Social Housing

You can buy a 2 bedroom in Newcastle for under £30k. Mind you they are in Scotswood!

If someone wants to buy privately it is surely because they do not want to live in social or privately rented accommodation. Therefore new developers should NOT be forced to include a few rental low cost properties within any new development on a private estate. In general, there is no incentive for people who rent to look after their properties as well as private owners.

Of course people still aspire to buy their own property. By paying off my mortgage 20 years ago I have lived 'rent free' for all that time. If you rent your home that will never happen. I could also sell and move anywhere I wanted to or release money from the property to subsidise my lifestyle. In general, I can choose to do whatever I like to my home within reason ( even have a red door!). Yes there are maintenance costs but in general it's a win win situation and, hopefully, I can leave it as an asset when I die to my children ( tax free, if the Tories raise inheritance tax like they promised at both the last 2 elections. If you rent you are just feathering someone else's nest and probably paying in rent the same as you would in mortgage payments.

I agree with you Quiz and if you have bought in a very expensive area/city you will be able to buy something significant in a much nicer place. I think a lot of the newly retired must have had their pensions in their property as a lot seem to downsize when they retire.

MOnica What is more the social housing has to be evenly distributed among the market housing, which I think is a very good thing because it means that all developments contain a mix of housing types from terrace houses and flats to large detached houses. I live in a village and this mix of small and large houses, social and privately owned is the norm and it is good to see it continued in the 300+ new houses being built or completed in the last year. Totally agree, no one wants council estates any more, segregating those who cannot afford to buy from those who can. We are fortunate to live in an area where most houses are different from their neighbours and we have a great mix of flats, semis and detached. One of the reasons we chose to move here from a 'posh ghetto'

www.politics.co.uk/blogs/2016/01/28/growing-homeless-crisis-politicians-don-t-talk-about

Where do you think these should be the housed if not in social housing?
If councils have been forbidden from building more council houses, where do the homeless live?

"Town hall leaders have criticised the government’s drive to boost homeownership, warning that it would lead to the loss of 80,000 council houses in the next four years and add more than £200m a year to the housing benefit bill.

In a cross-party attack on David Cameron’s proposed housing and planning bill, Lord Porter, the leader of Conservative councillors across the country, said the planned sell-off of council houses would drive people into the more expensive private rented sector and reduce their chances of saving enough to put down a deposit on their own home, which for the average first-time buyer is now 116% of their annual income, according to new research by Savills.

The Local Government Association (LGA), which Porter also chairs, forecast that on top of the 66,000 council houses expected to be sold to tenants by 2020, town halls would also be forced to sell at least 22,000 of their highest value council homes to fund the sale of housing association homes to tenants. A £2.2bn cut to council housing budgets would risk making building replacements “all but impossible”, the LGA said."

There goes social housing, unless it is saved by the Lords.

speye.wordpress.com/2016/01/30/lha-maxima-40-million-hb-cut-per-year-to-ymca/

A long list here of housing benefit cuts. Just one company, the YMCA, will lose more than the total of the discretionary payments given to local authorities.
The government will give £35 million to local authorities to hand out to charities hit by the cuts; YMCA will lose £40 million.
This is what MPs voted for last week.

Social housing is basically council housing and housing association properties.

Affordable housing is currently 80% of the market value or rental value of a property.

www.thecanary.co/2016/01/29/shameful-images-reveal-camerons-damaging-housing-bill-must-stopped/

This is appalling. It makes me feel ashamed.

www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2016/02/09/boris-johnson-and-the-social-cleansing-of-london-s-estates

www.welfareweekly.com/tenant-evictions-reach-highest-level-record/

Not many from social housing but a lot from private rentals.

www.welfareweekly.com/right-buy-puts-40-ex-council-homes-private-rental-mps-report/

This is what right to buy does to council houses.

We have 80 flats being built near where we live that are classed as social housing. That does not worry me, what does worry me is that all the people who live in these flats will be entitled to treatment by the Health Centre in our area, which is already bursting at the seams!

All very well building housing and more housing, but where are the schools, health centres, hospitals, community centres etc? We are also getting our bus services cut - again! Near the very places where all this housing is being built. The area is a mixture between very rural and urban.

How do you know they do not already live in the area using the health centre?

Almost 700 houses are to be built on farm fields behind the houses across the road from me. My house is in the last street of the town where I live and when you get to the end of the street, it's green belt farm land. 700 houses triggers least one, but probably two new primary school, probably a new secondary school, a GP practice and shops. The road is a country lane with a footpath on one side. This road will be upgraded so public transport can access the area. Basically a new village is planned.

As the land is green belt, it will be reclassified to enable the development to go ahead and somewhere else will then be reclassified as green belt to meet the quota. The land to be built on was offered to the local council by the owner, who built a fish farm on the part of the farm he wants to keep. All the farm buildings have been demolished and a new house built in their place.

The farm is divided into two parts by the country lane and the owner wants to keep the land on one side of the road. This land borders the M6 and part of the deal is it will be reclassified from green belt to protected land (I forget the technical name) because it borders the motorway, meaning the land he keeps will never be considered for compulsory purchase for any further development of the area.

We consider ourselves lucky to have lived in our house for 30 years without some development springing up around us, but the sheer scale of the plan was a shock. There's a protest group, but I think it's a waste of time and we've just accepted the situation. A lot of thought has gone into this plan and you're not telling me deals were not done behind closed doors.

Lots of deals are done in the open. The developers will be paying for a school or the health centre or perhaps both. It's called planning gain.

I'd be surprised if our village had many more than 700 houses. I think I would be shocked, too. There were plans, and still are, for an estate on the fields behind my house. I think we are fortunate that the village floods, so building another 150 houses would add to that.
My grandson decided he wanted to research the river near here, and we have found that twenty burns feed into the river, running down from the Durham Dales. The high school was actually built over one of them, running downhill into the car park! No wonder it floods.

Maybe that's what you need, Wilma!
Actually, the developer has put an objection into the government, even though it's been turned down three times.
There is actually planning in for about 350 houses on four sites for the village. The schools are full, there are no jobs and it's a dormitory village for Durham. Like you, the bus services have been reduced recently.
If the other sites are built on it would be better, as our lane is just that. Sounds very much like yours, in fact, and it cannot be widened except onto the site.

We live in hope.

There's bigger developments than ours planned. The Borough Plan should have been signed off in 2009, but the first draft wasn't published until 2013 and there's been merry hell since then. Over 10000 houses need to be built by 2031 and we're just part of those 10000.

Interestingly there's no mention of social housing, which is why I posted about it. We live in a former mining area, so it's not an area of high value properties. I expected details of what percentage of the houses planned would be social housing, but there's nothing. There's to be further consultation this year, so we'll take part in that. Luckily flooding is not an issue where we live, but it is else where in the borough and I dread to think what will happen about those areas.

I wish I understood why we need 10000+ houses. Nobody has explained how this figure was reached and I've read every document I could find online about it.

We get Private Eye and keep expecting to read something about the Borough Plan in it!

In my area the the long term plan of the council is to build about 12,000 new houses of shich 4,000 will be near my home - at the moment I live on the edge of the town but soon I will be inside it. House Prices here (west midlands) are more affordable, you can buy a 3 bed house for £120, 000 or less, but there is not enough employment in the area for 4,000 more people.
I don't know where all these people are that are going to buy them.

Under the government help to buy scheme, the government provides a proportion of the mortgage to top up what the building society offers. So If the couple get into financial difficulties and default on the payments, the taxpayer kindly steps in to cover the loss.

I live in outer London and in the last few months we've noticed something happening , our council are taking out of use blocks of garages that were built near a small estate a mix of houses and low rise flats also among the houses (many of which are now bought) there were small one bed bungalows, one at the end of each block they have also been emptied and now along with the garages (which got a lot of cars off the narrow streets) have been demolished and in the last week they have started laying the foundations for blocks of flats on the footprint of the garages and bungalows. Goodness knows where the residents will park as all the parking and garaging space is gone.
I know its going to mean lots of families will come off the lists but now instead of OAP bungalows with gardens these families will be housed in rabbit boxes with no parking or green space around them. Madness.

starbird that's my thinking which is why I would like to understand how the figures are reached i.e. What is the formula used?

tanith That's been happening where I live for a few years. Behind our house there used to be a small piece of land where cars turned in a cul-de-sac. Now two houses have been built - two tiny semis with a patch of grass at the back and no front garden. Tidy looking though.

I also don't understand why we're being told that more houses can be built on the same piece of land high rise blocks now occupy. We have high rise flats in the city next to our town and they have between 16 and 24 floors. That's a lot of flats.

Tanith , have you seen the plans? It would be strange for the LA to build flats with no parking. Most LAs stipulate adequate parking to accompany all planning applications.

x

Hi Durhamjen, I understand your question, as far as I am led to believe, the building of the eighty flats is in answer to a housing shortage here in our county.
I do not think the people who will be housed here are already in the area, as we have a seven year wait on our Council/Social Housing List.

I may be wrong, but there has been complaints about housing in our area for many a year,.

Wilmaknickersfit there are various schemes. Eg if buying a new house, you can borrow up to 20% from the government (40% in London) and 75% as a mortgage so you need only 5% deposit. The govt loan counts as an equity loan which means part ownership, and you do not have to repay the capital to start with, also, you do not pay any interest on the govt loan for the first five years, but instead, throughout the life of the loan you pay a management fee of £1 a month. . After 5 years, you also pay a fee equal to 1.75% on the govt loan which increases gradually every year after that (but only by a small amount) - so on a loan of £20,000 after 5 years you pay an annual amount of £350 (plus management fee of £12). The loan becomes repayable in full after 25 years or if the house is sold, but because it is an equity loan, you do not repay the original amount, but 20% of the current value of the property.

starbird thank you for all the information, but what I meant was how do they work out how many houses need to be built? For example, the actual number of houses planned for the land by me is 676. The total number for the borough is 10040. These numbers are very precise and I would love to know how they are calculated.

Incidentally, I found out today that of the 10040 houses planned, 7900 will be built on green belt land. It makes me wonder what the point of green belt land at all?

Of course you can't turn back the clock, but surely where it all went wrong was when rents increased so dramatically that they more or less equated with mortgage repayments. Once upon a time – and not all that long ago – it cost much less to rent than to buy. That is not usually the case nowadays.