I am not a Scot but miss the Hogmany show , instead we get that terrible hootenany.

Moira Anderson , Kenneth McKeller etc all were great performers with great songs.

JGD - you've lot me - I wasn't suggesting you should be able to read my mind.

Do you honestly think a family of four adults and two children in receipt of £100k a year (c. £5k a month) would be homeless if they lost their right to a council house? No wonder this country is in the state it's in...

Jon
I agree 100%.

If they are not to be evicted they should pay a commercial rate.

jon14

if such rules were implemented faced with eviction out of place they called home, grandparents (of my model family)may decide to kick out their children out to bring the income below the threshold of 100k. Therefore you are not having an empty home and you have another young family which would struggle by themselves to find a home. (Anyone over the age of 20 who lives with their parents would most likely like to live apart, but they can't especially if they have any children). As I understand most rents are higher than mortgages, and the age of significant numbers of first time buyers is now going to late thirties.

Increasing rents to 80% of local private local market, will certainly force many people to move to cheaper areas, one of them being Lewisham. This will bring some more money to the government purse, but it will also uproot and bring misery to many who have no option but to move out of the area.

Over 700,000 long term empty homes in private sector, and how many are there in the public sector. As I understand a lot of public sector homes have structural damages with other problems. As there is no money to make them in habitable state these remain empty. Developers are maximising profits by building less, and hold on to land to wait for higher prices.

This policy would not even begin to solve the problem of rising demand on homes compared to lesser supply. Compare the number (I guess fairly small as 1% earn over 100k although this is not the equivalent measure) of such possible homes created towards the number of empty homes in local housing and in the private sector. Therefore this is something designed to bring the attention away from the real problems. A great sound bite! While we bicker about 50 or 100k limit, we are missing that the loopholes for the rich paying their way are not being closed.

Brian,

commercial rates are starting in 2012.

jon14

This fallacy is not based on any published fact, never mind being axiomatic.

The conservative minister Grant Shapps, for it is he who kicked this off when he pronounced on "government figures" and that "some people" fell into this abusive category. The Daily Mail and Evening Standard later referred to figures around some 6000, but did not refer to the provenance or source of this figure.

As I have said earlier we cannot judge or condemn the individual tenants of these high earner homes as we know nothing about them or their circumstances.

Now it would appear they do not even exist in any substantial numbers.

For clarity I have also learned from experience not speculate in front of children about the existence of Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy or for that matter, the more recent arrival from American shores, the Easter Bunny.

Actually, it wasn't Grant Shapps - he has supported Westminster Council's proposal that their c.200 tenants earning over £100k should have their subsidy taken away, as they are well able to pay the going rate. Social housing should be there for those too poor to contemplate any alternative.

According to Westminster Council, these 200 households (amongst the top 2% highest earners in the country) are effectively receiving a state subsidy of between £14,000 and £76,000 per year (depending on the size of the home). I'm not judging them, just like they won't judge those who have lost their child benefit.

And yet the Labour Opposition opposes these measures that target 'middle earners'. Middle earners? How out of touch can you be?

The plan is not to evict them but charge them more as their means allow. Why would Labour oppose this policy? Because it doesn't effect enough people? (That's principle for you!). Or could it be champagne socialism?

presumably labour oppose this as it would be the thin end of the wedge.
They evict the families earning £100k, then later those earning £50K then £20K, etc

Like tuition fees in reverse.

I see no-one's been able to account for where the information on all these high-earning council tenants came from.

They oppose it because 100k is only a 'middle income'.

100k is not a middle income.

The average is about 20k . You seem to infer that 100k income is middle so as many earn more than this as less.
I do not believe it as Victor would say..

No Brian, that's what the Labour leader of Westminster Council said.

100k a year is in the top 2 per cent of earners.

They come from the Housing Needs Survey 2006 I think - quite old now - but Labour say this survey indicates there is nobody living in council subsidised housing earning £100k or over in Westminster. Tories say there are 200. Labour say all of the 200 are housing association tenents, which the council can do nothing about re rents.

I agree that you'd have to work out how much it would save before you start spending on administration. But I don't think the idea is wrong in principle.

I agree Jon 100k is a high earner.

So,e of your posts seem to agree with this others not.

I just found the article to which some posts seem to refer:

http://conservativehome.blogs.com/localg...ciety.html

So no one seems to speak about evictions any more like in the opening post on this thread. I can relax now.

But let’s just look at some of the figures. This proposal is expected to increase income in Wandsworth by 7m a year from 200 households. Depending on the size of the home a family would need to pay 14k to 76k EXTRA rent with average of 35k extra (7m /200 families). For this they would need average of 50k up to over 100k gross salary just to pay for the extra rent wanted by the council. All this is on assumption that multiple incomes come to over 100k and effective tax rate is 20% + 10% NI)

Now this 7m can be used to help those in real need.

Yeah right. Great policy! It will really solve the housing problem.

Apologies to everyone: sloppy research on my part - I only went back to early June 2011 when this thread started. jon14 is right, there is earlier information. Most of it put in the public domain by Westminster Council and Westminster’s Cabinet Member for Housing.

It would appear that some of the information came from a report titled City of Westminster, Housing Needs Assessment 2006 (published in 2007).

http://www3.westminster.gov.uk/docstores...Report.pdf

However Westminster's claim that over 2,200 Council tenant households earn over £50,000 a year has proved to be substantially inaccurate, after figures demanded by elected members were released by the Council’s Chief Executive.

The more accurate figures, from the 2006 Housing Needs Survey, show that only 406 Council tenant households earned more £50,000 a year, with 38% of these ‘wealthy’ households containing 5 wage earners (average wage of less than £10,000 a year), 38% of households containing 2 wage earners (average wage of £25,000 a year) and 23% of those households containing three wage earners (average wage of £17,000 a year).

Westminster Council arrived at this conflated “2,200? figure by adding in over 1,800 Housing Association households to the Council’s figures. The council has no authority or responsibility for these HA households.

The published figures also show that no Westminster Council tenant household earns more than £100,000 a year.

Housing Association tenants who earned an aggregated £100,000 a year, had 89% of those households containing four wage earners (average wage of £25,000 a year).

The Cabinet Member for Housing perpetrated the inaccuracy and stated that estimates deriving from the 2006 Housing Needs Survey, showed that the Council had more than 200 households with incomes greater than £100,000 per annum, and more than 2,000 households with incomes greater than £50,000 per annum.”

These numbers were not sustained by the published evidence and were only created by conflating and adding in estimates of numbers from other letting bodies.

Acknowledgment to several published sources.

Thanks jgdoherty for your excellent post.

It seems this whole policy is aimed solely at Bob Crow. Wrong again. He is housing association tenant and therefore this can't be aimed at him either.

As for me: over and out.

jgdoherty certainly puts some of this in perspective. But the article in the Telegraph that first kicked this off was referring to a Whitehall report rather than Westminster Council.

I don't see why on the face of it a household with four individuals earning £25k each needs a council house (or Housing Association property) rather than renting privately. I suspect that the vast majority of young people earning £25k per year live in private rented accommodation or part buy/part rent. I say young in contrast to most households with pensioners who will be earning less than £25k per person but they may already have paid off their mortgage. I see no reason for somebody with assets of £250k+ to automatically get a council house instead. The whole situation is complicated by individual circumstances and household size and income is just one part of the equation.

In a similar way I was appalled at the headline More than 90,000 live in 'inherited' council homes but when I think about it, I expect that most of these were one partner inheriting from their dead spouse, and I can't think of anything worse than turfing them out. But that does not mean there is not an issue (at a much lower rate) with children who have their own home inheriting a council house - that does not seem quite right.

Any change needs careful consideration, both to protect people already in subsidised housing, and to make sure the system is fair to all.