New Government Policy on OAP's & Prisoners

Think that just about sums up Britain these days:D

 

I know what you're saying Shiney, but at the end of the day I wouldn't change places with these people. Would you ?
As I see it, taxation is the price we pay for civilisation.
We can pay our taxes and let the state take care of the problems
or we can say no- in which case problematic people will just come and take what they want and you can defend yourself.
I know you did make the case for people who deserve to be supported - the elderly and sick.
I have no problem paying my taxes to support them.
Like you I see the wasters we support, but as I said, we give it to them or they come and take it.
That is the brutal facts.
I just prefer to give it to them.
I don't want to be our there with a gun defending my property.
It maybe sounds a bit dramatic but I think that's just the facts.
Pay your taxes and live in peace.

 

Paying taxes doesn't necessarily protect you, unfortunately. We had an interesting experience recently when we found that the little terraced house next to us had been turned into a short term hostel for offenders on Home Detention Curfew and homeless bailees awaiting trial. The MoJ was (and still is) snapping up run down buy-to-lets for use as unsupervised prisons. No planning permission or local consultation is necessary. At first I thought it was some kind of mistake and that if I just wrote to the nice people at the MoJ they would see how wrong it was for us to be woken at all hours of the night, have policemen crawling all over the place regularly and generally put up with all manner of nuisance. There was also the small matter of our house becoming unsaleable overnight. It soon became clear, however, that we were not part of the Big Plan. Put simply, we were no one's job. Thankfully, the hostel next door to us has now gone, but the new government has announced its intention to extend to project. My advice to anyone who is thinking of buying a house which seems unusually good value is to ask a lot of questions about the property next door.

 

I don't think by any means that prisoners should be treated in inhuman conditions like in the old days, but prisons shouldn't be too lenient otherwise they would not serve their purpose.
There is a lot of workforce in there that could be used to bring prosperity to the society.

 

Hi John

Well, thankfully the problem is over for us (although the problems of having a badly managed buy-to-let next door never entirely go away). In our case, we had been living in what is an ordinary, if not terribly posh, residential street, for around fifteen years when this happened to us. Unfortunately there is no legal control over this sort of thing and that, I'm afraid, is good enough for the Ministry of Justice. The bit I wrote about checking before you buy was really a warning to others! Although hostels quickly become known to the residents in a locality, it's not something a solicitor will necessarily flag up, since it seems that the vendors don't have to declare what is going on next door. It is basically 'buyer beware'. There is no official change of use - it's still a residential property in legal terms, even if several chaotic offenders have been placed in it.

I'm afraid the experience of living with the hostel has changed my mindset forever. I dealt with daft but highly paid public servants who couldn't even spell but still felt they could patronise me and imply that I was a nasty little bigot for wanting an ordinary family life. None of them, of course, was in any danger of actually going home to a hostel themselves. I sat around council tables with fragrant ladies who had non-job titles such as 'Deputy Head of Inclusion' and 'Wellbeing Officer'. Needless to say, concepts of wellbeing didn't apply to us, only to people who had chosen what is euphemistically termed an alternative lifestyle.

I've never been particularly motivated by money but now I think I've been rather naive. The only way to avoid this sort of thing is to have the funds to move!

 

I shouldn't laugh as I am getting on a bit myself,but it certainly makes you think.
I watched my father die of cancer and dimentia in a residential home.
He was in two, the first one was only a short time and was awfull, but we were very lucky to get him onto a very nice home where he was treated with respect and dignity and so were we.
It is a problem of our time and no one seems to want to address it.
We all get old eventually so whatever it costs....We MUST ALL pay.

 

Roders, the problem with that is we will all pay into some government scheme or other for yonks only to be told at the end of it all that once again the sums have gone wrong and there's no money for anything other than a duvet cover and a bucket .

 

I know this is the real world Clara,but that is the kind of pessimism I would like to dispel .

 

I like your optimism, Roders. I just don't trust politicians. Personally I'm relying on gin and seppuku.

 

That's just terrible ClaraLou and I don't think "they" should just be allowed to move antisocial and problematic people into residential areas. They wouldn't put them next door to themselves, that's for sure.
I'm glad the problem has been moved away from you now but it will be be next door to someone else.
Don't know what the answer is but that can't be right.

 

You're right, Alice, all we've done is to move the problem on to another unfortunate family and I'm not happy about it. I think supervision is the key - there has to be someone on hand all the time to look after people with problems because often they can't really look after themselves. If our hostel tenants remembered their keys so that they could get in for their curfew, they were doing very, very well. On one occasion they gave up looking for keys and kicked the front door in! And the smoke detectors went off all the time because they'd left something burning in the kitchen and forgotten about it. Unfortunately properly run and supervised schemes cost money - and there isn't much of that about.