Rent, Boyo…

It’s the new year, and time to try to start up again after the Christmas gap.

I always feel like the days between Christmas day and new year are a little like the days between the death and the funeral. But that’s not a very upbeat start to the year is it? So lets’ see what the property market has to offer.

My two big chuckles this week as regards looking for somewhere to live, have been a bungalow for the princely sum of £670 pcm and a couple of caravans, on for almost as much as a flat in town.

Firstly, the bungalow. Three bedrooms. Looks comfy enough. But who the smeg can afford that rent? If you can, could you please write in to me? Because I don’t know of anyone who earns the kind of wages locally to pay this kind of rent, along with council tax, bills and all the other stuff.

So the answer is of course, that someone gets help with their rent. We’ll come back to that.

These caravans for let. We have here, someone with a big garden and a static caravan in it, which they are able to let out for money. However, if you own land that isn’t a garden, you can’t put a caravan on it and live there. You have to pay rent to someone with a big garden.

The person with the big garden is probably pretty well-healed to begin with. They have a place to to live, plus a spare place to rent out to someone else. Same with the people doing the private lets. They have a house. And then they have another house that they can charge mad amounts of rent for, knowing that no one can afford it on a local wage, but it’s ok, because the person can claim housing benefit.

So they have to go through the rigmarole of filling in forms, and putting all their personal information out there, even if they’re working, so that someone can assess them, and decide if they come within the boundaries of needing help, which most people round here surely must do.

I bought my house back in the days of self certified mortgages. But who can get a mortgage today? Three and a half times your income? Not any more. Not around here, where most houses are over two hundred grand and most wages are under twenty. Even buying a terrace in Neyland for 100k is tricky. I owned a house, and I owned a business, a shop in Narberth, and then the business closed down, and I found myself having to sign on.

But I couldn’t get help to pay the mortgage on my house, because I owned it. Basically, I could sell the house, and then the council would pay the buyer, a private landlord, the money to let me live in it. However, what they wouldn’t do was give me the money to pay for it and cut out the middle man, not even for a little while while I got my act together and recovered from the loss of the shop.

So then what happens, is that you’re put in a position where you can never catch up again, and you get into the place where you can no longer keep your house. And now I’m looking for somewhere to rent, but the rents are all too expensive, unless I claim housing benefit, which I’m not prepared to do.

Meanwhile, I have land with a caravan on it, that I’m not allowed to stay on. Are we getting the insanity of the picture here? How do we fix this?

Even the council rent for a three bedroom house is between four and five hundred a month. West Wales is the poorest part of Northern Europe. To pay that, most people need help. But there are also plenty of local private landlords, and plenty of empty local houses, that nobody needs or uses, and so they let them rot away. How do we explain this vast split between the haves and have nots?

One little experience form many years ago sums up a lot of things for me. My buddies and me used to do fire shows, stilt-walking, juggling workshops, back in the early nineties when juggling was cool. We did shows and workshops all over Pembs and beyond.

One time, we did a workshop in Monkton Community Hall. At the end of the day, the kids helped clear up all the stuff and put it all away. We didn’t lose one ball. The following week we were at a posh hotel that I won’t name. We did a big fire show, and a workshop the next day. At the end, the kids vanished, and so did quite a lot of our kit.

That always stayed with me. It’s like those who already have feel that they can just take more whenever they feel like it, and they feel like they don’t have to chip in. There’s no sense of shared responsibility or care or respect. The kids who didn’t have much were really grateful that we turned up and showed them something cool. They helped us and felt responsible for the kit. It meant something to them. We meant something to them. The other kids took us for granted. I feel like these are the kids who grow up to be landlords, who price their properties way higher than the locality can sustain, knowing full well that El Taxpayer will pick up the tab. They don’t care where the money comes from, as long as it comes their way. The real benefit cheats are the private landlords, gaining more government money than actually goes on paying people JSA. Around 17 billion of government spending goes on housing benefit. It’s not the poor that benefit from that money. The next biggest spend is on tax credits, topping up unfair wages. The system is broken.

And this is why the poorest part of Northern Europe is a Tory stronghold. There are systems in place that are working very well thank you. And no one wants that to change. Well, I want it to change. And I’ve been looking into that council election stuff that I was going on about before Christmas. More on that next week. Meanwhile, happy new year. And if you’re a landlord. Sorry, not sorry…