Surely the fact that the government gives you cash to give to a landlord just inflates rents by ensuring everyone can afford a bedsit by default, with the workers then immediately filling the slightly better accomodation of studios and flat shares etc. You've immediately outstripped the supply.

Yes the minimum wage is at its lowest in relation to costs, but when rent is everyone's largest outgoing it's never going be anywhere near enough. The more you pay the more viable it will be to come and work here from abroad if you're happy to share a room.

This is definitely a problem, especially given that the state has no real housing stock with which to offer a control factor to the private market. Realistically, the situation is such that the provision of housing benefit actually creates a greater problem for people who work (high housing costs due to a secondary market driven by landlords and people renting out second properties as an investment).

The problem here is that no government wants to actually implement real regulation on the rental market such as forcing councils to levy rental charge caps. And they have been remiss in pursuing landlords over taxation from properties and capital gains where people have rented properties out to pay mortgages or provide income, and then later sold what is arguably a business asset.

This has slowly changed over the last decade, but its too little too late, as the revenue generated by capturing any rented property income (with corporate tax charges) and the sale of such investments (via capital gains) should have been used to feed back into the high costs of housing benefit.

Like any market it required real control and regulation, especially once the housing boom began and council properties were mostly sold off (these served as a competition to private rental markets).

That's why we need to break away from employment of overseas workers or EU migrant workers, or to fix the capacity of the working classes to actually do those jobs. By fixing a reasonable minimum wage, it makes it viable to take such jobs, and for the UK to begin migrating people within the UK to fill jobs (in a similar way to how we migrate people from Poland to do such jobs) because they can move their families etc with them (from low employment areas) or it becomes viable for them to work.

We need to end the Freedom of Movement from the EU and tighten up restrictions on other working migration so that it is restricted to where the employment cannot be first obtained within the UK (if necessary the government should subidise moving people geographically to fulfil jobs and training).

The attraction of migrant labour is that its cheap. I don't have an issue with someone who, say is a Nurse, coming to the UK to work, if there is no availability to Nurses in the UK to fill that role. If necessary we need to leave the EU and control working migration so that it supplements the long term interests of the UK and UK residents, even if that means spending more revenue and cutting profits.

If there are vacancies we need to identify how to fill them from our own resources. Even if that costs us in the shorter term.

"One Nation Under God, has turned into One Nation Under the Influence of One Drug"
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Great post.

An economic model where 2 full time employed adults still need the state to pay them more money on top just to reach a minimum standard of living and be able to afford to rent a mediocre property is not a model that's defensible.

The injustice is compounded when you see those rental and taxpayer-funded housing benefit payments often going straight into the pockets of buy-to-letters and already wealthy landlords, who then perpetuate the cycle by buying up more property to extract rental income from.

Well I think Simon's head is large; always involved in espionage. (Name that tune)

Probably bad news for people who bought to rent, given that an increase in council housing would see a drop in demand for property would drop, along with rents, likely trapping them with negative equity on their mortgages.

But f**k it, that's the risk with investments, they don't always work out.

"One Nation Under God, has turned into One Nation Under the Influence of One Drug"
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I do agree that the cost of living, especially in the South East is just disgusting. My Mrs is from the North West and she can't believe property prices where we currently live (Horley). You can get a four bedroom property for around £370,000 in some areas where she's from. It wouldn't buy you a three bedroom property round here.

Why should anyone be entitled to state-subsidised housing, when the rest of us have to pay market rents or pay the going rate on a mortgage?