There's an app for that

There were two similar articles in The Metro this week, Tenants face being thrown out of their homes if they get richer and Council tenants could lose their homes if they get a job under new reforms.

From the first link:

New renters will be offered fixed-tenancy agreements of as little as two years and could be evicted after that period if they become better off, housing minister Grant Shapps said.

He insisted the reforms would be fairer than the existing system, which sees 5million people on the housing waiting list while others have homes for life which they can pass to their children without means testing. ‘When a tenant goes to renew their contract, they will have to let their local authority know if their financial circumstances have changed,’ Mr Shapps said.

[runs out of room screaming, calms down, returns to keyboard]

This can all be dealt with much more simply. Once we have adopted the MW patented system that welfare claimants and lower earners are paid their Citizen's Income in full, but are given a PAYE code without a personal allowance (i.e. a BR or 'emergency' tax code), so if they earn as much as the personal allowance, the extra tax paid and the CI received net off to nothing in cash terms, it would be a doddle to simply scrap the entire system of trying to collect rents, council tax and then overlayering those with means-tested Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit.

Because of the way the numbers work, it would be fiscally neutral to give social tenants who are low earners (or potentially low earners) a PAYE code saying that an extra 20% income tax has to be deducted (i.e. a K-code), which would then be channelled via HMRC back to local councils (this can't be rocket science, it's like Student Loan Deductions, only without any need for particular precision).

So non-earners pay nothing, low earners pay a bit, median earners pay a market rent and above-median earners would actually be paying more than a market rent.

It's up to these people themselves to decide whether they are happy to overpay in the good years as insurance against possible future bad years, or whether their income is so secure that they could save money by renting privately or buying their own place to live. Local councils in turn will have every incentive* to attract more employers to the area and instead of giving priority to the needocracy, they'll have every incentive to allocate social housing to people doing low-to-middle paid jobs.

* Assuming that the Tories really do implement the plans to allow local councils to keep the rents that they collect, rather than them being pooled in Whitehall and then dished out again.

PS, I know for a fact that all policy wonks read each others' manifestos, all this was explained in the UKIP Welfare Paper of earlier this year so they can't pretend they're not aware of the idea.