Ben Reeve Lewis Friday Newsround #277

[Ben Reeve Lewis is not doing Christmas this year …)

The Xmas break for me starts today as Tessa is closing down the blog for a few weeks for an upgrade.

Not that I am remotely in the Xmas mood. We are living among cardboard boxes in the rental flat while we do up the house for sale and the move north. No room for a Xmas tree and even less room for the desire for one.

I’m not even going to do my usual food fest of weeks soaking, brining, marinating and pickling, instead opting for an M&S Turkey crown roast and a packet of mince pies. Anyone who knows me well, will have to sit down at the very thought.

Usually, by now the fridge starts getting crowded with strange bits and bobs in Tupperware. Frazzy getting irritated looking for the marge and shouting “What in this blue pot????” while I yell back from the living room “Fermenting goats cheese” or “Prawns in jam” or some such.

Doing the opposite for homeowners

I came across this strange curio in What Mortgage. New research from mortgage lender Kent Reliance reporting that landlords are dealing with next year’s buy to let mortgage relief changes by setting up limited companies and jacking up the rents.

Apparently, more than 100,000 new companies were set up during the past 9 months to obtain buy to let mortgages. Andy Golding of the One Bank says:

“The raft of recent measures aimed at the buy to let sector singularly sought to increase home ownership levels. Ironically, they will achieve the opposite, with even greater upward pressure on rents combined with the prospect of declining real incomes likely to stretch affordability even further,”

So more rent increases for 2017. Oh, the joy!

Workers in poverty

And more grist to the mill of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation reported on the BBC that 3.8 million workers are officially in poverty driven in no small part by rising rent levels, which if the Kent Reliance report is correct will set to increase from April 2017.

Helen Barnard, the head of analysis at the JRF said:

“The economy has been growing since 2010 but during this time high rents, low wages and cuts to working-age benefits mean that many families, including working households, have actually seen their risk of poverty grow,”

Not all doom and gloom. It seems that pensioner poverty is reducing as is the number of people in workless families that are in poverty, so it appears that it is working people who are renting that are the worst off at the moment.

Give up work or give up renting? Hmm. Think I’ll try both at the same time.

The Vision

My mate Cynthia and I, who works with me in Safer Renting have created a future vision to keep us going that we call the ‘Mojito Club’, the notion of both of us being rent and mortgage free while we mentor and assist our growing team of apprentices in tenant’s rights advice and advocacy services, dispensing wisdom, knowledge and support from our respective gardens, nursing a Mojito in one hand and a mobile phone in other shouting “Well kick the door in then”.

Housing advice 2017 style.

Much as I still enjoy some of the madness of front-line life I am leaning more towards just telling a younger generation how to do it, while I get through the day without having to go nose to nose with an idiot who has just removed someone’s mattress because she is late with the rent (last week, Tuesday in case you’re interested).

Homelessness Reduction Factsheets

The wind assisted Homelessness Reduction Bill took a step forward last week with the publication of a set of factsheets by the DCLG, outlining how the thing will look when it all becomes statute.

Some of it is good, most of it long overdue but all with a massive impact upon costs to the local authority with extra duties imposed.

Whilst I would be the first to admit that the response of many homelessness units to people in crisis is often pretty damned poor, not to mention unreliable it is driven by the twin concepts of vast increases in homelessness approaches against a background of budget cuts and having nowhere to actually put people in a landscape where market rents outstrip the benefit cap so the only place they can go is B&B.

As one friend of mine commented to an over enthusiastic member of Crisis at a recent joint meeting with the DCLG “Why are you so darned keen to see people moved into B&B more quickly?” because that is indeed where many will end up if their home can’t be sustained by various means.

Some investment advice:

If I was a decent entrepreneur, which I am certainly not, I would invest in B&Bs because they are going to be in big demand.

Unless of course government actually provides local authorities with a genuinely adequate funding pool and not £30 million, which whilst admittedly looking impressive if it came up on the screen of a local cash machine with your name on it, in terms of local authority budgets is the modern equivalent of 1 Groat.

More creative and effective working will obviously go a long way towards the Bill’s success when it becomes an Act (and that’s going to be an uphill struggle on it’s own) it won’t provide the full Monty when it comes to service delivery.

Ben’s New Year Resolutions:

I see my new year resolutions starting to form here:

• Get out of any work connected with homelessness.
• Stop arguing with rogue landlords and tell others how to do it.
• Stop renting.
• Pay off the mortgage.
• Buy a set of garden furniture
• Buy a bottle of Bacardi, a bunch of mint, some limes and brown sugar.

What made me smile this week.

For a while when I was a kid my parents ran pubs in south London. As a consequence, I love the smell and the atmosphere of old pubs, not modern bars. The whiff of damp beer towels, even damper cellars.

And this week I had a business lunch in a wonderful new find, the Grenadier, in Wilton Row, just off Hyde Park Corner.
A fantastic atmosphere the minute you walk in. Oodles of history and even a well-known ghost. The sort of pub that American’s think all English pubs look like, in fact, you half expect to see Dick Van Dyke wander in.

A fantastic atmosphere the minute you walk in. Oodles of history and even a well-known ghost. The sort of pub that American’s think all English pubs look like, in fact, you half expect to see Dick Van Dyke wander in.

Tucked up a little mews, I shall reserve this place for special trips to the west end that are worth the detour from the touristy bit and add it to my diminishing list of lovely pubs that haven’t been turned into flats for sale by Foxtons, which includes the downright weird ‘Bradley’s Bar’ just off Oxford Street, the old pirate haunt the ‘Prospect of Whitby’ in Wapping, the ‘Lamb and Flag’ in Covent Garden and ‘The Viaduct’ opposite the Old Bailey.

See ya in the new year.