To a starving Treasury wolf, the fatted calf that is the housing benefit budget looks like breakfast, lunch and dinner combined. After all, has the budget not swollen over the decades and does it really provide astounding value for money? And who can defend the much quoted example of the Westminster family whose housing costs absorbed a staggering £104,000? Surely those who cannot pay for themselves should not be subsidised to live in luxury.
Such is the thinking behind the set of proposals contained within the recent Budget. A cap on the highest rents (mostly in London) will be followed by a reduction in local housing allowances everywhere, with future uprating limited too. Working age households in private and social housing alike will see their benefit cut if they are deemed to have any spare bedrooms and in 2013 anyone on jobseeker’s allowance for more than a year loses 10 per cent of their benefit.
Is there any defence that can be mounted? Well, I don’t know many people who, furnished with £20 billion plus of public money, would choose to funnel so much to private landlords. With some exceptions, private rents have soared and are often substantially above rents in the social sector.
A few families are indeed in properties where the rent levels are eye-watering. Yet these extreme examples are so rare (a few dozen at most in the whole country) that it would be a grave error to construct a policy around them. We must not propose a cure that is worse than the disease. Most low income households in private rented homes are there because they have either lost their jobs and are trying to keep a roof over their heads, are pensioners with long residency, people unable to access social housing or have been directed there by local councils as part of a homelessness prevention strategy (70,000 or so households last year alone fell into this category). Over the years, as social housing has shrunk as a sector, more and more low income households have ended up in expensive, insecure private tenancies. So public spending has shifted from building homes at reasonable rents to funding private homes at sometimes dizzying levels.
The choice tenants will face is to either swallow a substantial cut in their already low incomes or leave. Many will become homeless, while others will chase the increasingly pressurised supply of rental homes in the country’s poorest areas, smashing any hope of building mixed communities. Improving the supply of affordable homes is central to any realistic and non-punitive attempt to reduce benefit expenditure, as, of course, is a strategy of full employment and a living wage.
There will be many of us seeking to engage in this process before real damage is done to huge numbers of vulnerable people.
Karen Buck is MP for Westminster North
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Readers' comments (6)
Gavin Rider | 16/07/2010 10:14 am
I would like to know what is meant by the rather bizarre comment at the end - "others will chase the increasingly pressurised supply of rental homes in the country’s poorest areas, smashing any hope of building mixed communities". What does building mixed communities (a social engineering objective) have to do with meeting housing need (a civil engineering objective)?
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Sidney Webb | 16/07/2010 10:31 am
If rents are capped instead of benefits there will not be a need to defend the vulnerable, and the scale of savings to the taxpayer will be vastly more Ms Buck. Surely this must interest your party, or are the interests of the private sector landlords more important to you.
Cap rents, build homes, restore the stable housing policies which benefited us through the 1950's, at a time when the borrowing to GDP ratio was 5-times worse than currently.
It is not therefore a question of economic ability but MPs with the wit and will to do what needs to be done in the wider interests of the nation (assuming that you agree that people are 'the nation'). So get off of your soap box Ms Buck and perform the action that you are in a position to achieve, vote this evil and poorly thought out government measure down.
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Brian Capaloff | 16/07/2010 11:30 am
'Bizarre comment'. I would have thought the intent behind Ms Buck's comments were blatantly clear: the Shirley Porteresque consequence of these changes to HB will be the shifting of certain members of the community into sink estates, leaving those more able to afford rents to enjoy their new communities without having to be in close proximity to the great unwashed. Or perhaps that's too obvious!
And meeting Housing Needs is a civil engineering objective? As someone who has worked in the 'Housing Needs' end of Housing for 20 years, I must admit I never thought of all of the clients coming through the door as being yet more demands on bricks and mortar and the design and composition of housing. I tended to see them as people with vulnerabilities and real needs. The bricks and mortar are essential ingredients, but Housing Needs is primarily about the people. And, to go back to the point of this column, it is a great number of these people who will be condemned to living in newly developing ghettoes for the 'undeserving poor', through the benefit changes that have been announced.
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Chris | 16/07/2010 7:44 pm
A labour politician that has loyally supported her government since being elected, never spoken out against the perpetuation of the housing shortage nor the deliberate milking of the benefit system by private landlords.
What a shame you never did something for tenants when you had the power to do so. What a bigger shame you will not personally suffer the results of such sloth.
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Melvin Bone | 19/07/2010 12:44 pm
Thanks Mrs Buck, but you really should have spoken up when you were in power and had the opportunity to actually fix the financial mess that you created.
You were driving the LHA wagon when all the wheels fell off. It seems rather rich to criticise those trying to fix it.
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Anonymous | 19/07/2010 1:36 pm
"Well, I don’t know many people who, furnished with £20 billion plus of public money, would choose to funnel so much to private landlords."
I don't know many people who, when furnished with £65k plus of public money, would choose to funnel so much to some MP who does nothing to help yet criticises any attempt to sort out the mess that she has helped to create.
Buck - Why don't you go away and come back with a workable solution rather than raise all of the obvious criticisms that i have already seen a hundred times on this website?
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