Emailed in by MBK from The Sunday Times:
A LANDLORD has collected taxpayer-funded rents of £3,550 a week by letting out two modest former council properties.
James Wiemer, 56, rented two three-bedroom properties in central London to two families — one with five children, the other with six. In one case he converted the property into five bedrooms and, in doing so, made it potentially eligible for housing allowance payments of up to £1,800 a week.
Wiemer, 56, who has received total rents of almost £400,000 in just over three years, has now joined the two families in a legal attempt to retain extra payments after the government imposed a £400-a-week cap.
A grim document
10 hours ago
10 comments:
FFS
Well so long as everyone understands that it is the families in the houses (which by the sound of it Mr Heimer has converted from bog standard social housing 2/3 bed semi's into many bedroomed mansions - no doubt at great personal expense) who should be pilloried across a centre spread in the Mail, and not Mr Heimer who has simply been demonstrating aspiration nation tendencies ...
BobE - grrrrrr.
You have to wonder why he's kicking up such a fuss. Housing Benefit is currently paid at market rates unless I'm mistaken, so he should be able to get the same rent from a private tenant. What's likely is that he's somehow got the council to pay him more than market rent.
L, yup.
B, good summary of Homey doublethink.
M, you aren't seriously suggesting that landowners with mates on the council receive some sort of backhander disguised as rent? Surely not?
M, I think you misunderstand the term "market rates". There are two markets, one for properties let to those in receipt of Housing Benefit and one for properties let to those not on HB. Insurers provide a handy dividing line, in that you need special insurance to let to people in receipt of HB. The rates in the HB market are higher, which is why our landlord hero doesn't want to rent to non-HB tenants. Also the rental income is more secure as the LAs pay the rent direct to the landlord.
BTW does anyone have a subscription to the Sunday Times? I'd like to know whether they take the logical line or the Homey one.
B, I have forwarded you the pdf of the full article.
Mark, thanks for that. Faintly Homey, I'd say - vaguely disapproving of tenents with foreign sounding names, but only disapproving of Mr Weimer because he's been stupidly greedy.
B, of course Mr W also has a vaguely foreign sounding name. Were he called Blandford or something then he'd deserve every penny.
I'm not sure that Mr Blandford would have been given the Sunday Times seal of approval, but I suspect they picked on Mr Weimer because of his name.
Interestingly there's a bit of a fuss going on down here about a development of some existing houses into HMOs, but the fuss is not about the council buying the houses, keeping them empty and then selling them at undervalue to one of the councillor's mates, nor yet that the developer will be raking in huge amounts of housing benefit for sub-standard acccommodation, but because the locals think that the HMOs will be used for housing "undesireable elements" who are not from around these parts.
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