Bedroom Tax affecting private landlords?!!!

Suggest your tenant takes a lodger temporarily to help with the rent. You can provide a simple lodgers agreement for them to ensure the lodger has no rights to stay long term.

I think it is perfectly correct that people in receipt of housing benefits should not be paid for empty rooms they could so easily be renting out (and sometimes are doing without telling anyone, pocketing both the benefit and the rent).

There is also a maximum rent and when one of my tenants was made unemployed he was only given the specified rent for the location he lives in and that was without a spare room. I had the choice of either temporarily reducing my rent or letting him fall behind and evicting. He's a good, long term tenant so we met and agreed a plan of reduction until he found a new job with a structured repayment over the following 6 months once working.

I accept and agree with the principle that these controls are to stop people living in larger, high cost accommodation at yours and my expense when a a smaller property or even bed-sit might be perfectly acceptable, particularly whilst they are unemployed.

There are plenty of stories of so-called successful landlords going bust and ending up living in a single room & if I couldn't let my properties I would have to reduce my own standard of living - why not everyone else??

R

Private landlords are not suffering because of "bedroom tax" that is only about social housing. We are suffering from benefit caps and reductions in allowances for non-dependant relative. Under LHA rules tenants are only paid for the number of rooms that they are deemed to need not the number of rooms in the property and some tenants have faced reductions where they children are now classed as adults and should be claiming in their own right and contribution from their benefits towards to rent. Some of these children have in fact left the family home and therefore the LHA payment is reduced anyway.

Many landlords did not realise that we have had a form of "bedroom tax" since LHA was introduced. The benefit caps are slowly being introduced and will cover the whole country eventually and this will reduce the amount they many tenants are given to help with their rent.

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Thank you. This makes it all very clear. I agree in principle with the government's attempts to make the benefit system more sensible .Like everyone else I am much less happy when it affects me adversely!

Michael.

In this area [Wirral] HB for homes in the PRS is/was paid according to the requirements of the tenant eg £375/month for 1 bedroom [if over 35], £450 for 2 bedrooms, £525 for 3 bedrooms and so on. There was an anomaly between PRS and Social Housing because Social Housing tenants were paid HB according to whatever the rent on their property was at the time the tenancy began. A family of 1 or 2 parents and a male teenager and a female teenager would have rented a 3 bedroom house at whatever the rent was, say £500/mth. Typically a few years down the line one of the teenagers moved out but the HB claimant continued to receive the rent for the property, eg £500. Now that the HB is being reassessed so that Social HB and PRS HB are at the same rate this family is only entitled to HB for 2 bedrooms and £450 will be paid to them. They now have the choice of finding the extra £50/month themselves or moving to a 2 bedroom property for £450/month. This is being described as a ‘tax’ on the 3rd bedroom but really it’s a reduction in HB, not a tax as such. Social Housing tenants entitled to 2 bedrooms in a 2 bedroom house with a rent of £475 will now only receive the LHA rate of £450, which is what PRS tenants were only ever entitled to and face the same decision. The percentage reduction varies according to the difference between the entitlement and the actual rent.

It sounds as though your tenant’s family circumstances have changed since the original HB entitlement was assessed.

I have just posted this report by HB expert Bill Irvine, which may shed some further light on the points raised by Mary:

http://www.propertytribes.com/benefits-cap-hits-2400-t-8761.html

Bill believes that the benefits caps are only just starting to bite!

Mary, private landlords and private tenants have been suffering because of what is now inaccurately called "bedroom tax" for many years and even decades. That is, they have had limits placed on HB / rent rebate because of spare bedrooms. Thus your comment that private landlords do not suffer from "bedroom tax" (ie reduction or limits in benefits because of spare rooms) is inaccurate. One dreads to think of other inaccuracies in your book.

Michael Bond, the reductions for private tenants has been going on for decades and that is what you see happening as described in your comment just above.

Reply to the comment left by "r01 " at "14/08/2013 - 11:14":

ro1: where there is no apparent contract, and so long as the landlord is resident; the tenant is not a tenant and has no right to stay for any period of time. Where there is a discernible contract (written or not) then it's terms must be adhered to by both parties. If the contract does not cover the matter of length of stay, then the lodger has no right to stay for any length of time. Indeed, the resident landlord has only to act reasonably when requiring a lodger to leave. This can be used for example to get rid of a violent lodger at five minutes notice instead of having to go through months of court hearings with tenants.

i have a single man in a 2 bed house, h/b paid direct to me, he has to top this up, he has a lodger, anything he makes in excess of the top up is his, works well, live and let live.

Reply to the comment left by "Jay Jay" at "14/08/2013 - 16:37":

Yes, but a written licence making it quite clear they are simply a lodger with no right to stay could well overcome the tenant inviting a "tasty" lodger, falling in love, falling out of love, walking out and leaving a lodger thinking they have some sort of entitlement to stay rent free.

I'd prefer to have something clearly laying out the rights or lack of them the lodger has.

R