[Ben Reeve Lewis is waving a lonely sparkler and feeling sad …]
Is it just me or was there a marked lack of fireworks over the past week?
Normally the week leading up to bonfire night sees the skies awash with glittering explosions, people’s garden’s crackling with golden showers and Catherine wheels, playful scamps throwing bangers at each other and for those of us in south east London, wondering whether that single loud pop you just heard was a firework or a shooting over a £10 drug deal gone wrong.
I am sure that the sale of fireworks must have seen a dramatic fall this year but I don’t think its just about the cost. I think people have so little to celebrate generally that few people were in the mood.
Frazzy and I were walking home from the station in the early evening, having been to see Arsenal play (she still doesn’t understand the offside rule).
A perfect November 5th night, dry, crisp and a little bit foggy and all we saw, at this prime party time was a formal display in the distance. No friendly chattering parties in back yards.
None of our friends could be bothered to host a bonfire party either. This chill financial winter is cutting to the bone.
Mortgage repossessions
On Monday of this week I attended a conference on the future of mortgage repossessions. If I bounced into the conference room full of beans I certainly left with the beans moving slowly down my digestive tract and turning into a very uncomfortable wind situation.
I was one of the first people to grab the microphone and thanked the first presenter for depressing me more than a Monday morning would normally do.
It aint good news folks.
The speaker from the Council for Mortgage Lenders predicted an increase in mortgage repossessions from 40,000 this past year to 45,000 and even he admitted this was probably a conservative estimate.
Not only is the economy getting worse The FSA, of all people, have announced that they want banks to take a more considered view before cutting slack to borrowers in difficulty. This effectively disempowers me in my day job saving homes from repossession, so I reckon the CMLs 5,000 repo increase is going to be well short of the mark.
The Assisted Voluntary Sale scheme
The conference launched a new initiative the Assisted Voluntary Sale. This isn’t a government thing. AVS was cooked up by the National Homelessness advice Service, taking a grim but practical approach that if people are going to lose their homes it will be less stressful if they can be helped out of it rather than just have the family home snatched away.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against the scheme, I’m a pragmatist in this too but it depresses me that people in my line of work, the Robin Hoods of the housing world, are having to adopt such a grim and fatalistic approach.
An unstable PRS?
Hannah Fearn wrote in the Guardian of the problems with the instability of the private rental sector brought about by a combination of ludicrously inflated rents coupled with Assured Shorthold Tenancies that offer little security to occupiers.
She said
“When private renters are asked to move around year after year, uprooting their families and incurring large arrangement fees every time they sign a new 12-month lease, the private sector will always be considered a third-class choice”.
I couldn’t agree more Hannah. The PRS has never been so unstable.
24 Dash quoted James Murray from Islington council saying the ‘Draconian’ HB cut was forcing many out of London.
Benefits again
Statistics are certainly showing an increase in the benefit bill for outer London Boroughs. As rents continue to rise benefit claimants will probably have to leave those boroughs too as people like me from the inner London ones who are in work will be taking their place in the available short lets in the dreaded suburbs to cut our living costs.
Who will be left renting in Southwark, Hackney, Wandsworth etc in a year’s time? Only people earning £60,000 a year?
35,000 people to lose their homes say Shelter
In a sobering thought Shelter produced figures saying that it is estimated that 35,000 people will receive a letter threatening the loss of their home between now and Christmas.
That’s 630 people a day or 2 people every minute.
Is it better in Germany?
Even people inside the landlord industry are commenting on this. In an excellent article on Property 118 lettings professional Julie Ford also talked of the instability of the rental world for tenants and as so many writers do, cited the German model as being a more effective tool in terms of both stability and longevity.
Renting there also doesn’t carry the strange social stigma that it does in the UK, as if by renting you are somehow one of society’s failures.
Many landlords in the UK, including the excellent and very humane Mary Latham is a supporter of short term lets saying they are needed to protect landlords from nightmare tenants. But under the German scheme longer lets are also offset with the requirement that repairs are down to the tenants.
I think that is an excellent way to do things. I would happily swap my protection from repairing obligations for a guaranteed longer let where I could feel I was living in my home instead of just house sitting for someone else, with all my pictures stored in boxes for fear of being accused of damaging the blank walls.
Changes in Cuba
And while we are on the subject of the way they rent in other countries I was intrigued by an article on ‘Left Foot Forward’ about new changes to housing practices in Cuba.
Apparently if you want to move around the island you find someone with a similar sized property and just swap, as long as no money exchanges hands.
Home ownership has existed since the revolution and people do actually have deeds to their houses but because of their peculiar communist system they have no experience at all of how to put value onto things like houses and cars. With Raul Castro softening restrictions it is creating a strange hiatus. How do you price a house when you have no framework to do so?
The article talks of a guy who sold an old Russian Lada for $60,000. Give it 5 years and the fella who bought it is going to be mightily embarassed and is bound to be the talk of the village for the rest of his life. “Do you remember when Jose bought that Lada?” guffaws all around the Mojito bar.
Destination Dartford?
And so, in a depressing week I will shamble off, lighting a sole, miserable sparkler to celebrate the housing future, a damp squib of a bonfire night and the prospect of a low key Christmas where Frazzy and I exchange an orange and a peck on the cheek while all our money goes on an exorbitant rent and the new year’s possibilities of moving to Dartford…..wherever the hell that is.
Ben Reeve Lewis
Ben has started Home Saving Expert, to share his secrets to defending people’s homes from mortgage repossession Visit his blog and get some help and advice on mortgage difficulties and catch up with him on Twitter and check out his free report “An Encouraging note on Dealing with your Mortgage Lender” and have it sent right to your inbox.
Good article, Ben and one I’ve been pondering on since you posted about the AVS this week. It occurred to me that should the proverbial you-know-what hit the fan and interest rates rise quickly, as expected, then private tenants are going to be in an even more precarious position.
Rent rises are nothing more than greed at the moment on behalf of the landlord taking advantage of supply and demand. When interest rates start to climb then surely a landlord will use this as an excuse to raise rents further? If the landlord can’t or chooses not to pay the mortgage then it’s the tenants knocking on your door.
I just wish the housing powers that be would stop poncing about and give us all stability. Love the German system for tenants – that would save me a fortune for starters!
P.S. I too was disappointed with the lack of festivities on Saturday. Think the country must’ve been watching X Factor – we are now officially dumbed down.
I was watching Strictly myself, but I did hear a few bangs and whizzes outside
We are all moving to strictly Tessa, now that Frankie and his fat legs in skinny jeans has been ousted and Louie is turning into an old lady as we speak. I expect him to appear tomorrow night with a purple rinse. And my heart lost interest when Johhny – the 21st century version of Charles Hawtrey got voted off.
@HMO I am currently writing notes for a presnetation I have to do in December on rent increases (I can hardly contain my excitment) and half spent a while researching the history of rent control in the uK this morning and found that there have been several times when the government have intervened and imposed controls, even as late as 1972 as part of the Counter-Inflation measures. There has also been a history of rent strikes, both in the UK and abroad where people just refuse.
Maybe if thousands of tenants gave up their accommmodation and dumped themselves on the doors of the local homelessness unit the government might realise there is a problem.
To be honest it isnt the rent levels that get to me so much as a tenant but the lack of security. It is November and instead of planning for Xmas I am already keeping an eye on March when my 12 month AST is up and the landlord inevitably dumps a £200 or £300 rent increase on us, which will take my rent to 75% of my take home pay. I will have to save my 6 week’s worth of deposit sometime in there too because you can bet your life when we move out the agent/landlord will hang onto our deposit for the maximum 10 days allowed before releasing it.
3 moves in slightly more than a year. Thanks guys. Think I’ll take out shares in a van hire company
Ben, I think you really may want to revise this post. It contains the following phrase:
“people’s garden’s crackling with golden showers”
I would say what one of those is but it’s not work safe.
Thing is, though, if there was a mass homelessness presentation the Councils would just photocopy their standard “you’re intentionally homeless” letter a few hundred times and present it on the same day, hoping that only a few people would be clued up enough about s. 190 HA ’96 to threaten a judicial review.
Once again, I also have to ask, Ben, whether you’ve considered moving to Manchester or Liverpool or somewhere else large, urban, and northern? It’d be cheaper than London and there’d be just as much work for an experienced housing bod, surely. And you won’t suddenly start saying “eyup” and breeding whippets within days either!
(You will be required to learn all 17 verses of “Our Sarah’s gettin’ a Chap” though.)
A Freudian slip on the firework metaphor I suppose. Brought on by living for a couple of years around your way in Viccy Village JS haha..
Imagine it though, 10,000 people turning up at the HPUs of London on one day? We could enter the Olympics for the massed gatekeeping event LOL.
And Yeah I do a lot of training in Manchester and really like the place but its more than just cities, its London. I was born and brought up in Deptford, went to the old Den as a kid, and had Friday night meals from Manzie’s in Deptford High Street, I dont see why I should be priced out of my home town