Housing Benefit costs 500,000 homes

Billothewisp would like to explore some figures with you my grubby little Englander mates concerning Housing Benefit, house building, house prices, rentals, political dogma and how all these thing are sadly related.

Housing benefit is currently £21 Billion per year.
In total, about £75 Billion has been spent on Housing Benefit in the last 5 years.

How many houses would this build?

The average house price (from here) is about £165000

So the last five years "lost" money spent on Housing Benefit could have built just over 450,000 homes. As our "average" house price is inflated by land costs it is easy to see that the cost of Housing Benefit, over the last five years, would have financed the building of at least half a million homes.

How many extra social houses did Gordon Brown, Ed Milliband and friends actually build? According to Radio 4 this morning, there was a net increase of 14000. That though, was in 13 years. But here, to make the maths easy, we will be kind an say they managed it in 5.

So for every 35 houses (lifespan 100 years) they could have built, they built one and blew the cost of the other 34 on short term "down the drain" solutions and social engineering.

One issue raised on Radio 4 breakfast time by a council leader from Kensington and Chelsea (i.e.very expensive area) was that normal working people could no longer afford accommodation in his borough, because they were priced out of the market by the unemployed on housing benefit. So we have this hullabaloo about people being ethically cleansed, when in fact it has already happened. But it is not the unemployed. It is the common working folk who have the audacity to hold down a job and fend for themselves who are the victims.

Then you have to ask why market rent is so high. It does not take a brain surgeon to work out that if you are pumping 21 Billion into the rental market each year then rents are bound to inflate. Artificially inflated rentals then inflate house prices as buy to let landlords buy up low end stock and price the young out of the market.

Then tack on to this the uncontrolled immigration over the last 10 years. (See this site and be appalled at the figures). If the net levels of immigration had stayed the same as they were in the 1980's/early 90's then there would now actually be a surplus of 200,000 homes.

It is an absolutely awful vicious circle.

All because of out of control housing benefit, uncontrolled immigration and essentially long term bad government.

What an absolute utter mess.