Participants in the Fair Deal Scheme should be obliged to rent out their houses

Early Riser said:
Presumably you are basing this on some general moral principle, rather than just that you have strong views about this matter. It would be helpful if you could state the general principle and then we might see how solidly grounded it is and how this could be applied to other situations.
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Maybe "moral" is the wrong word here. How about "wrong"?

It's just plain wrong to encourage people to leave houses idle.

And that doesn't matter if it's the Fair Deal Scheme or the ban on bedsits or the RPZs.

But this one is wrong on all counts.
It takes property off the market
And the taxpayer is paying for it.

Brendan
 
arbitron said:
No, people are penalised for holding assets as cash rather than as their family home. There is a 3-year cap to a maximum of 22.5% charge on the family home. This does not apply to cash or other assets.
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That is a very good point.

If I hold onto my home while I am in a nursing home, I pay a maximum of 22.5%

If I sell it which would be better for society , I will end up paying 7.5% of the value for longer.

Brendan
 
Brendan Burgess said:
It's just plain wrong to encourage people to leave houses idle.
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How are people being encouraged to leave houses idle?
That implies that the scheme actively discourages them from being rented out currently - could you clarify that?
I'm not clear on what the incentive is at the moment to leave the house idle versus renting it out.
 
jjm said:
How many houses are we talking about any figures please .I suspect when you take out all the people who finish up in a Nursing home where there partner still lives at home along with the people who spend less than a year in a nursing home before the die we are talking about very few houses

These houses will be coming on to the market when the die anyway,
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I doubt anyone has those figures to hand. Maybe someone could extrapolate?

We know that between 700 and 1,000 people are approved for FDS each month. More people join each month than leave the scheme.
 
Brendan Burgess said:
Hi Odyssey
I have set it out in this post
https://www.askaboutmoney.com/threa...to-rent-out-their-houses.204672/#post-1525898
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There is an incentive to not sell their house while alive I grant you.
But I would not interpret "in many cases, there would be no incentive to rent" to be the same as "people are being encouraged to leave houses idle."

If your primary concern is making more housing stock available, I think it would be possible to propose a reform of the Fair Deal scheme such that there would be an incentive to rent - without resorting to making it a mandatory requirement.
I think people could be persuaded of the benefits of a policy that encourages people to rent out their homes while participating in the Fair Deal scheme.

And such a reform would have far more chance of being politically possible.
 
Everyone, including myself, is throwing in their tuppence worth about this particular "problem. I see the sanctity of the family being muted as having to be preserved, and yet there are very many people who could and should be taking care of their parents in their old age but they don't and they won't. However, they'll make sure everything imaginable is done in order for themselves to profit from the assets of their parents and also make sure the state pays as much as possible to mind their very own flesh and blood, even down to pre- planning (scheming) the sale of any assets and turning them into cash which somehow has disappeared when applying for fair deal or admittance to a nursing home. Oh yes, we have many who love and dote on their Mum and Dad and will do everything for them, but boy oh boy do we have the takers?
Tough on anyone trying to get this working, politics is too open to being bought, sadly. Maybe the goverment should look at other ways where their involvement is not the final say.
 
Brendan Burgess said:
The current situation is as if we had shortages of food in Ireland and we were paying some farmers not to produce food.
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The analogy doesn't hold, though, as we don't have a shortage of houses in Ireland. We have a shortage of houses in certain locations. And we have homeless people refusing to live in certain situations.

Apart from the relatively small number of people availing of the Fair deal scheme, we have a plethora of holiday homes. Should these be requisitioned to deal with the crisis? Should people be obliged to move to where housing is available ? There is also a lot of free space in the city areas where homelessness is the biggest issues. Some of it is in large gardens attached to private property. Should the owners be obliged (morally or otherwise) to accommodate a mobile home as a temporary measure in the emergency ? Would any of this be fairer than attributing a moral responsibility for homelessness (or, at least, its solution) to people at the most vulnerable point in their lives?

Brendan Burgess said:
If I sell it which would be better for society , I will end up paying 7.5% of the value for longer.
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You are conflating two separate issues. Yes, the Fair Deal funding needs to be reformed. So why not do this by increasing both the 7.5% and the 3 year thresholds ? If it would help in the housing crisis, you could also separately incentivise the renting of these houses by exempting any income for the reckoning of Fair Deal. This would be more attractive to owners in high demand areas, where homelessness is most an issue.
 
Brendan Burgess said:
There should not be anything sacred about the family home during a housing crisis.

Brendan
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Brendan,

I don't agree that the two points are linked in any way.

Forcing people out of their homes is not a solution to the housing crisis; building homes is.

Whether the State should pay for us to go into nursing homes or not is a separate issue.

The family home is sacrosanct in my view.

Gordon
 
jjm said:
Are you saying Governments should not govern most of the problems we have at present can be traced back to governments no longer being directly responsible for getting value for how taxpayers money is spent just look at the HSE as an example,
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Not in the words you're using, but yes, a way has to be found that does not involve the electorate having undue influence that will have an always negative value overall.
 
The 2015 Review of The Nursing Home Support Scheme contains 104 pages of info and statistics, way too much detail for me at this hour on a Sunday evening.

Page 20 says at the end of 2015 there were 23,960 persons in under Fair Deal.

Page 24 says at the end of 2014 the average stay was 35 months.

Page 34 says 56.4% of applicants have a PPR.

The Appendix outlines long term care services in other countries.

http://health.gov.ie/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Review-of-Nursing-Homes-Support-Scheme.pdf
 
Brendan Burgess said:
Hi Gordon

I don't understand this reference? I don't think that anyone has proposed forcing anyone out of their homes?

Brendan
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It may be the family home in lots of cases .parent/parents often finish up going into a nursing home close to where they live and there family who live a long way from there parents home may be using the family home when they come to visit them .Lots of family members may have put investments into the family home which are in good condition ,You must remember lots of people who are in nursing homes today would only have the OAP pension and would have got lots help from family,Unless the family are forced out of there family homes and the home sold or rented I don't see how the can help sort the housing crisis,

I don't think that anyone proposed forcing anyone out of there homes but the cannot do anything to help the housing crisis unless there is some one living in there family home who are not family if a family member finishes up in a nursing home,May not be explained well but hope most will understand the above point i am making,
 
PMU said:
Why? The Fair Deal scheme is concerned with the provision of financial support for those with long term nursing home care needs. These needs have no correlation with the market for housing.

It's always reasonable to assess if the Fair Deal is being reasonably financed, but this does not appear to be a problem at present, as according to today's Indo, the government is to review the scheme to reduce the cost of nursing home care for farmers and small businesses.
http://www.independent.ie/business/farming/farmers-dont-want-special-treatment-from-fair-deal-36024806.html.

It would be most unreasonable if pensioners, i.e. those on fixed incomes, were forced to rent out their homes to make up any shortfall in Fair Deal funding if those in the farming and enterprise sectors get a special deal.
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noproblem said:
Everyone, including myself, is throwing in their tuppence worth about this particular "problem. I see the sanctity of the family being muted as having to be preserved, and yet there are very many people who could and should be taking care of their parents in their old age but they don't and they won't. However, they'll make sure everything imaginable is done in order for themselves to profit from the assets of their parents and also make sure the state pays as much as possible to mind their very own flesh and blood, even down to pre- planning (scheming) the sale of any assets and turning them into cash which somehow has disappeared when applying for fair deal or admittance to a nursing home. Oh yes, we have many who love and dote on their Mum and Dad and will do everything for them, but boy oh boy do we have the takers?
Tough on anyone trying to get this working, politics is too open to being bought, sadly. Maybe the goverment should look at other ways where their involvement is not the final say.
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You can see why lobby groups would have a field day if the fair deal scheme was at arms length from government ,
 
PaddyBloggit said:
Somebody in government must be following this thread:
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Great that Minister Murphy is listening to us.

I would have no issue with encouragement and incentives for those who are able to and want to rent vacant homes. It would make homes available and it would help families of those in care pay additional costs not covered under Fair Deal.

As long as there is no expectation that the elderly should rent their homes, and the elderly are not penalized if they don’t or can’t for whatever reason rent their homes.
 
Going back to the title of the existing thread I don't think there should be a "compulsory" requirement to rent out the family home in instances where a parent moves to a nursing home. However I think for families who wish to do so and for houses in areas where there is significant demand then the prohibitive terms of the fair deal scheme should be amended. It doesn't make sense to consider the rental income of the property as income for the nursing home resident and therefore to require the family to pay 80% of it towards the cost of care.

Providing incentives to upgrade/rennovate such houses in areas of high housing demand should be considered. Making it obligitory for families in remote rural areas to rent such houses makes no sense and will do nothing to solve the housing crises.
 
Gordon Gekko said:
Brendan,

I don't agree that the two points are linked in any way.

Forcing people out of their homes is not a solution to the housing crisis; building homes is.


Gordon
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I agree totally. There is all this talk about councils receiving funding to build new social housing however, there is no sign of any construction actuvity commencing. What is happening, why aren't the houses been built?
Brendan premise about forcing the elderly to sell up will not work because in reality, many of these houses are out in the sticks, in areas where there is no employment and even if they was employment/services in the area the houses would need massive renovations to bring them up to modern standards.

Many people from the countryside are moving to the cities leaving behind empty houses which no body is willing to buy and besides house prices in the country particularly the west are still very depressed.

The solution is to start a building program in areas where they is huge demand not try to force an elderly lady sell off her little cottage of modest value in the countryside while the developers keep sitting on vast parcels land banks in the hopes of lining their pockets with more dosh.

It's very easy to scapegoat the elderly as in general they don't have much of a voice.
 
delfio said:
There is all this talk about councils receiving funding to build new social housing however, there is no sign of any construction actuvity commencing. What is happening, why aren't the houses been built?
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Agreed. But lets see the outburst of NIMBYism that sprouts up whenever concrete (!) proposals materialise. Many of the NIMBYs will be the ones who now shout about the shame of homelessness.

delfio said:
It's very easy to scapegoat the elderly as in general they don't have much of a voice
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Agreed about scape-goating in relation to this specific proposal. But the elderly have quite a powerful voice politically (because they vote?) and have protected themselves relatively well over the past 10 years.The funding cap on the PPR contribution to Fair Deal badly needs to be reviewed.
 
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