And homeless-on-the-street figures have started to rise again.
Of course, the Tories are determined to make rough sleeping illegal, after making sleeping in abandoned buildings (“squatting”) illegal…

The housing benefit changes are DESIGNED to cause mass homelessness.

They are trying to make everyone homeless and then make being homeless illegal?

Curse you tory trolls!

@2 – The poor. Your sarcasm is misplaced, given the fact they are actually doing this.

@ Leon

“The housing benefit changes are DESIGNED to cause mass homelessness.”

Nah, it’s callousness rather than malice. There’s no political advantage to making people homeless, and I honestly doubt that many people, given a straight choice between making people homeless and not making people homeless with no other factors involved, would pick the former.

The government as a whole probably doesn’t really care if it makes people homeless as long as they don’t end up garnering voter sympathy in the papers, but there’s no reason to believe they’re going out of their way to create a problem.

@4 – I disagree. There is a VERY clear aim here – they’re trying to shift the demographic make up of key areas. Homelessness is a side effect, but one they don’t /care/ about.

@ 5 Leon

“Homelessness is a side effect, but one they don’t /care/ about.”

Then you don’t disagree, because that’s what I’m saying!

No, because It’s still a result of malice.

@ 7

FINE… direct malice. The Tories aren’t making people homeless for the sake of making people homeless. It’s actually a negative factor because it can be used against them.

Rented housing in the Uk is so loosely regulated that landlords can vurtually evict tenants by saying: ‘I evict you…’ three times. ALL tenants are roughly two paypackets away from the streets, and two months notice is all that’s required. The private rented sector is the domain of amateur landlords who resent tenants despite them paying for their pension nest egg, and Letting Agents who invent new fees on a daily basis (I have heard of finance fee – a fee for collecting fees.)

We need tight regulation, and a culture change that encourages long term renting and treating the rented house as a home (ie decorating rights) rather than the owners fiefdom or fragile porcelain piggy bank.

Also in France, winter evictions are illegal a after an evictee froze on the streets. We need a similar law.

@8 – Honestly, I think you’re splitting hairs. Malice is malice…
And they’ve already taken steps, they’ve abolished the main count of the homeless.

@9 – And in the short term rent caps. No offence, but that’s more important.

The figure that never gets quoted is the number of homeless households who approach the Council. With pressures on limited housing stock, particularly in London and the South East there is increasing pressure on homelessness officers to gate-keep, and decline to rehouse households on the grounds that they are not vulnerable (if there are no children) or intentionally homeless (if there are). If we had those who approached but were refused added in, we would see that the trend is even higher. Not Richard Exell’s fault, as if authorities gather the information they keep darn quiet about it.

“The latest National Statistics on homelessness for England show that the number of homeless families and the number in temporary accommodation have started rising.”

I’m not surprised, not with house construction having fallen back to levels last seen in the 1920s apart from the war years. That’s one of the consequences of the bursting of the house-price bubble which experts were warning about back in 2002. GB made it worse by switching the Bank of England’s inflation target in February 2004 from the RPI – which included an element for housing costs – to the CPI index, which didn’t.

Blame, Yvette Cooper, the minister for housing from 2005 to 2008 and John Prescott, the cabinet minister. They screwed up in a big way but then Prescott had his hands full engaged on other matters, didn’t he?

@ 10 Leon

“Honestly, I think you’re splitting hairs. Malice is malice…”

It’s important on a tactical level, if nothing else. If you misrepresent your opponents’ interests, it’s hard to understand or predict them, and if you try to debate them you end up fighting straw men. It’s honestly in the left’s best interest to honestly interpret the right, and vice versa.

Take Islamic extremism. A lot of people, George Bush being an obvious example, take the party line that Islamic terrorists do what they do because “they’re evil”. It’s a judgment call that doesn’t tell you anything, and it also prevents you from actually addressing the issue. “They’re evil” is a lot less useful, from a purely pragmatic stance, than “they’re angry over the perceived marginalisation of Muslims, exacarbated by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan”.

This doesn’t require you to agree with your enemies, or even sympathise with them if you don’t feel like it. It just requires that interpret their actions in terms of human thought processes and cause and effect, rather than attributing them to nebulous concepts like “evil” and “malice”.

@ 9 Rentergirl

I think you’re generalising a bit there. I’ve known bad landlords and good ones. I’ve had landlords that plot to stitch you up and landlords who would forgo almost any contractual right to avoid having to kick people out of their homes. They’re human: some are decent, some aren’t.

That said, one of the things people forget is the power discrepency between landlords and tenants. If a tenant complains too often, the landlord can make their lives difficult in a million little ways, starting with just ignoring their phone calls at strategic moments (“sorry, I never got your voicemail saying you’d had no running water for a week”). And despite recent legal changes, possession in nine-tenths of the law: landlords own your home and hold your deposit. If the tenants of a home get evicted or feel forced to leave, that inevitably hits them a lot harder than the landlord. And so on.

@13 – That’s why you differentiate between Islam and Islamists. It can be safely assumed that the goals of the second are not friendly to the West, while Islam as a whole cannot be labelled in that way.

Also, bluntly, better to call them on their motivations than – as too many in politics do – treat it as polite game. It affects people.

@14 – To be fair, the deposit thing is pretty good, there are penalties for messing about on that. Of course, that still leaves them a LOT of leeway to be awful. Frankly, if they screw over people badly enough to be sent to jail, the tenants need to be awarded a long lease.

@ 15 Leon

“That’s why you differentiate between Islam and Islamists. It can be safely assumed that the goals of the second are not friendly to the West, while Islam as a whole cannot be labelled in that way.”

Of course, that should go without saying (and it’s a shame that it doesn’t). But it’s also why you differentiate between “my enemies, who are evil”, and “my enemies, who have specific motivations and honestly believe themselves to be in the right”.

Nobody casts themselves as the villain in their own story. It’s important to remember this. Terrorists, fascists, serial-killers… none of these people concoct their plans while thinking “Bwa ha ha ha!”

“Also, bluntly, better to call them on their motivations than – as too many in politics do – treat it as polite game. It affects people”

Agreed, that’s another reason we shouldn’t fudge our opponent’s incentives.

RE the deposit scheme: you’re right that it’s a big improvement, and it’s great that it was brought in, but most people won’t go to court for a few hundred pounds, and ultimately it’s the landlord holding the money.

@16 – There are three different schemes, actually.

The DPS is a custodial scheme, where it gets put away in escrow.
MyDeposite / TDS, which are insurance-backed, and what you’re describing.

I don’t have it at this place though, since I’m (legally) sub-letting. Which is silly. The previous two places I lived used the DPS. You don’t need to go to court, though, it comes with built-in arbitration and landlords constantly whine about how it finds in tenant’s favour (i.e. is probably good)

Britain has a population of some 60 million. We have just under 50,000 households (however they define that) in temporary accommodation and some 12,500 people who were actually homeless at some point between July and September of 2011.

Why is that not reported as a pretty amazing effort showing how minimal homeless people are as a problem in the UK?

@ (10) I agree on rent caps entirely – bring back rent officers who used to tell landlords where to get off when they raised rents exorbitantly. It used to be that profit was made on on accruing capital increase in the property, not ramping up rents. Some landlords being okay does not justify not regulating the terrors. It’s about amateur owners behaving wrongly/illegally/badly.

Last year, net migration into Britain was about 250,000. If that rate keeps up, it will mean additional housing equivalent to a city of the size of Birmingham every four years at a time when the construction of new houses is running at the lowest rate since the 1920s apart from the war years.

@9:

“We need tight regulation… ”

The tighter the regulation, the lower will be the supply of private rented housing.

Notice of two months is generous, and provides enough time for people to make other arrangements. Which is not to say that some aspects of renting and letting could not be improved.

@18 – Absolutely, Labour nearly entirely ended homelessness.

But it’s rising, and will shortly soar, as a DIRECT result of the Coalition’s policies. The policies YOU support. Charities are overwhelmed, especially since their funds have been slashed as well.

@21 – And that’s why, in the public interest, a hefty tax is needed on empty property and unused brownfield sites. There can be an exception for temporarily unoccupied main homes.

Nobody loses their main home. Some mortgages which were always a terrible idea get taken off the loan books. And the rental stock will, if anything, increase.

Your objections are answerable. Two months is pathetic, even America doesn’t do that to people, and uses rent caps. Socialist-fearing America. Especially today, when moving to an equivalent property is basically impossible for lower-income working households who rely on HB.

@22:

“Charities are overwhelmed, especially since their funds have been slashed as well.”

I work for a housing charity, and I can assure you that is utter hogwash.

@ 23:

“Two months is pathetic, even America doesn’t do that to people,”

Wrong. Look on the web, and you’ll see notice periods in the US are typically one or two months.

@24 – Funny, that’s contradicting EVERYTHING else coming out the sector.

And what’s freely agreed in contracts in America is one thing, there is NO legal requirement for it as there is here, where it doesn’t matter how long your contract is.

@ 26:

“Funny, that’s contradicting EVERYTHING else coming out the sector.”

If you find that surprising, you are not very sceptical. I’m afraid it’s in the sector’s interests to cry wolf – particularly when the organisations in question are often ‘fake’ charities largely or wholly funded by government.

“And what’s freely agreed in contracts in America is one thing, there is NO legal requirement for it as there is here, where it doesn’t matter how long your contract is.”

So you were wrong to claim “Two months is pathetic, even America doesn’t do that to people”. And you are wrong to suggest that two months is an absolute legal requirement here. Rather it is the legal minimum for an assured shorthold tenancy; but tenants and landlords can in “freely agreed” contracts state longer if they so wish.

Oh yes, of course, it’s in the interest of charities which have lost much of their income and are demonstrably facing a million or more people forced to leave their rented properties over the next half-decade are “crying wolf”.

…

I don’t believe you work for one.

“And you are wrong to suggest that two months is an absolute legal requirement here.”

98%+ of new private residential tenancies are AST’s or sublets.

With Assured Shorthold Tenancies, where a section 21 notice creates a 2 month notice period. And sublets can be evicted in at MOST one billing cycle, and usually a week.

So while your claim is technically true, it’s also a pile of nonsense.

“98%+ of new private residential tenancies are AST’s or sublets.”

That may be (though I suspect you just made up the statistic), but you can amend the notice period in an assured shorthold or an assured tenancy agreement to make it longer. If prospective tenants don’t ask, they certainly won’t get.

And, according to the laws of logic, a claim cannot be both “technically true” and a “pile of nonsense”. You are contradicting youself.

Sorry, above should read: “…or an assured periodic tenancy agreement …”