So, Grenfell tenants will be rehoused in Kensington. In flats, social housing flats, coming from the affordable homes part of a development already near completion. No need for a suspension of civil liberties therefore.
Oh, and the financing part of it is coming from the City Corporation. You know, those appalling types who give away the entirety of their rates income and live purely off the land value tax they gain as the owners of much of the freehold of The City.
Just about everything he didn’t want, isn’t it?
“the financing part of it is coming from the City Corporation”: candidly, this is neo-feudalism.
Somehow I get the feeling that someone somewhere must be avoiding tax that should be paid here.
I’m pretty sure the residents/refugees are receiving a benefit here and should be paying tax on its market value.
Fuck it, invoke the Enabling Act anyway. There’s forreners need requisitioning.
Filthy capitalists from City of London Corporation buy 68 apartments from filthy capitalist developers at cost & government provide funds for fittings. Capitalist bastards.
Presumably there are 68 families who thought they might buy an affordable property here who now can’t.
Comment response in ES is not entirely supportive of this.
This is mental. I would love to live in Kensington for a subsidised below market rent but I am not one of the lucky ones. Instead I am paying the taxes to support government to subsidise people to live somewhere I can’t afford to.
I imagine these are key workers like hospital cleaning staff, Whitehall boot polishers, HMRC filing clerks, etc. Kensington couldn’t live without them.
Day of rage indeed.
So how does this subletting scam work?
Person X gets a nice pad paid for by housing benefit, sublets it illegally (but in plain view of anyone who looks at housing rental portals), and then goes and lives somewhere cheaper, e.g. shared.
Pockets the difference, which could be over 1k a month.
Right?
“Presumably there are 68 families who thought they might buy an affordable property here who now can’t.
Comment response in ES is not entirely supportive of this.”
Scrap all council housing. Cap housing benefit at rent price at top of lowest 1/3rd of the market prices, regardless of where they live (people in Hull may even be better off). Let the market sort it out.
Low value employees should not be living in London. If you can’t pay your own way, there’s plenty of cheap housing elsewhere.
Unemployment now higher in London than any other English region. But things like stamp duty, and high value social housing entitlements act as a drag on unemployed Londoners migrating to where the jobs are being created such as Midlands car plants.
That drag effect on labour migration doesn’t apply if a convergence subsidy paid for by the UK has automated your job in Poland and you decide to chance it in the UK with your skills.
Alas, none of the political parties, and none of the leading think tanks too, are advocating free market approaches to dealing with excessive immigration. It’s just a few classical liberals on here howling at the nighttime glow of summer.
“Somehow I get the feeling that someone somewhere must be avoiding tax that should be paid here.”
I do hope so. Far more efficient in this and most cases to miss out the wankers in the middle.
“Scrap all council housing. Cap housing benefit at rent price at top of lowest 1/3rd of the market prices, regardless of where they live (people in Hull may even be better off). Let the market sort it out.
Low value employees should not be living in London. If you can’t pay your own way, there’s plenty of cheap housing elsewhere.”
It’s not in the Overton window yet, but should be.
abacab said:
“So how does this subletting scam work?”
Yup, that’s about right. Known people who were the sub-tenants on that basis.
There’s also a theory that it partly explains the low level of marriage amongst those on benefits; stay officially separate to keep both council flats, move in together and rent out the other one.
@ Andrew Again
NO, you are not paying a single penny *in this case*. The Corporation of London has a £billion or three of funds in charities thanks to rich individuals who died childless (because child mortality was horrendous in the middle ages) and they spend it whenever they can spot a good cause. There are very few residents living in the City, and even fewer of them are poor, so the Corporation of London subsidises housing in Southwark and Islington and Westminster and sundry other places – Kensington may be a new area for subsidised housing but it’s not that far away compared with Epping Forest or the quarantine system at Heathrow or London Docks which are no longer within sight of the City.
@ BiND
Charities are not liable to tax. So – if you think like Murphy – they are avoiding tax.
For any sane person, OTOH …
john77, I took BiND’s comment as a snide sidewipe at the Omniscient Tuber.
Key workers possibly not too unlike the Council worker that Corbyn’s thugs beat up last demo…
LBC is asking if the ‘undocumented’ of Grenfell Tower should get amnesty to stay here.
No one seems to be asking how you can get social housing if you are ‘undocumented’.
Henry.
It was.
abacab
Exactly right. But as my wife pointed out to me the other night, benefit fraudsters pocketed the money and might well be pocretin a new pad as well. Meanwhile, in another, poorer part of the world, a family waived off its son/daughter/brother/sister to work hatd and try and build a good life in the UK and will now never know what happened to them, never know how or where they died, never even know they have actually died.
And this is all good apprently
I suspect it won’t even cost the City Corporation anything.
The reported £10 million for 68 flats is an average of £142,000 each. Social housing rents in Kensington average £125 per week. I I’ve got my sums right, that’s a return of 4.4% p.a.. Yes, some of that will go in management costs and maintenance, but it’s not a bad return for a “social investment”.
Just what the City Corporation ought to be doing; solving a social problem with a clever bit of financial engineering.
@ Henry & BiND
Good – I hoped so but was just covering because the irrational hatred of the Corporation of London makes Shylock look like a media hero (that he should be is another question that deserves a thread all to itself).
@ Richard
That’s making assumptions.
In the late 1970s, services charges in Barbican grew to be similar to/higher than rents, so I don’t expect the City to make a profit..
I totally agree that the Corporation of London should use its financial fire-power to solve social problems.