The UK is a generous, welcoming state indeed. The UK provides money, homes, medical care and education all free, especially if you aren’t British and you don’t work hard to earn any money yourself.
Nobody would deny that we should help those less well off than ourselves. Letting agents, particularly, see individuals and families that need help, could do with a break, that have lost their own homes due to difficult circumstances in their lives.
But has the country gone completely bonkers? Do we really have to give a Somali asylum seeker and his family a beautiful home in star-studded Kensington at a base cost to the public purse of £8000 per month? This family were welcomed into England eleven years ago when they left their homeland during the Somali civil war.
They didn’t like the five bedroom house they were living in; it was not in a very good area, (sorry, those of you who live in Kensal Rise, it’s obviously not as nice as war-torn Somalia) the schools weren’t good enough, the shops not sufficiently interesting.
The Mail on Sunday broke the story, saying that Mr Nur, the highest value housing benefit tenant in the land (unless you know better) used to earn £6.50 an hour as a bus driver, but he lost his job 18 months ago and is trying to retrain, currently via a course which teaches him how to apply for a job. His wife has never worked, as she has seven children to look after. They are totally dependent on state benefits.
Their new house is an 1840s three storey, five bedroom, two bathroom house which was bought for £2.1 million in 2007 by a company called Brophy Group Business Ltd, registered address is a post office box in Liechtenstein.
The advertised rent for the house is believed to be £1050 per week, which is 2.6 times as much as the new Government’s limits for housing benefit claims, but these limits do not come into effect until next April.
In the meantime, this family is living in luxury, their council is saying that it is “an unreasonably generous benefits system which is open to abuse” and that it is powerless to stop people moving into private accommodation in the area.
