The Tom Sawyer Principle (Politics)

[Mick Harper]

What is supposed to happen is that either the landlord reduces the rent (which saves public money) or the family moves to a smaller house (which saves public money). The first is unlikely because the rent is the market rent so why would the landlord take less. The second would be possible if the housing market worked as a market but it doesn't. For a start this family-on-welfare would need to find a month in advance, a deposit and meet the costs of house moving -- not to mention finding a place near where the kids go to school etc etc with a landlord prepared to take claimant families etc etc.

So the family goes on paying rent but now at the level of the new housing benefit limit. The landlord may swallow this for a bit -- after all he doesn't specially want to go to all the bother of getting new tenants and the shortfall is manageable. But soon the amounts are enough for him to start eviction proceedings. At this point it is not worth the family paying him any rent at all. It makes no difference to them what level the arrears are when they are evicted. Actually it's quite good for them, they can spend the housing benefit on themselves. The state just goes on paying the housing benefit ('Hey, look chaps, the new policy is working. We cut the housing benefit and nothing's happened.')

Eventually -- up to a year if the family get a bit of advice, but at least six months -- the eviction takes place, the local authority has to re-house the family and the cycle can begin all over again. Without the landlord this time who is ten thousand pounds out of pocket and a whole lot wiser about renting to welfare claimants. But help is at hand... .

[Mick Harper]

The weird thing about social reformers is that their ideology always leads them to do too much or it leads them to do not enough. This, as AE-ists know, is because they have an ideology. AE-ists don’t, they just want to crack the problem. So first off they ask, “Do we need housing benefit at all?” To which they answer, “Yeah. We might not have got ourselves into this hole in the first place but there are millions of people dependent on it so you have to work with the parameters you’ve been dealt.” So then we ask, what is the purpose of housing benefit? It is to provide minimally decent (using existing parameters) housing to people on welfare at the least cost to the state.

We now roll up our sleeves and work out how that is to be done. Without any ideology, which basically means not identifying goodies and baddies. As our chairman said at last year's conference, “Are their goodies and baddies in an algebraic equation?” Which caused an enormous tumult in the audience as one lot of people explained to another lot of people what an algebraic equation was. But back to housing benefit...

[Wile E. Coyote]

Actually Housing Benefit has already been done away with for most new claimants. It has been reinvented, and is now called Help with Housing Costs, and is one component of Universal Credit. Or to put it another way, the older, legacy Housing benefit cases are still locally managed by Local Authorities. New case Help with Housing Costs are administered by the DWP as part of Universal Credit. New UC claimants receive one payment that comprises of what used to be six different benefits all now rolled into one larger monthly payment. So its pretty difficult to actually distinguish what is Help with Housing and what isnt. The idea is that HB will be no more in about 2023.

[Mick Harper]

I'm a big picture man, Wiley, and don't know any of this but I can tell you're being hornswaggled on account of having been through these exercises all my life -- sometimes as a student of these things, sometimes as a recipient of these things but always as an expert on these things. By God, you have to be if you're an intellectual who has to be supported by the state because nobody else will. (Aside from being an inveterate scrounger.)

[Wile E. Coyote]

[Mick Harper]

I'd like to believe you, Wiley, but you're falling for all the old sleights of hand that 'reformers' produce in lieu of reforms

[Mick Harper]

I think we can agree that there is not a single home in London (or anywhere else anyone would want to live) that is even remotely close to the 'social rent'. For those who haven't written Landlord vs Tenant (Wildwood House, 1979) I should explain that a social rent goes back to a notional sum, assessed by a Rent Tribunal, whereby a comparable property could be rented taking into consideration size, amenities, location etc etc but not scarcity. In other words social rents would be the same as market rents in Gasworks Lane, Middlesborough but a small fraction of market rents in Eaton Square, London SW1.

This wheeze was thought up by the Labour Government in 1965 in the wake of the Rachman scandal (not the one that involved his live-in lover, Mandy Rice-Davies) to clobber landlords and reward Labour voters while not costing the government a penny. You just had to pop along to your local Rent Officer and you were paying a fraction of the rent this week compared to what you were paying last week. The result was that properties for rent in London disappeared overnight so anyone looking to rent something next week was out of luck. Squatting was born. Short-lifing was born. Local key-workers were born. Neighbourhood law centres were born. Shelter was born. They were glorious days, my little ones, glorious days....

[Mick Harper]

Anyone watching Murder 24/7 will have noticed that there was a thriving community of 'the homeless'. This in a quite small and unremarkable town, Colchester, so we might take it as a countrywide pattern.

This situation is normally tut-tutted at and blamed on an uncaring government but I don't think so. They were all clearly subject to various pressures -- centrally around mental health -- that brought them to this unconventional situation but all the same, in some sense, they have chosen it. This voluntary espousal of the kind of life that makes the rest of us shudder is by no means unusual. I remember the same was true of the hippy commune movement, and before that various religious operations.

It is though a fairly modern phenomenon and is down to two things that I can think of (other suggestions welcome). The first is the closure of the big asylums and the start of the 'care in the community' programme. The amount of care was pitiful but it was generally the case that you got benefits without too many questions being asked (a lot cheaper than not giving it to them) and charities provided a certain amount of fall-back in the form of hot meals and hostels.

But these are not that important because of the second factor. This is the availability of cheap and efficient camping gear and a fair amount of tolerance on the part of the locals where they camp. These homeless may be offered housing but a great many of them would rather not.

[Wile E. Coyote]

[Mick Harper]

Oh, OK, I seem to have become over-intimately involved with all ten of them. The begging aspect is interesting. As you say, it's the bit that jars. If all other things were equal, it would pay the town to send out a functionary first thing to give each beggar twenty sovs on condition they make themselves scarce. Rather like seaside resorts sending out people to clean the beach.

You seem to be in the pay of the town council yourself, Brother Wiley, does the local army garrison play any part?

[Mick Harper]

We're in uncharted territory which is what we're good at, so let's all think about suggestions. Keep politics out of it -- they're just trying to keep the coronavirus out of it -- but no need to keep the ideas practical in the sense of "They'll never wear that". Remember, it's uncharted territory, we don't know what they will or won't wear.

[Mick Harper]

First idea: call all the major broadcasters in and tell them it's wartime conditions i.e. they are subject to government direction and all existing contracts can be breached by force majeure.

[Mick Harper]

Though while we're on the subject what are the sports channels going to do for the next coupla months?

[Mick Harper]

The weirdness of Venezuela knows no bounds. The reason petrol was free was not because it has the world's largest oil reserves, not because the Iranian tankers had arrived but because there was no currency note low enough even to buy a tankful. In fact, there is a general shortage of money in circulation. I have never heard of such a thing in all my born days. Governments printing too much, yes; refusing to print enough, no. All this resulted in having to queue for five days to get petrol.

No wonder all motorists were overjoyed to hear that petrol prices were to go from practically zero to practically US prices overnight. Surely another first. But you'll probably need dollars to buy it. However, this is a socialist, poverty-stricken country at loggerheads with America so naturally there are now prodigious queues of Venezuelans with brand new gas-guzzlers brandishing bundles of dollar notes. What happens when the Iranian oil runs out after thirty days? There's plenty more where that came from, says Iran. That's your Socialist International that is.

[Mick Harper]

I once watched a documentary on Mexican music. Everyone was in raptures about it but it only took a single documentary to realise that there wasn't much to it and it was only any good because Mexicans had spent a long time getting this small amount right and you only ever heard this small amount before going off to listen to non-Mexican music. For all I know this applies to Mexicans too.

It was the same spending three hours listening to Samira Ahmed in raptures over Persian art. She even stated with enormous pride how everyone in Iran today is enraptured by the paintings, sculptures, architecture, poetry, what-have-you of the Golden Age. Which varies with the genre but is never less than five hundred years ago. It's the same everywhere you go in the world (unless you've been somewhere I haven't) except here (leaving aside for a moment where here is).

I'm second to none in my contempt for the avant garde and all its works but if it is the price we have to pay to be not stuck in medieval mariachi, it's a price I am prepared to pay. Put me down for ten bob.