaders have the wisdom not to replicate a failed experiment from East Germany:

It was not a success, as Germany's Federal Audit Office concluded two years ago in a devastating assessment of one such program involving so-called "one euro jobs." Under the scheme, the long-term unemployed could work a certain number of hours a week in, for example, old people's homes, schools or parks. In return, they received compensation of €1 an hour or more on top of their regular welfare payments. But, according to the report, the government-funded ersatz jobs were displacing many regular jobs and even decreased the chances of participants finding real work.

For the majority of long-term unemployed people, the one-euro jobs did not "provide any measurable advantages" in terms of finding work, the auditors concluded. Hundreds of thousands of East Germans were "branded as second-class workers," says Esther Schröder, a former SPD member of the Brandenburg state parliament.

Link

[Menie]

One consolation is that landlords sometimes get the Section 21 Notice wrong, which means that the tenant can stay until the notice is corrected and further two months have passed.

The French model is much better with usually a 3 year tenancy agreement which can be automatically renewed by a further 3 years and rent increases during this time governed by an inflation statistic tool. This is why the French can adopt the laisser faire attitude towards home ownership, unlike chez nus.

yep but u all forgot to mention the quality of our french houses have nothing to compare to our english shoes box...

[miko]

The unemployed being forced to work for JSA and DC's big annoncement this week called the big society are two parts of the same jigsaw.

He spoke about charities taking over from the state , and the unemployed are being got ready to be a limitless pool of free labour for those same charities.

[Wario]

EDIT - jsut googled "protedted shorthold". They were only introduced in 1980, so clearly an early strike by the Thatcher governemnt against tenants rights before wholesale change in 1989. Before 1980 it seems all tenants had full protection.

Up to a point, Lord Copper.

Prior to this, the game involved the LL of the sort of crummy city flats (which were all we could ever aspire to, although working (on an embarrassingly low screw)) getting round the spirit and intention of the tenant legislation by exploiting carefully inserted loopholes.

The first of which was the "furnished/unfurnished" let wheeze.

"Unfurnished" was simply a fabulous, endlessly-sought mythical beast. It had fairly decent conditions of tenancy, I believe.

Only places I recall were older (married, kids etc.) folk finally getting a council let after aeons on the list having contrived to stay in the same town that long.

Not available for the likes of us younger singletons who followed the work. Ever. Council Housing may as well have not existed, for us, until the day it was all flogged off.

"Furnished" simply involved the LL getting a load of filthy old crep from salerooms, his chicken-shed, or the dump, by the looks and aroma of it.

Magic! Six-month (sometimes three-) tenancies, inspections, renewal by going through the whole carry-on each time, month's deposit, out on your erse at the drop of a hat, no reason needed.

No maintenance that I ever recall. Filthy, unheated due to recently imposed Clean Air regs. and shutting of all coal fireplaces with a bit of ply, cold rising-main only, rotting victorian sash&case windows which might as well have been holes in the cave wall. Alive with rodents due to shonky second-fix etc. You get the picture. Withnail & I, minus the luxurious decadence and superfluity of living-space.

Pretty much the same arrangements as an HMO, strangers (initially ) two to a room. Rent for that half-room taking a third (rare) to a half your wage.

TBH it was a massive relief, and a step up in the world, when we got into the squatting scene.

At least we could redecorate, clean the joint up, and install proper plumbing and wiring (the lead had invariably magicked itself away), even secondary glazing (every other bu55er was some sort of tradesman).

Almost like having a home

Edited July 21, 2010 by Wario

[dissident junk]

For those not old enough to remember, the current scheme of assured shorthold tenancies dates from 1989.

Before that most tenants had protected/regulated tenancies where it was much harder/impossible to get tenants out and also rent control was much tighter.

Although before 1989 it was still possible for a landlord to grant a tenancy with very little security. It was called a "protected shorthold tenancy". It was much trickier to set up though than an AST.

EDIT - jsut googled "protedted shorthold". They were only introduced in 1980, so clearly an early strike by the Thatcher governemnt against tenants rights before wholesale change in 1989. Before 1980 it seems all tenants had full protection.

Wasn't this, in part, though to do with the major problem of the extremely poor quality of rental accomodation in the 50s, 60s and 70s? The idea being that if landlords could increase rents, they might be more inclined to renovate properties.

I remember watching a programme about housing in Notting Hill back in the 60s and 70s, and they showed old news and reportage footage of the state of the rental houses. Many homes were more or less crammed into carved-up derelict Victorian villas where people had to make do with an oven in the corridor and all the walls were damp. There was simply no incentive for landlords to do anything about the state of their properties because it just cost them money they could not get back through increasing rents as there were rent controls.

I've a feeling it might have been on the BBC a couple of years ago as part of a series on housing in Britain.

Ahhhh, and part of the legacy of all this looks to be down to Rachman ...

From Wiki:

As full details of his activities were revealed, there was a call for new legislation to prevent such practices, led by Ben Parkin, MP for North Paddington, who coined the phrase "Rachmanism". The subsequent 1965 Rent Act added to the security of tenants, but had the unintended consequence that private rented housing became scarce.

It's just swings and roundabouts really, isn't it? You hit one mole on the head, and another pops up somewhere else.

Edited July 21, 2010 by dissident junk