housing | Steve Middletons blog

Tories end housing benefit for under-21s

The new ‘Right to Buy’ is already asset-stripping housing association houses without properly providing replacements, entrenching inequality in the housing market even further. The new policy of preventing under-21s from claiming housing benefit is now going to put a home out of reach of thousands of young men and women at a critical time in…

You’re on your own

Anyone interested in the details of the summer budget can find some useful briefings and information here: BBC Local Government Association Liberal Democrats As a Liberal Democrat, this is obviously a difficult day. Our party spent five years preventing the Conservatives from implementing policies that we felt were unfair, as well as introducing distinctive Lib…

Five months to get a deposit back

In December I posted here about a battle to get my deposit returned for the house I rented in Whitefield. Blogging has been light, so I thought I should post an update. I eventually received my deposit back in February 2015 (I moved out in October 2014) a full 5 months after my tenancy ended.…

How quickly will I get my deposit back?

For the past couple of weeks I have been trying to get my deposit back from a house which Mrs M and I rented for the last year in Whitefield. Despite endless problems during the tenancy with the house alarm (which never worked) and particularly the boiler, we left the property in a much better…

There should be an end to rip off rent fees in Bury

Earlier this year Shelter wrote about the exorbitant letting fees charged by estate agents. They reported that 1 in 4 renters have said they’ve been charged an unfair fee and 1 in 7 renters are hit with fees of over £500 or more. Polling carried out in March shows 67 per cent of the British…