Solution to benefit everyone
This week Inside Housing launches a campaign to find alternatives to the current proposals to cut the £21 billion housing benefit bill.
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What’s the Benefit? follows an outcry from tenants and landlords (social and private) about the plans announced in the recent emergency Budget to save £4 billion by 2015 through measures including cutting and capping the local housing allowance paid to just over 1 million private tenants in the UK.
Analysis by the Chartered Institute of Housing shows that, if this plan is introduced as planned from April next year, within a decade LHA payments would not to cover private rent in many areas of the UK.
And numerous charities and commentators, including former London mayor Ken Livingstone have warned of ‘devastating consequences’ long before then, with people forced out of homes they can no longer afford.
This is a truly shocking development and reaction to this and other coverage we have run since the chancellor’s speech on 22 June shows that our readers are keen to find alternative solutions.
This is the principal aim of What’s the Benefit?. We take as our starting point the economic reality that the housing benefit bill simply cannot be allowed to continue to soar - as George Osborne highlighted in his speech it has grown by almost 50 per cent in a decade.
We also contend that the government’s current plans are unacceptable. Instead we want you to tell us how the housing benefit system should be reformed, without forcing millions of people into far greater housing need and stretching public resources elsewhere.
We will then work with the National Housing Federation and the Chartered Institute of Housing to present the best ideas to the government. We will do this ahead of the comprehensive spending review on 20 October and with the aim of influencing the debate on the Welfare Reform Bill which is due to be published by then.
Mr Osborne said of the soaring welfare bill: ‘We are wasting the talent of millions, and spending billions on it in the process’. We aim to ensure this talent is fulfilled without ending up on the streets.
Visit our What’s the Benefit? page for more information or sign our petition to support the campaign