Universal Credit The Elephant in the Room

It will not be a Property118 product Mary, we made a pledge not to use this site to sell any of our own products. I have held off accepting adverts from all the existing suppliers as I don't believe in them myself. I am, however, aware of a product which is to be launched imminently which will be a godsend to any landlord who is reliant on rental income and just wants to wash their hands of payment problems and evictions.

I hear what you are saying and I feel a blog coming on. WAtch this space 🙂

What are you talking about woman???? That was my serious note! LOL. I genuinely do think we are in a changing landscape. At the moment we only have the private or PRS models. in a panic public sector are looking to the PRS to plug the gap but that is only part of the picture.

Seperate and creative finance initiatives are the way forward. Annoyingly my job level doesnt allow me any influence there, and to be honest, with my head for figures the whole country would be bankrupt if i had any real sway.  but I think the more proactive public sector orgnaisations are really getting on the case just now.

If you look at websites like Inside Housing, 24 dash and Housing Excellence you can see the ideas floating around and in one way or another it is all about public/private partnerships.

Is UC really the way forward? I understand the focus but I'm not convinced of the practice of it. In a way it is a new idea with an old school motivator. The traditional old 'Pull yourslef up by your onw bootstraps' approach but with nothing in place to facilitate that actually happening in a c ulture not prepared for it.

I think I've written about this before, sorry if I have, but for a while, obviously when someone had forgotten to take their medication, I was made the Head of Homelessness for West Wiltshire Disctrict Council. As ever the policy and strategy side interested me less than the people at the bottom end of it and I started to go into schools, talking to teenagers about what they thought would happen if they ever found themselves homeless. The responses were as depressing as they were worrying in their naivete.

UC will work. I really believe it will but it needs a completely different mindset for it to do so and it starts down there, in the 6th form colleges and with teacher and parent encouragement. Otherwise we are just setting ourselves up for even more debt and homelessness

Sorry to double post but writing the above firms up my conviction that although we can change finance structure and legislations what is really needed is a complete change in the mindset of how people go about occupying properties, that includes PRS landlords, tenants social landlords, property investors and enforcement officers.

We've had a simple 2 tier model so far, public or private? Its no longer working

I have also written about this before Ben and how Homestamp are working on a module for the national curriculum to educate 14-16 year olds about their future housing options and the responsiblities that go with renting
http://www.property118.com/index.php/maslows-theory-applied-to-landlords-and-tenants/18124/

You and I have spent a lot of our careers educating people and we need to up our game - there is no point in waiting for Government or anyone else to do this. I am adding new seminars to my list all the time and recently I have talked to landlords about how we can change our working practices to control our incomes and protect our investments because if the PRS does not thrive the homelessness situation will go off the dial.

So we need to focus on the realities as we know them and help all parties to understand the system and how to make it work for them. This is why I blog on this site.

Starting with

If you use/supply a service it must be paid for. 
How best can you make that happen.

What is not working is that demand is greater than supply and this is tending to drive up prices and reduce standards as always happens in that situation.

William most landlords and agents are also struggling with this and that is mainly because we don't really know the detail yet.  As you will see from this and other threads there is a lot of work going on in the background to find ways to make the new system work and we will find those solutions just give us a little time

Someone on Twitter has read this article and thought that we were talling about tenants who rent only from local authorities.  To be clear Universal Credit is going to replace LHA which replaced HB in 2007 and will apply to all tenants (we are told) regardless of who their landlord is.

HB is the calculation method that applies to both social and PRS tenants  but the method of payment for PRS is LHA, so in reality PRS tenants are still considered HB tenants to people in the council. we use the term LHA in slightly different context, to mean the way it is paid and which sector it applies to.
 
UC is going to be the catch all umbrella for lumping in HB, LHA and a variety of other DWP benefits in together, putting everyone on a level. A single monthly payment but which is calculated in a variety of different ways to arrive at the final sum. In that sense, in terms of the way things are qualified, there will still be a complex array of calcuations behind it. So it wont simply be Unemployed = UC, there wil still be disability payments and tax credits being applied.

.....and the total amount of the UC payment will be capped and unlikely to total the same amount as those benefits added together  do now.

So one purse containing less to cover everything.

And there's the rub Mary. However it is calculated or paid it means less money than people are getting now.

I read an interesting article this week somewhere about some good work being done by councils spending money getting in with homeless people to support them before they turn up at the homelessness office to make an application. More money spent on pre-support means a lot less spent doing blue-light emergency work. Units like mine dont get to be proactive because we are always fire-fighting.

I think there will have to be something similar put in place before UC comes in if we are to avert a disaster. I think advice workers, which my job bleeds over into, will need to add another string to their bow and we need to start thinking of this now