UK Housing Benefit System Offers Fantastic Opportunities
During the last couple of years a lot of intriguing housing benefit cases have surfaced and this weekend another amazing story was brought to us by The Daily Mail:
10.07.2010 Somali asylum seeker family given £2m house
We find this story appalling. While we are for diminishing the gap between the rich and poor, there must be something seriously wrong with the system when at the same time there are so many people living on the actual street. The Combined Homeless and Information Network figures show that the number of homeless people in London is currently around 4,000.
Here’s a few more unbelievable stories from the past year:
15.02.2010 Single mother-of-six finds £2m mansion on the net… and then gets YOU to pay £7,000 a month rent
15.01.2010 Millionaires’ Row 2009: How hundreds of families get luxury homes on benefits far beyond the means of most working people
02.12.2009 Afghan family STILL in seven-bed £1.2m house taxpayer has been funding for a year
30.11.2009 Taxpayers pay £1,600-a-week for family of ex-asylum seekers to live in luxury five-storey home
What the Budget plans for housing benefit
* Limits of £250 for a one-bed property and £400 for four or more bedrooms.
* Local housing allowance rates set using the bottom 30 per cent of rents rather than the median from October 2011. It will be linked to the consumer price index, rather than the retail price index. There are 1 million LHA claimants in the UK
* Cutting housing benefit by 10 per cent for claimants on jobseekers allowance for more than a year.
Source: Inside Housing
Meanwhile Inside Housing has launched a campaign to persuade the government to drop plans for housing benefit reform that could force thousands of people out of their homes. What’s the Benefit? follows an outcry from tenants and landlords (social and private) about the plans announced in the recent emergency Budget to save £4 billion by 2015 through measures including cutting and capping the local housing allowance paid to just over 1 million private tenants in the UK.
