I actually agree with you RC. I suspect this landlord, like many others, will have been dropped in the shit by the housing benefit changes (excuse me while my heart bleeds). In which case, if he had simply been honest and said that, due to the changes, this meant that he could no longer afford to keep these tenants since his debt to income ratio had been knackered by the new benefit caps; in which case, he has decided to rent the properties out to Eastern European migrants because they will take low paid jobs that will allow them to live 10 to a house and still be able to pay the rent he is asking, I would have had some degree of understanding, at least economically speaking.RenewableCandy wrote:While not disagreeing that the landlord here is making other people's lives a misery, could it be that he is also being dropped in it by recent changes from HMG?
I mean, you hear a lot about housing benefit etc being delayed, miscalculated, or whatever. If his income is becoming unreliable as a result, perhaps he hasn't got much of a choice.
However, if he doesn't want people who get any type of benefit, these days that rules out rather a large proportion of the working population, not just the sick and unemployed. If other landlords follow suit, that means places where housing is expensive will soon find themselves devoid of anyone who does any actual, local, work (as opposed to managers, consultants etc). So, no cleaners, no dusties, no firefighters or teachers...
Trouble is, that wouldn't sound very nice or morally grounded, though, would it.....
So, instead, he comes out with some poisonous shite about immigrants being somehow superior to the incumbent tenants. This way he thinks he can ride on the back of the current moral justification used by the authorities to keep dissent about immigration policies suppressed. The fact that this makes the scumbag look even worse to many will have no doubt been lost on him.
Nasty, nasty, nasty.....
