disabled will NOT be exempt from 'bedroom tax'

PLEASE stop feeding Frank. If you all ignore him, he might go away.

A couple with 3 children had just saved enough money to buy a modest house in Sth London. Before they could go ahead with the purchase WW2 was declared and the husband went off to fight in Italy/Nth Africa. Returning after the war house prices went up, housing stock reduced and it took time to get back into steady work again. An un-planned 4th child was born and the family continued living in their privately rented (non self-contained) rooms with garden.
They were content and accepted that the opportunity to buy was now lost. They continued to live what then would have be thought of as a respectable 'working class' life. The children did well at school and two went into the forces, one became a secretary and the fourth, eventually, became a teacher. The house they rented rooms in was then compulsorily purchased to build an underpass and the parents and youngest child were rehoused by the council & moved into a two-bedroomed top floor flat (10th floor). The parents stayed in that flat until they died, both in their 90s. Neither needed residential care, just some home care (benefits) in the last couple of years. It was THEIR home. If they had been forced to leave and go to a smaller place I think they would have become more dependent and cost society a lot more than their occupancy of a two- bedroomed flat.

I only give all the info to illustrate, to those posters who seem to think all council house tenants are somehow lesser beings than themselves, that people like you and me live in council accommodation!

HUNTERF you seem to be under the impression that the whole £500 you pay in tax each month goes to help the needy.

What about schools, nhs, roadworks, aid abroad, the armed forces, missiles, wars, looking after the elderly, and so on.

I would guess about a fiver goes on people on benefits.

He likes the house and where he lives

Elegran

I know 1 person who lives in an ex council house.
I understand it was council owned when he went in to it but after a few years his circumstances improved and he purchased the house.
He has been in that house for 30 years to my knowledge. Why he has not moved I do not know.

Frank

Petallus I agree with you.
I am very fortunate to own my own home, have a reasonable work pension plus my state pension. I also have my p/t freelance earnings. My DH and I are not financially 'smart' and we do not have any major investments, second homes etc. However we do not begrudge our taxes being used to support those who need benefits as that is our philosophy about how society works.
I do begrudge my taxes being used for wars I do not support but accept that the government makes decisions and takes actions following a democratic election. There are bound to be things I do not agree with & take that into account when trying to choose how to cast my vote. It is getting harder to find a political party that I can feel I can commit my vote to.

Do you know any of them personally, Frank ?

that anyone can be so cold and callous.

petallus

I pay over £500 a month on my occupational pension alone as well as tax in the interest and dividends I receive and I also pay band G council tax.
I will pay more tax when I get my state pension.
I think the so called needier members of society must be on a good living at my expense.

Frank

Agree Bags that we are all responsible for the kind of society we live in. I believe that the more fortunate among us should go without a bit of their wealth so that the needier members of our society have the basics in life.

That is why I don't begrudge paying quite a bit of tax out of our joint income.

gillybob

The difference between my last posts and your parents situation is the daughter owned the bungalow and I don't think the council could reasonably expect the daughter to keep the bungalow in the adapted state. The chances of the next owner wanting these adaptions is very remote.
I would imagine the council decided it was cheaper to pay for the adaptions rather than give the father a separate property even though the expense would have to be written off after the father's death.

Frank

I follow your argument, petallus, and now think that 'responsible' is perhaps not the right word. But we as a society are responsible for the rest of the society we live in at least to some extent. If we don't accept the ultimate responsibility for how our society organises itself, who will?

As individuals we are not responsible for specific government actions (the Iraq example you gove is a good one), but we were responsible collectively for the government of which Blair was leader.

It really is ultimately down to us, collectively, how the poorer people in society are treated. I agree that currently it's difficult to assess which shade of politics would serve us and the needs of the country best.

My mum and dad live in local authority "adapted" bungalow. They pay full rent and waited quite a long time to get it as there are not very many available within our area. Their bungalow is especially designed for people with disabilities and they would not be allowed to remove any of the adaptations should they no longer need them.

Lilygran

I presume the modified flats will be left as they are.
Somebody I knew owned a bungalow and her father in effect lodged there.
He had little money but I presume the daughter did have some.
At the time Social Services arranged for the house to be modified ( ramp, grab handles etc ) and paid for them.
After the father died the daughter gradually got the bungalow restored to its original condition when she decorated it and had other alterations done.
The ramp had to be smashed but she asked if the council wanted things like the grab handles back as they were in good condition but they were not interested.
I am not sure if the council would have paid for the alterations to the bungalow as of now with the cut backs.

Frank
After the father passed away the daughter had to pay to

What will happen to the houses and flats modified for use (often at public expense) by people with disability? And where will the people move to, who can't afford to pay the difference and who need modified accommodation? There are so many flaws in this decision!

Thank you Elegran for explaining how democracy works .

Bags mentioned us all being responsible for the Government we have. But I just don't feel responsible, in the same way I don't hold myself responsible for the invasion of Iraq having been on all the demos against it.

In other words, I did all I could do to prevent what I considered to be an undesirable state of affairs in both cases.

Of course, I have to go along with the majority vote but that's not the same as being responsible.

nightowl's clarification also demolishes in one fell swoop all the arguments about parents and inlaws having to sell up or take in lodgers to pay their housing costs. All that is quite simply irrelevant to any argument about the fairness or otherwise of housing benefits.

Thank you for that clarification, nightowl.

I still we should all contribute to sorting out our government's messes. There is some truth in the saying that we get the government we deserve. Yes, it's a generalisation. elegran explains very well how democracy works – though we should all know that already of course.

nightowl, thank you for setting out the facts regarding the 'bedroom tax' - as you say, pensioners (of both are on state pension) are not affected. And it only affects those in receipt of housing benefit.

Therefore not all council/private tenants will be penalised, and no pensioners will be forced to downsize. We seem to have lost sight of some of these facts on this thread...

Absent's post made me think about the recently built Assisted Care Home my mother was in before she went into a Nursing Home.

She had a brand new, well appointed one bedroomed flat. Some of the even larger flats had two bedrooms even though there was only one resident. Some were privately owned but most were rented from our local Housing Association - all by elderly people.

Referring to it as a ghetto would not be wide of the mark. I remember my younger daughter and I having a discussion about the complete waste of facilities. A library....empty, function room with large flat screen telly....empty, courtyard garden....unused, a shop that only opened two days a week due to lack of support etc., etc.,

I know from talking to some of the elderly residents that they preferred the old building (which was demolished) where all the flats were grouped around courtyards or meeting places. They would leave their doors open as it was all on ground floor level. They didn't want to be stuck up on the third floor dependant on a lift.

So....Surely a mix of young and old could work in a complex where there is a supermarket only a five minute walk away, primary and secondary schools around the corner, a bus service into larger towns and GP surgery nearby. It would be lovely to turn the clock back to when communities took care of their own but that's unlikely to happen when people are pigeon holed and young families are unable to find or afford their own homes.

Petallus This is a democracy. The party with the most votes frames the laws which apply to everyone. Elected local authorities do the same in their area. Those who voted for a different party go along with the majority vote unless they can influence lawmakers before the bill is enacted, and if they feel strongly enough, they help their choice to win the next time round.

Those who did not bother voting also have to go along with the majority vote, and should then turn up to vote in a different party the next time. In reality, they don't bother the next time round either, but that does not stop them complaining about those in power.

But Bags, won't that mean that taxpaying home owners will be paying twice as the bedroom tax will have to be covered for people in social housing who are on benefits?

Sorry if this has been said, but I can't be bothered to read through all the posts on this thread. As I understand it, those on a state pension are exempt from bedroom tax anyway so talk of people having to downsize in their later years is not accurate. People may have to consider that at an earlier stage when their children leave home, but that's a different matter.

There are many anomalies, including the unfair treatment of people with disabilities (although I believe children with disabilities are also exempt) as per the subject of this thread. There are others such as fostering/ special guardianship situations, which are currently being challenged. But just to be clear, the 'bedroom tax' is not a charge but a reduction in the amount of housing benefit that can be claimed and does not affect anyone not in receipt of housing benefit. Therefore the debate is not about social vs private housing but about whether benefit rules are fair or not.

But what if we didn't vote for the Government Bags?

Went off to clean my teeth and had a thought while I was doing so.

It occurred to me that the bedroom tax would be fairer (not sure about actually fair) if it were applied to all dwellings, publicly or privately owned.

My reasoning is this: those of us who are home-owners are as responsible for who is in government and what kind of government we get as those in council houses. The problem of not being able to make ends meet on publicly owned housing is therefore as much the fault of home-owners as it is of council tenants (our fault through our choice of bad government) who are being made to pay for governmental bad planning.

Either we should all be contributing if we have a spare bedroom, or no-one should.