Thursday 5 July 2012

Brent's unaffordable rents - have your say

Click on image to enlarge
Darren Johnson, Green Party Member of the London Assembly, has published an interactive website LINK which demonstrates the difficulty of finding a home at an affordable rent across the London boroughs.

An affordable  rent is defined as one which takes up no more than 35% of take-home pay after tax. Based on a working week of 48 hours (the maximum allowed under the Working Time Directive) spread over five days of 9.6hr shifts, you should have earned enough to pay the rent at the end of Tuesday.

In the London Borough of Brent you would have to work until the end of Wednesday on the National Minimum wage for 18-20 year olds (£4.98 an hour) to rent a room in a shared home. However, on the London Living Wage (£8.30/hr) supported by the Green Party, you could afford this by the end of Tuesday.

For an adult on the National Minimum wage needing a 2 bedroomed home, it is just not possible even if all the wages went on rent. If they were paid the London Living Wage they would not have earned enough to pay the rent until the end of Friday i.e. 'extremely unaffordable'.

Currently these unaffordable rents are topped up through housing benefit, the Local Housing Allowance, but these are now being capped and cut, making it more difficult to find affordable homes to rent when with a job and benefits.

Go to the website for more details and to feed back your views on the issue to Darren Johnson

2 comments:

bigbreadeaterellis said...

what an insult...I say brent council are lucky anyone is prepared to pay rent to live in their havens of torment.
from the 1970s to the present day, no council estate or housing association property in brent is worth renting.
don't get me wrong I'm not trying to encourage people to stop paying rent no...what i am saying is that we deserve to rent and live in properties that are well built not the trash that brent is well known for.
but of course they will say that we are only worthy of so called affordable housing and then they insult us by insisting that we pay rent that for many is unaffordable.
I really feel sorry for people because you are going to suffer immensely under the rule of these expert hypocrites that occupy brent town hall and 10 downing street and the houses of parliament.
I know that no one is perfect and playing god isn't a easy thing to do, these people are clearly not up to the job, they are only experts at causing problems not solving problems.

bigbreadeaterellis said...

it's funny but obviously not in a literal sense because last week I went to stay with a good friend in essex for a few days and more and more she was telling me how difficult it is becoming for people to find a place to live because rents are getting more and more expensive.
and seeing this thread yesterday just confirms that it is true and i think it is a sad reflection of the times we are living in in which it was foretold that people in our time would be lovers of money and self obsessed and when you have a situation in which people cannot afford to pay rent because it is too expensive does that not reflect a money loving greedy and self interested society?
landlords put up rents because they want to make lots of profit or the system forces them to put up rents and because certain jobs don't pay enough it is no wonder why people cannot to pay rent these days.
and now that the so called government are planning to change the benefit system, it surely means that homelessness is going to become more and more common.
without question the current government will be kicked out so hard come the next general election it will hurt them.
and some would say they deserve it for what they have done to this country.