If ever you wish for a cast iron example of political policy and local council lunacy then you will find it here in an article in 24 dash housing released today.
The London borough of Westminster has bought back 45 council flats at an average cost of over £400,000 that it sold under the right to buy for less than £100,000 each!
What a way to waste £12 million of public money by the Tory council there and the reason for this lunacy, the current welfare reform policy of Tory central government!
The welfare reform of capping Local Housing Allowance or LHA – the private rented sector version of housing benefit – means that LB Westminster has seen a huge surge in private renting tenants being evicted by private landlords as housing benefit (LHA) no longer covers the rent.
This means these evicted families become the duty of the council (LB Westminster) to rehouse and regardless of the cost of rehousing these evicted families in temporary or permanent accommodation.
Fortunately we know how much LB Westminster is spending on rehousing these homeless families – up to £13,000 PER MONTH!!! – as this was detailed a few years ago in February 2013 and 13 months after the Tory coalition capped LHA at £400 per week by BBC London and please watch this 2 minute or so video footage of that as it will truly astound you as to the cost!
It is presumably cheaper for LB Westminster to buy back 45 flats which costs the taxpayer over £12 million than to accommodate the huge rise in homeless families created by Tory central government policy in the LHA caps and then added to in the overall benefit cap policy from October 2013!
What the above reveals:
- The RTB policy per se is a disaster for the public purse
- Tory local government is forced to waste millions of public money directly due to Tory central government policy
Yet it is much more than that and only today sees Tory central government policy advocating even more RTB to buy short-term votes that will bugger up the position even further! In other words with more and more social housing being sold off all councils will need to use the prohibitively expensive private B&Bs and hotel more than now.
One final point and a very important one. IDS was outraged that in some cases more than £100k per year was spent on HB to accommodate families – That is why he brought in the LHA cap and then the benefit cap. However, when the political hyperbole was looked at it was found that there were 5 (FIVE) only cases in the UK that received £100k per year in HB. Still 5 cases too many but only 5 out of them 4,751,551 HB recipients.
The BBC London film reveals there are now well more than 5 cases in LB Westminster alone!!! In simple terms and as a direct result of the ill-conceived policy of IDS and the Tory coalition we have MORE households costing over £100k per year than before!!!
The bill shown in the BBC London clip of £12,678 per month is a yearly figure of £152,136 and that is one case of many as again the film shows!
That is one reason why, as I explained here in detail, the four welfare reform (sic) policies introduced by the Tories to reduce overall HB cost (bedroom tax, benefit cap, LHA cap and SAR cap) have actually INCREASED the overall HB cost and not saved the public purse a penny.
SPeye Joe (Welfarewrites) 
Reblogged this on SMILING CARCASS'S TWO-PENNETH and commented:
It is my considered opinion that benefit reductions and caps are not at all designed to save money; rather, they are designed to bugger up the welfare system by claiming the costs are too high and justify further austerity!
It all seems like a bunch of “clever” accounting tricks, where the HB “account” is reduced, but the homeless provision “account” (and others) is increased by much more, the same as with the bedroom tax which proposes a saving, but in reality massively increases the costs via:-
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moves to private rent (more expensive),
homeless provision for arrears evictions (more expensive),
NHS costs due to increased poor health (more expensive),
disrupted eduction of children (more expensive, but a can kicked years down the road)…
in the same way companies “payroll” is reduced but “contract” costs increase… on paper it makes sense as a department reduces its payroll costs (PHB’s happy) but reduced profit (accountant pissed off) {actually I’m not sure why companies do this, but some how it makes sense to someone
But IDS is so incompetent, and giddiot for letting him do it, that in this case the HB reduction in one area is a massive HB increase in another as he didn’t realise that both sets of payments came out of the same HB account; as ever IDS is a massive c88cwombling f88kwit who never sees beyond his beliefs.