my sister turned 21 just days before our mum passed away, now on top of having to come to terms with our loss we have been told my sister and her 2 young children will have to leave their home as it was a council property in my mums name. This just doesn't make sense, she is entitled to a 2 bed council property, that's what shes living in, Corby council want to move her into another 2 bed property and give her house to someone else for absolutely no reason we can find. Not only will this cause stress to my sister and her family it will also involve alot of extra work for the council. How can this be a justifiable way of spending tax payers money?

Foreign investors are buying up chunks of new housing developments across Britain, making it even harder for young people to purchase their first home, an investigation by The Times has found. Overseas buyers are spreading beyond London, purchasing flats in the midlands, the north and the capital’s satellite towns as the fall in the value of the pound makes property cheaper. The Times has established that more than 93 per cent of flats in one of Manchester’s biggest housing developments have been bought by foreign residents or companies registered overseas. Only 17 of the 282 flats were bought by British residents and only two are being lived in by UK owners. The rest are empty or being rented out. Foreign buyers are also snapping up properties in Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle, Cambridge, Slough and Brighton as they look beyond London for better returns and lower taxes. Estate agents say that the surge of foreign money is pricing out young buyers. Daniel Valentine, author of a report on the housing crisis for the Bow Group, a Conservative think tank, described the scale of overseas investment as a scandal. He said: “British people face a grim future unless the government starts to limit the scale of foreign ownership. Overseas investors are inflating prices across the entire market, meaning most people on average wages will never be able to buy a home. There is effectively an infinite supply of international money that can pour into the country. There are 63 million potential buyers in China alone.” The development in Manchester, where prices started at £148,000 for a one-bedroom flat, has buyers from 18 countries, including Azerbaijan, Zimbabwe and Nigeria. More than 65 came from Hong Kong and Singapore, both of which restrict Britons from buying property there. More than 130 of the properties were bought by two secretive companies based in the British Virgin Islands, a tax haven. The government announced plans this week to reveal the true owners of these companies. The situation in Manchester is mirroring what has been happening in the capital for years. In 2014 foreign investors bought three quarters of new-build properties in central London, according to the estate agent Knight Frank. That trend appears to have accelerated since. In one development in London’s Docklands examined by The Times, all but a dozen of the 56 owners had Chinese names with almost all the rest from the Middle East or Asia. Overseas investors are no longer from wealthy elites but come from the growing middle classes of expanding Asian economies. Lucien Kirk, of the estate agent Savills, said: “These middle-class buyers are more likely to need high-yield properties [that pay good rents relative to their value], which is why they are increasingly looking outside London.” Sadiq Khan, mayor of London, has commissioned a review into foreign ownership in the capital, which is expected to demand that new homes are marketed locally for at least six months before they go on sale to foreigners. One estate agent’s website in Hong Kong advertises more than 80 British new-builds, in areas including Basingstoke, Coventry and Slough. Most have not yet been built. The international estate agent Juwai.com estimates that Chinese investment in foreign property could quadruple within ten years. Steve Turner, of the Home Builders Federation, said: “A lot of developments rely on foreign investors to get started, particularly [in] high-rise developments. The upfront investment gives confidence to lenders. You can’t get that [money] from British buyers because UK mortgage rules limit offers to six months and some of these projects need finance up to three years in advance.” (Article from the Times Newspaper)

Fergus Wilson, a major buy-to-let landlord in Kent, has recently openly declared that he will not rent to people based on the colour of their skin “because of the smell of curry”. He also refuses to rent to single parents, victims of domestic violence, workers on low incomes, families with children, pet owners, smokers and single adults. It it frankly unbelievable that in this day and age a landlord is legally allowed to discriminate like this, and we demand that the minister for housing stamps out this behaviour as soon as possible. Fergus Wilson and other landlords like him seem to think that we’re still living in feudal times, it’s time our laws caught up with the current century and this behaviour was made illegal.

It's important because there are a shortage of accommodation for the general community, an feel it is wrong to build for student accommodation, as there is a majority of building developments city wide more than enough and not enough for families in that area

Current planning law states that if a developer will make less than 20% profit on a new development, they can ignore a council's regulations about building affordable and social housing. Leaked documents from several developers have shown that the maths they use to work out their profit margins are purposefully misleading, allowing them to claim they will make less than 20% profit on a development by undervaluing the prices of the houses they will sell and over-costing the labour. To combat this Islington, Greenwich, Lambeth and Bristol councils have introduced a policy that forces developers "viability assessments" to be made public. By bringing these dodgy maths into the public domain, Councils, campaigning groups and individuals will be able to hold developers to account and force them to use more honest maths. Resulting in more affordable and social housing for Camden.

It is abhorrent that in a country as wealthy as ours, a man has been allowed to die on the streets of Glasgow because he had nowhere to go. Glasgow City Council website states that: “As a minimum, the council will arrange for you to receive: Advice and Information Temporary Accommodation” We demand that Glasgow City Council acts immediately to fulfil it's duty to the people of Glasgow. Everyone who presents themselves at a Council facility as homeless, should immediately be provided with somewhere safe and warm to stay, until such times as they are able to find permanent accommodation. Furthermore, we demand an end to the policy of abandoning our friends who are deemed to have made themselves intentionally homeless. This unfairly punishes people unfamiliar with the law or who are victims of bullying by rogue landlords.

People who live in social housing are already paying high tenancy fees, this will add more anxiety to the very ones who need social housing. Paying nearly £100 for a 3 bed house is putting the roofs over the heads of children at risk. The Government will pay more for housing benefit thus meaning the tax payer will be also footing the bill. The Riverside Group have intentionally made more than a third of their manual workforce redundant, how do the expect to maintain thousands of properties with less workforce? The tenants are having to pay for remedial works already and are having to wait long hours for a response to urgent works. This is a stealth tax on the very people who need / rely on social housing.

The cut will leave young people in situations of abuse, or being thrown out of their family home, more vulnerable to sleeping rough. Government cuts to social care, youth services, children’s services and advice centres mean that those who become homeless are less likely to get support to help them out of their situation. The estimated number of rough sleepers in England has doubled since 2010. This is a national issue being spearheaded from Bradford which is the youngest city in the country and will be the youngest in Europe by 2020.

To stop families being moved for the profit of landlords!! It is only business for landlords but is a home to tenants, there should be a new scheme to allow private tenanants to buy and the government should be able to allocate another property for that landlord to rent out!!!

The housing allocation policy that accompanies the spare room subsidy has done nothing more than stop families from finding a home or forcing them into accommodation too small for purpose and children and young adults forced to share bedrooms. To add to the misery it forces people to live in the short term and not allowing families to settle into a home

The family home as been in our family for 30++years

This city desperately needs more houses and we, the undersigned, are sick of selfish NIMBYism on the part of people who are more concerned about their view than they are about doing anything that might alleviate the housing crisis. It's about time those of us who us who want to see the crisis solved started trying to make our voices heard too. Also they've got 9,000 signatures for their petition opposing development in Stratford and that winds me right up.