Universal Credit The Elephant in the Room

You are right Ben we all need to get up to speed and procative. Birmingham CC have been calling tenants and offering to talk to their landlords where their LHA has been reduced.  Over 500 landlords have agreed to keep the tenants on the lower rate.  I LOVE this.  Landlords are not demons and if we can afford a drop in the rent we all know that its better to keep a good tenant on less rent than to evict and go fishing for another tenant who may not be so good.

Communication is key and everyone needs to play their part. No time for moaning time for action

Do you know what Mary I cannot answer all your questions.
All I do for my RGI cover is to give the phone no of the prospective tenant to the RGI company.
They then contact them.
If it is as simple case as mine have been todate, then I receive a response from the RGI company.
It has taken them approximately 45 mins to come back with Ans YES.
Now I have never made a claim so that would be the proof of the pudding!?
It really has been as simple as that.
Now I know I have been naughty; but I haven't even checked on LRS or tenantid as I have yet to upload at least 6 tenants.
So in conjunction with seeing normal stuff like ID  and employers stuff this is all I have done.
Cost £89.00 for 1 years cover for up to £50000 including legal costs.
There are of course many RGI companies out there or rather companies that white label the same product.
I think it would be beneficial if Mark could come up with a table of RGI providers along with their offers, a bit like he did with the deposit schemes.
There are not that many RGI providers.
Such a table would assist LL to source appropriate RGI.
If  a link was provided from this site to the respective RGI site there would presumably a financial incentive for Mark and this site.
I think the point with RGI is that it is only of use if you could not self insure against the time it takes to evict a tenant without rent coming in.
Defacto this will tend to be the smaller LL; like me.
The big boys will determine it is not worth their while as they will carry out DD on the tenants which in most cases will be such that vey rarely will they have to dig into their own resouces.
That is not the case with me, I have NO resources! and therefore have little choice than to have RGI.
For me it is a simple choice of £89.00 per year or possibly no property and being bankrupted.
I have just lost over £12000 to a criminal tenant because I DID NOT have such a RGI policy in place DOH!!
Never again will I believe anything a tenant tells me!
How I managed to retain the property I will never know, or rather I do; a church mouse compared to me for the past 12 months was living like a king!!

Ben socialist logic!?,  couldn't a replacement desription for that title be mutualism.
You know where people got together to form an institution where they would save money in it .
Then at some point the institution would lend that money to it's members to purchase property.
Do you think there could ever be such a model!!!?
As for a credit union the concept of saving money with an institution that doesn't seek to profit massively out of it's customers but seeks to facilitate finance for a community and it's projects surely is mutualism in the extreme.
Such a model of course means that local people control their own resources rather than a bank seeking  to make massive margin on products which are actually very simple to administer and effective for people to manage their resources without being ripped off by excessive and unjustified charges.
To me that is a mutualist ideal and certainly not socialist.
Most people don't need the services of a bank.
A simple credit union would be a far more cost effective way for them to manage their finances.
Course the big banks wouldn't like an expansion of the credit union model as it would impact severely on their business.
I still think the Post Office is the ideal institution to operate as a credit union or as an outlet where any member of any credit union may operate their account at.
Chances of this happening
ZERO

And you can see by this happening that the govt is getting it's way in reducing LHA payments without affecting homelessness.
So essentially the govt policy of reducing LHA is having the desired effect they said it would!
So annoyingly the govt have been proven to be correct in stating that LL would not evict tenants if the LHA reduced.
So a govt policy that is actually working as they intended; a 1st maybe!!?

Mutualism? Yeah I can deal with that. When you are a socialist you have these massive debates, sometimes thorugh what is called a 'Lock-in', where the doors are literally locked while you thrash out the dialectic and decide on the 'Objective truth' of it all.

I could envisage many a lock in to discuss the difference between mutualism and socialism, or anarcho syndicalism for that matter and then I would have to reach for the valium.

For my part I have no problem with your analysis. Thats why the far left never got anywhere, because it would contstantly fragment into different groups who disagreed with each other over finer points like that. Remember the "people's popular front of Judea v. the popular people's front" in Monty Python's Life of Brian? Thats it to a T.

And thats why I am not a socialist these days. I do still believe in social justice and fairness and people power but I no longer believe that socialism is the only way to achieve it. I met some god awful human beings who were socialists and some decent caring people who were Tories.

Thats what i find weird about a lot of the government's plans, Localism, UC, devolving power to communities. They sound very socialist/mutualist to me/ The lines are blurring.

At heart it also reminds me of the philanthropic Liberalism of John Stuart Mill in the 1800s, the kind of liberalism that gave rise to housing associations.

Funnily enough I was listening to a woman being interviewed on Radio 4 the other day about her new book, which looks at the history of welfare benefits and apparently back in the early 1800s there was social welfare but it was run by small communities out of contributions collected in that same community, which may have a been a small town or a cluster of villages anbd used for the disabled and windows etc.

Less chance of a person on disablilty living allowance being caught out playing football if the people who are contributing to the fund are playing left back and more chance of a local employer saying to unemployed Peter, 'I've got a job you can have Peter'.

I will be an exquisite irony if it takes the Tories to usher in the ideal socliast state haha

Good morning Paul

I have started a new thread here http://www.property118.com/?p=26857

I understand your request, watch this space!

You will soon have something much more useful that a table of suppliers.

Good luck with your claim.

Been reading this thread to see if it will tell me what will happen when one of my tennants whose HB is paid direct to me goes onto UC. I think it will go back to her and we will go through the mess of her getting behind with payments again.

Am I right?

By the way the date on this forum is 24 hours ahead of itself. 🙂

re date: its corrected itself now. Stand down Matt Smith