Should people raised in countryside expect to be able to stay there?

nanej Yes, Islington is a desirable area which many people I worked with could not afford and therefore is much more expensive than some other parts of London.

I take your point about how hard it is if people have to move out of a property which is bigger than they need but the other side of the coin is the ones who currently live in overcrowded accommodation which does not seem fair either.

Greatnan I note your sarcastic comment but the fact remains she is a single mother of five children living in a very expensive area. No amount of sarcasm alters the facts.

granjura I agree with you. This is quite a simple matter of choice between those who don't need all the room that they have and those who do. Those in the greatest need should be given the housing.

My own children movds schools because we moved with DH's job and they had no problems making new friends and fitting in each time. Children are very adaptable and mine have grown up to be adaptable and responsible adults.

Yes, in an ideal world we would all have plenty of room and everything else we want but unfortunately we don't live in an ideal world.

Goldengirl, many people who own their own property live in 'one bedders' - it may not be their ideal choice, but they've had to cut their cloth according to means. That's life. We live in a very large house, so my comment may seem hypocritical, but the house cost us a lot less than a one bedder in Islington, as we live in the sticks in a very cheap area (which is no problem as we are retired so no need to be near jobs). When our daughters went to university, we rented our spare room and one of our daughter's room to pay for their rentals at uni. Maybe a good idea for people with spare rooms to rent them to suitable people in need of accommodation?

movedalot. You are talking about children who are living in a secure family unit. It's a different kettle of fish for children who have witnessed the break up of their parents' marriage. I know at least three young women in our village who are hoping that new builds in a community land scheme will give them a chance of shared ownership. They have full time jobs and family close by. The last thing they want to do is move away from their support network.

I think it is inhumane and lacking in compassion to suggest that families should be moved out of an area simply because they are not wealthy. Do we want ghettos, with gates? Poor familes often have good support networks of mums, aunts, grans, cousins, etc. The councils in the North made bad mistakes in the 1950's and 1960's by 'clearing' whole communities and spreading them round the cities into 'overspill' estates. What happened often was that they swapped their shiny new council houses with people still in old terraced properties, just to get back to their roots. I know Birkenhead had quite a good scheme, of clearing one street at a time, putting the families in temporary accommodation, and renovating and updating the terraced houses with bathrooms and kitchens. Not everybody wants a garden and certainly most families did not want to be uprooted and planted miles from their families, friends and employment.
I see that immigrants are also getting stick on another thread. I suppose we could amalgamate the two most usual hate figures of the right, and just talk about single mother immigrants.

merlot I don't know if the person concerned had a broken marriage or not, that was not mentioned in the programme so I have made no assumptions. I have simply reported what was said. I also come from a difficult disfunctional family so do have some expereince. We moved on my 14th birthday (which was completely forgotten) I didn't want to go and left behind a lot of good friends but I just got on with it.

Greatnan I really don't think the 1950s are comparable to 2013! Life is completley different! We all have phones, most have computers and these days no one lives in a place and never travels outside. It seems to me it is quite rediculous to think that life has not changed and the circumstances are comparable.

A lot of people moved to the 'new towns' and started new lives and were very happy. There are 2 sides to every coin.

There was another example in the Sunday Times yesterday of someone who feels she has a right to live in an expensive area at the cost of rest of us. She had a 4 bedroomed house in Belgravia which at the time entitled her to £1200 in housing benefit. Yes, that was a week! She had told a neighbour the rent was £4000 a month and another neighbour that it was £6000 a month. When the benefit cap was imposed she applied for £40,000 as a one off discretionary benefit and was given £10,000.

She has 6 children and is a student at Westminster University. She has asked to be moved back to Belgravia because the school some of her children attend is a very good school and is close to the standard of private education. There was no mention of who looks after the pre-school children while she is at uni.

She owns 50% of the shares in her husband's business which she said had negligible turnover and has set up 2 other companies . He also has a consulting firm. He does not live with her but when she was asked if he helped her financially she said "Yes, he helps a lot"

She also took her children home to Togo for a 6 week holiday last summer with tickets paid for by a cousin.

I simply report what I read. I do believe that it is unfair on those who work hard and limit the size of their family to have to pay for this family to live in a luxurious area.

Now Greatnan are you going to accuse me of attacking married people this time?

I truly think some of these discussions totally lose the plot. One extreme being thrown at another. Isn't there some common sense to be had somewhere?

Most people in the UK cannot afford to live in Belgravia, many families are living 10 to a 2 bed home, 1000s in London have NO school places to send their children to next year, even. Even the well-off cannot afford to live in Belgravia, only the very rich!

So solutions have to be found - and BOTH sides have to listen and yes, make sacrifices. Why should my daughter, and 1000s like her, have to commute 2 hours +++ a day at huge cost, to be able to live in a decent home and work in London- because she defo can't afford a home in Belgravia, or Islington for that matter.

Why should my nieces be given social benefits and huge accommodation costs because they insist that life is boring outside London, and claim it would affect their mental health to move (back to the Midlands) and this for the past 30 years. Common sense, please. The bedroom tax is poorly put together, and exceptions have to be made for all sorts of circumstances, granted. But children can share bedrooms without being psychologically damaged (most of us had to), not everybody needs spare rooms for occasional visitors, and most families do not need to live in Islington or Belgravia.

I love the way that newspapers manage to winkle out some outrageous example of benefit scroungers, work-shy shirkers, single mothers of multitudes of children and other blots on the social landscape who live in mansions in the most expensive places in the country. Then, they use these exceptional examples to justify an ill-thought out scheme that affects many, many others who are none of these things and who live in very ordinary accommodation.

Is Belgravia in the countryside or has this thread now just turned into a general criticism of anyone living in social housing?

Well said, granjura!

This is exactly what I find so unfortunate. Saying that there are problems which need to be solved (taking full account that those cases in the Press are extremes, and exposed to get a reaction) does NOT NOT NOT undermine the great and good principle of social help and social housing. AT ALL - but it does not mean either that the current abuses by too many, and the current principles that, say, living in Belgravia or other very expensive boroughs, is fair (certainly not to those, most, who cannot, live in social housing for a mere fraction of the cost where there may be many problems and 'poor' schools, or to those who work themselves to the bone to raise a family and have to live in much more modest circumstances, or have to make huge sacrifices, personal and financial, to commute for hours every day to work in london, etc).

This is one thing I find so distasteful and destructive in the UK, this constant LEFT against RIGHT, RIGHT against LEFT, and round again - without any side trying to use common sense and see the others' point/s of view.

absent I am sure you know where Belgravia is! The principle is exactly the same though isn't it? This is hardly the first thread to go off topic even though it is only slightly.

Recently there was a statistic on the television about the number of children in families getting housing benefit. I was reading at the time but DH said that a very large number had more than 3 children, I think he said 76,000. I wonder if it is responsible to have a large family you cannot afford to keep.

Yes, I agree that the media bring these big matters to our attention, why on earth not? Maybe they are one end of the pendulum swing but I would far prefer my taxes to go to the people at the other end of said pendulum. I believe it is our duty to help those who really need it but not those who don't or who are just working the system like those youths in East Anglia who refused to do 'immigrant jobs'

Well said granjura on both counts. GN is classic in that some are very clearly left wing and appear to be blind to its faults and some right wing. I am sure you will agree that common sense is actually very uncommon.

I find it distastful that there are posters who attack or ridicule what one says just because they have decided to attack that person rather than because of what they have posted. Surely simply posting something which one has read should not be construed to be one's opinion. Even if one finds they often disagree with a poster one should be generous enough to comment when one does agree with them rather than twist what they say to make it sound as if they have said something else? C'est la vie.

I've just posted a chart on the Pictures thread which is very relevant to this discussion.

I think granjura and movedalot are right - staunch left-wing members of Gransnet seem to be very blinkered whenever the subject of large families, single parents and/or immigrants and their entitlement to various benefits is discussed.

I think we are all informed enough to know that there are not that many at the extreme end of the scale, e.g. 11 children and counting, but of course the press seize on such examples to highlight the inbalance there is in the system. Insisting over and over that we should all feel compassion for the poor and needy, and implying that those of us who question the benefits system are rabid right-wingers who believe everything the DM reports is not addressing the problem, it's just divisive.

And no, I don't have the answer, but do we really have to go round and round nitpicking and sniping instead of having a reasoned and sensible debate? Yes, gone off-topic again - sorry!

Well said movedalot I agree with you entirely.

Just had a look, Lilygran. Surely the government should be focussing on all those issues?

But the discussion was originally about whether people from a rural background should be able to stay in the countryside and had absolutely nothing to do with social housing or people on benefits. It was to with building or not building homes in the countryside/green belt which is a very different concern – and an important one – from whether someone on benefits lives in an expensive part of London in an already existing property.

This thread seems to have morphed into the one about bedroom tax.

Ban or restrict second homes and holiday lets in rural areas. That is what has made the properties unavailable to local people. The rich can afford to pay inflated prices for a house. Those who work in rural areas are generally very poorly paid and are priced out of living where they need to be for work. It sounds to me like the rich disposessing the poor peasants.

May I suggest that the difference between left and right opinions on a variety of subjects is the left feel an entitlement, a right (excuse the pun) It would be nice to live where you grew up, if that's what you'd chose but there is no right to do so. It would be nice to have an extra bedroom but unless you own your own home and pay for it, you have no right to expect one. It would be nice to have as many children as you choose, but unless you can pay for them, you have no right to do so.

I saw a brilliant play at The National on Saturday 'This House' set in the period of the hung Parliament of the 70s. The hilarious stereo typing of Left and Right in that era hasn't changed much today on GN although life and politics have.

Nellie I can see your point but think it is a bit more complicated than that. If you banned holiday lets in, say, Devon and Cornwall that would have a significant effect on employment in an area which relies heavily on tourism. I don't have the answer though.

Sel & Ana good points well made.

absent I think you have missed the point which is that whether people live in the coutryside or the city the question is exactly the same: "do they have the right to expect to stay there". The thread has taken a tangent but is no less valid as a result.

Movedalot Sir Simon Jenkins suggested that houses should be built only in cities and towns. That, surely, was one of the central points of the thread.

Sel Did you mean to be quite so condescending to and supercilious about other Gransnetters or was it some kind of mistake?

Sel I don't think you sound 'condescending' at all. Nor do you sound 'supercillious'. You have as much right to your opinion as anyone else. IMO this is the kind of 'sniping' Ana referred to in her last paragraph.

I won't bother to respond to your comment absent. It really does not deserve a response.

BTW I did not think you sounded at all condescending , Sel .

[sunshine

Suggesting that gransnetters are locked into archaic hilarious stereotypical Left/Right political confrontation when the rest of the world has moved on is, in my opinion, extremely condescending and belittling – if that was what was meant.

I think the suggestion that new homes should be built only in towns and cities is a very worrying one. At the same time, I think it is important to preserve the quality of the countryside. Balancing two somewhat contradictory objectives is extremely tricky and is worthy of intelligent debate. Also, surely rural communities do require some workers in rural jobs – so where do the upcoming young people for those jobs live? I don't understand why this should be considers undeserving of a response.

On the contrary Absent I am never condescending or supercilious - I choose my words carefully, ever conscious that a report may wing it's way over to GNHQ otherwise.

Your view of the issues is very cut and dried Sel, but doesn't take account of the complexities or the need to exercise a small degree of choice when looking for suitable accommodation. Perhaps if small and rural villages hadn't been decimated by the policies of successive governments, we wouldn't be facing a 250,000 shortfall in school places this year, nor so much unemployment in rural areas.