New LHA Laws Favour Violent Criminals

Spot on Teena, an accurate analysis.

I think I read somewhere that it costs £70,000 to keep someone in nick for a year, And enhanced housing benefit rate is a lot cheaper than that, not to mention the other knock on effects to society as a whole and the possible costs therein.

And as you say there are already a variety of subsidies. The issue of whether or not they are fair, just or reasonable is a seperate issue from the practicalities of dealing with these problems.

A person could take the view that all offenders should be locked up, but then what? We need more prisons, we need more staff to work in them and it all costs a fortune.

I do understand the more emotive responses. I too resent sitting an interiew room with my own troubles helping people out all day long who do little to help themselves and earn on benefits what I have to slave for all week. I am even tempted sometimes when passing a beggar to shout "Get a job", especially if it is 3 days from pay day haha But there you go.

The question of what to do with offenders is one that occupies every country in the world. The French created the Foreign Legion back in the 1830s....nice idea, take society's psychos, train them up and then give them a gun!!!!! and Hitler drove all criminals out of business in 1930s Germany by either killing them all or putting a brown shirt on them and badge.

Drastic solutions can seem appealing but they dont really stand up to much close scrutiny

Oh that made me laugh out loud - you having a little hissy fit on the high street at some oblivious soul in a cardboard box! 🙂

The emotive responses are human nature. What is tragic is that successive governments respond to just those emotional outbursts which means the situation cannot improve. With a 3 - 5 year term no government is interested in a solution which takes a generation to have impact. And no quick fix is going to have lasting benefits to society as a whole.

After reading your reply I went out to lunch thinking about emotive repsonses being human nature and I succumbed. A woman ambled up to me and asked for 20p to which I responded "Do I look like a bloody cash point?".

Yous ee, whereas you lot just go about your lives in a normal way and have a flsuh of festive feeling once a year and give money to beggars, I have to be caring and sympathetic 365 days a year so I can be forgiven the festive lapse that left me with a warm glow and a self satsified smile.
Come next week I'll probably be arguing with her landlord to keep her in the property because hse ended up being 20p short of the rent

She probably just needed the right change for the parking meter!!! 🙂  

Trust me....this woman did NOT own a car

Thanks to a very kind person on the Money Saving Expert forum I now have some extra data.

"In the whole country 924 individuals were subject to MAPPA level 3 in the year
2008-2009.
On 31 March 2009, there were 32,336 sex offenders, 11,527
violentoffenders and 898 other dangerous offenders subject to
MAPPA.How many of those are aged between 25 and 35 I'm not sure.
Probably just a handful but I'll keep looking for you. It is
estimated that 2000 ex-offenders will benefit from this policy.
Social housing is different. An applicant to social housing can be
granted a self contained 1 bedroom property at 18 and the full rent will be
eligible for housing benefit. The changes only apply to private rentals. Would
you rent your property to rapists, peadophiles, arsonists and murderers?
Probably not.Disabled war hero's on higher rate mobility can claim for a
self contained property."

How about this one Ben. Layabout sitting on the steps on a multi story car park, on a dirty old sleeping bag, next to the stereotypical scabby dog.  He asks a passing 6 year old girl  "can you spare some change please, I'm homeless and hungry". Kid responds "eat your dog!". Seriously, I witnessed this first hand.

I have just got home from a short training update on the new HB SRR rates (they are now called Shared Accommodation Rates - SAR), if you wnat a scanned copy of the notes I'll send them over Mark

Those figures do look worrying nationaly but when spread across the 332 local authorities it becomes more manageable. Our area, which must be one of the most densely concentrated inner city areas,  has around 40,000 people on housing benefit but only 40 MAPPA cases, which is tiny really.

Weirdly, and our trainer was equally mystifed by government logic on this, these SAR exemptions for schedule 1 offenders only relates to people between 25 and 35. An ex offender who is a danger to the community but is only 19 wont be exempt and so will have to live in shared accommmodation. This shows you that the new plans are simply about reducing budgets not actually addressing a problem.

Of more immediate concern than the emotive cases of peadophiles, and I have to confess I didnt think of this, will be the couple's between the ages of 25 and 35, living on a joint tenancy of a 1 bed flat who split up - the remaining partner finding their HB reduced to the SAR, which is going to kick up rent arrears for the landlord while the hapless remaining tenant tries to get to grips with what just happened.

The MAPPA stuff is a tiny proportion but these relatinship breakdown cases are going to be causing major problems all around.

In a word, outrageous!

Of course its not fair that someone just out of prison should be
entitled to a self-contained flat at a cost to the taxpayer. If they went inside for a violent crime then they should not be 'dumped' into the private sector and left to their own devices, which has happened a number of times on my (private) block.

These are people that need far more support than the average (or even brilliant) landlord can or is prepared to give and I have personally ended up emotionally bruised by having to deal with such people.

This is what social services are for!

Sharon, social services dont have housing stock. The council as whole doesnt have housing stock anymore because of a little thing called the 'Right to buy', feeding the UKs obssession with homeownership, still being championed by Camo and his little gang of 6th form prefects in thrall to his city chums.

A violent offender gets released from prison, they cant get a mortgage so where are they going to live? If they are on the street we dont know where these people are at and cant police them. I have said this again and again on 2 different threads that are running concurrently on P118. The HB exemptions arent a reward for bad behaviour, even though the offenders may look at it that way, they are a tool that allows monitoring authorities to keep tabs on people who may otherwise be a danger to the community.

If there is no social housing available to put them in and they cant get mortgages and PRS landlords, who would be the third force in this arent interested, and I dont blame them for a minute, what do we do with these people? Pretend they dont exist? pretend that they are a problem that will go away if we dont think about them?

It is the classic case of the lesser of 2 evils. We either kill them, and I doint believe that even Jeremy Clarkson would advocate that,  or accept the fact that we have to figure out the most effective way to manage the problem.

I agree that these kinds of people should be in the province of the social housing world. we have the skills, the remit and the expertise for dealing with these tenants, but the right to buy has denuded social housing stock, and affordable rents are pricing them out of the market. What are we supposed to do?

You can champion homeownership and the right to buy but in doing so you remove a resource that was previously available to use to house people that might otherwise be a danger to the community. People ridicule social housing. Mark himself (sorry mate) has referred to them on this thread as namby pamby doo-gooders but we are the people who would normally take these  phenomanaly difficult characters on. we woulndt need PRS landlords if our stock was left alone.

Rant over......and relax haha