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Renting or help with deposit
colon1970
Member Posts: 14 Listener
Hi all my landlord is selling her property and she wants me out so I have to find somewhere but not having no savings and being disabled I'm not sure I'm going to be able to be housed. I'm on waiting list with the council but they said it could be two years before I get something. So wondered if anyone knows what I can do. Thanks in advance.
Replies
For a better understanding of how the current system works I would recommend reading https://www.theguardian.com/housing-network/2012/oct/26/council-homelessness-rules-housing-policy
Shelter's advice on this can be found at https://england.shelter.org.uk/housing_advice/homelessness/rules/longer_term_housing_when_homeless
Please don't be too worried about fixed term tenancies if you are offered one. L&Q converted its fixed term tenancies to permanent and last I hear Peabody were considering the same. In real terms they tend to end up as rolling fixed term tenancies and unless your financial position changed significantly it is more likely there would be little difference between fixed term and permanent tenancies.
In short they were introduced in response to a few council tenants who were on high wages and an ideology that says those in private rent were less likely to be unemployed and that saw social tenancies as a last choice.
But please do talk to Shelter as @poppy123456 suggested so you understand your options. One concern I would have is as you are already on the waiting list if offered help to get a private tenancy without the full assessment would this affect your place on the waiting list.
Also does your council have choice based letting? If so you should be checking what is available and applying for properties you are interested in if you are already on the waiting list.
As an individual I stood alone.
As a member of a group I did things.
As part of a community I helped to create change!
Sorry to hear what you are going through.
Please may I suggest Housing Associations. You do not need a deposit . Accept those with disabilities and illness or conditions.
Often some have support net works need floating support or other assistance.
This is mine have a look.
https://www.homegroup.org.uk.
Hope that helps you . Please if I can be supportive please get in touch.
Please take care.
@thespiceman
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To be fair for some private landlords it would be a term of their mortgage. On top of this various changes in the rules have made it a bigger risk for private landlords. Many private landlords do not own multiple properties they rent out and the higher risk of rent forfeit will be a big issue. Depending on the type and location of the property there can be a lot of ongoing costs which the landlord is still responsible for covering, potentially including block and estate management and repairs as well as major works.
There are a number of reasons why tenants on benefits can get into trouble with their rent, and it is not always because they are selecting to use their rents for high priced products, fancy holidays etc. Some are well known here, like sudden sanctions and changes in some types of benefits. But also, especially at this time of year, costs can be higher for everyone, especially if you have a family.
I am sure that there will be some who will disagree with me, but unless the change in banning adverts saying 'No DSS' is followed by a genuine change in attitudes with private landlords then I wonder if there is a real value in doing so. By this I mean is it any better applying for tenancies that you have no real chance of getting than identifying those landlords who are happy to take on tenants who are on benefits?
As an individual I stood alone.
As a member of a group I did things.
As part of a community I helped to create change!
Will that landlord ever let again to anyone unemployed? The law is made by lawyers. Guess who gains from this system?
It was forseeable. There could have been tweaks to overcome lumping together the bad tenants and the steady reliable ones.
The irony is, employed people can lose their jobs, so merely being in work is no promise of being able to afford rent. Meanwhile, there are two groups of prospective tenants who have a secure, non altering income, even though they are already unemployed:
Pensioners, and permanently disabled people. They can't lose their jobs, and they can't lose their income. They are probably the least likely to wreck the property, the least likely to suddenly squander their income and not pay rent.
Yet, no credit referencing by landlords would consider them for a moment. Unemployed through severe disability or retirement counts exactly the same as unemployed through being feckless and workshy, on the computer.
Maybe worse, for the computer, is that older people and seriously disabled people do not go into debt. They wouldn't get credit, and they dare not and would not want to. They have limited income, and know they must, whatever happens, live within their means, and no matter how hard it is, they must keep back a little bit for rainy days, too.
They have to live within their means and make rent the priority, because they are excluded from the range of options the rest of the population can exploit.
They cannot whine to the bank of mum and dad, they cannot easily go sofa surfing or flat sharing with fun friends, and they cannot nip out and do a little cash in hand work now and then, to top up. They can't simply take an on-the-cards job, till it gets boring, just in order to take out loans and credit while they are temporarily officially employed.
Those who go into debt have a credit rating, which the landlord's computer likes. Those who don't go into debt don't have a credit rating, which means the computer doesn't believe they exist at all.
But people close to the receiving end of these laws, rules and systems could have predicted where it would all go wrong.
It's such a shame the power holders merely make a token of consultation.
In theory, that habit was made illegal under the statutory public duty embodied in disability equality law, and in theory, that law was incorporated, not cancelled, by the single equality act.
The original DDA law was a beautiful piece of legislation. People had put their life effort into getting the last dot and comma foolproof. One part mentions 'users and hard to reach excluded potential users' of services. It insists there is a Statutory Duty to ensure 'meaningful consultation,' which 'must include a realistic chance of changing plans and policies at the early stages'. It stresses that 'tokenistic consultation ' , after the main decisions are made, is an offence.
(Insult added to injury when MPs recently proved they do know, full well, about 'meaningful' . Not for disabled people, but for M.Ps. who all insisted they wanted to have a 'meaningful' vote on brexit. Hmmm)
Another recent flurry in Westminster was so ironic, you had to laugh or you would weep. One of the 'chosen ones' gave a speech supporting a revised Domestic Abuse Bill. She spoke about her partner being unpleasantly controlling, which made other M.Ps weep with her. A great proportion of them are lawyers.
A few did catch on, pretty fast, to the unintended consequences of one part of the new law. It doesn't matter to male M.Ps, but it will disadvantage mere ordinary non -rich, non -well -connected men, who cannot afford lawyers, so will need to be their own lawyers in court. In divorce courts, these 'litigants in person' will be banned from contesting any alleged abuse. As an 'abuse survivor', the (usually woman) 'victim' gets legal aid, therefore a lawyer representing her interests in court. The 'abuser' must not personally cross examine to contest allegations. Unless he is very rich, he won't have a lawyer to do it for him. Anything his ex says must go unchallenged, even if it makes no sense, or he could show it is untrue, if only she was questioned.
(It is just badly drawn law, originally intended for a sensible reason, because men used to misuse the court. They could get a chance to distress their own rape and paedophilia victims. All they needed to do was to get rid of their legal aid lawyers. (Automatically given them as accused criminals) Then, h they could cross question victims face to face.)
There is another mile wide gap in Domestic Abuse law, but not a soul noticed. It excludes opportunistic abusers within the home, unless they fall within the extremely narrow list of personal partner or limited category of mainly blood relatives. Glaringly, however extreme the abuse, no other abuser counts as Domestic. No matter that is upon a victim inside the home, with no option of escape.
A carer, or a house sharer, or a sublandlord, or anyone, gets away with being defined as not a domestic abuser. Instead, the disabled victim must, alone, take the abuser living under their own roof through the courts (!!) Domestic Abuse organisations define abuse by the 'wrong' assailant (outside the list) as being equivalent to a civil neighbour dispute. (sic)
Meanwhile , one of the women M.Ps got her head round a built-in problem of enforcing equality law. She had grasped that Equal Pay law was supposed to be enforced by the woman, on her own, fighting a pack of lawyers through courts and Appeals, to prove Discrimination.
This, realised the M. P, was unreasonable and unequal. She even thought the Equalities quango should leave their office and enforce that part of the Equalities law.
(Well, Duh.....How about enforcing all Equalities equally, starting with Ageism, which is virtually official policy, but above all stressing Disablism, which Sir Trevor Phillips described as " invisible, institutionalised, universally practiced, socially taken for granted, and, in it's effects on peoples lives, in many ways worse than Racism"?)
(Racism is already more equal than all other equality, because it is the only one which counts as a criminal offence, to be enforced by police, not by the victim.)
Of course, that equal-pay-light-bulb-moment M.P. would not comprehend that, for a disabled person, taking court action for every direct and indirect instance of discrimination would require him to be richer than Bill Gates, and to employ the entire world supply of Human Rights lawyers.
I did attend a public meeting that was meant to be a consultation about our council spending. It was tokenism at its worse as most of the decision had been made, and were looking for public support for their decisions. It was literally tokenism as we were giving a limited number of tokens to put into what we thought should be the spending priorities. There was little information about what the different pots represented or their importance. I refused to take part in the farce and also complained about it.
Yes the trouble is many of the laws are poorly made. More often then not there are people who will point out the shortcomings but our political system is set up as well for these laws to get through generally with a majority government. Sometimes it is because one set of priorities are considered to outweigh the others.
As an individual I stood alone.
As a member of a group I did things.
As part of a community I helped to create change!
To their credit they did apologise, rather than trying to bluff it out.
It was stupid because the meetings were well attended by community activists, charities and some local businesses. I am sure that I was not the only one aware that the budgets had been approved.
The thing with these examples is it shows little respect to the communities they represent and while you may be able to fool some of the people some of the time, you cannot fool them all of the time. Not at all when done so blatantly in your example.
As an individual I stood alone.
As a member of a group I did things.
As part of a community I helped to create change!