Place your Betts
Labour MP Clive Betts narrowly won a cross-party vote to chair the Communities and Local Government department’s select committee, giving him power to scrutinise the government’s housing policies. In his first interview since taking the job, Lydia Stockdale finds out why MPs were willing to take a gamble on him - and why he’s supporting our housing benefit campaign.
‘Is it different working with Tories since the election?’ asks our photographer presuming Clive Betts, who has just walked off to buy us some drinks, is one of David Cameron’s backbenchers.
With slightly ruddy cheeks and dressed in a light coloured suit on a hot summer’s day, Mr Betts is every inch the archetypal Englishman. But he’s is not a Conservative - he’s been a Labour MP for almost two decades.
Perhaps his ambiguous appearance was one reason MPs of all political inclinations felt comfortable voting the 60-year-old MP for Sheffield South East into the chair of the Communities and Local Government department select committee last month. It is now his job to lead the scrutiny of the coalition government department in charge of housing led by, the unmistakably Tory, Eric Pickles.
This is the first year in which select committee chairs have been directly elected by the entire House of Commons, and Mr Betts managed to beat former Labour housing minister Nick Raynsford to the role by just three votes - 279 to 276.
Well-known housing doyen Mr Raynsford would surely be the sector’s odds on favourite to win - but Mr Betts is no rank outsider.
A ring around housing professionals who’ve worked directly with him elicits nothing but praise for Mr Betts - he could be a strong advocate for the sector, it seems, at a time when it needs a committed representative in the corridors of power.
As far as Inside Housing is concerned, he’s already made a good start. Earlier this month, we launched What’s the Benefit?, a campaign which aims to find a fairer way to reduce the UK’s £21 billion housing benefit bill. This magazine and the 482 readers who have so-far signed our online petition in support of the campaign, believe government plans to cut the bill, introduced in last month’s emergency Budget, risk driving thousands of vulnerable people from their homes and into poverty.
Campaigning spirit
With stakes that high there’s no time to waste - as soon as we take our seats in the café area of Westminster office building Portcullis House with coffees compliments of Mr Betts, my first question is whether he’ll back the campaign. The man tasked with holding the housing minister to account puts his name to it without hesitation (see video, below).
‘I’m extremely concerned it will create additional poverty for people who are already on very low incomes,’ he states.
Under the proposals, people who have been on jobseekers allowance for more than a year will see their housing benefit cut by 10 per cent from April 2013. ‘If after a year of not working they suddenly find their benefits cut, and the amount of rent they pay isn’t totally covered because the eligible levels have been reduced, then that potentially poses very real problems for individual families,’ comments the MP, whose political life began in 1976 when he was elected onto Sheffield Council.
Mr Betts grew up in a council house in the south Yorkshire city. By the age of 37 he was leader of its local authority - his former landlord. His 34 years’ experience in local and national politics means he is aware of the potential fallout of the coalition government’s budget cuts.
‘Housing benefit has a purpose of helping people who can’t afford to pay the rent to pay it,’ he says. ‘What we have to address - this is me speaking on a personal level - is the extent to which housing benefit and council tax benefit get withdrawn as people’s income [increases]. Because when they move into work, they find themselves almost no better off - the solution to that isn’t to cut housing benefit.’
Just as Mr Betts is about to go into more detail about possible alternatives to cutting benefits, we are interrupted and the thread of our conversation is broken. No doubt it’s a subject he will be returning to, though, given the uproar caused by the proposed changes.
As he later points out, his own constituents have not yet started coming to his surgery with concerns about Whitehall plans - but it’s only a matter of time. ‘With many of these things, it only occurs to people when they suddenly find they’ve got less money.’
The CLG select committee chair - whose constituency is close to deputy prime minister Nick Clegg’s in the Steel City - is firmly in place. However, the 10 MPs who will make up the rest of the team are unknown at the time our interview. This means Mr Betts can’t say whether the group will launch an inquiry into the potential impact of the government’s housing benefit plans. Even so, he does point out that although housing benefit falls under the Department of Work and Pensions, the planned cuts are of concern to the CLG.
‘You have people staying in completely unacceptable circumstances, staying on people’s sofas because they can’t afford property in the area,’ says the MP who slips into his native Yorkshire brogue when he speaks quickly and passionately about a subject. ‘If people are living in areas where rents are so high they can’t be covered by housing benefit [or local housing allowance], they get displaced to other areas where they don’t have support of parents, grandparents - sources of childcare that enable people to go out to work.’
Phyllis Starkey, the previous chair of the CLG select committee who lost her parliamentary seat in May’s general election, says she is ‘really pleased’ that Mr Betts - a committee member since 2002 - was elected as her successor. ‘He will maintain the focus on housing, which is now even more important,’ she says. ‘He’s hard working and dedicated.’
Henry Gregg, public affairs manager for the National Housing Federation, agrees. He recalls that whenever the NHF has given its expert opinion on matters under scrutiny by the select committee, the ‘omnipresent’ Mr Betts has been there.
There’s evidence aplenty of his dedication to housing. Between 2005 and 2010 the Sheffield MP chaired the all party group for urban development, and he continues to chair the all party group for arm’s-length management organisations, declaring himself a huge fan of the ALMO model. ‘I think some of the national [housing associations] may be a little bit remote [from tenants],’ he says - ‘they ought to look at what ALMOs have done.’
Gwyneth Taylor, policy director at the National Federation of ALMOs, believes Mr Betts was instrumental in overturning the Labour government’s decision to cut decent homes funding for round six ALMOs last year, successfully lobbying ministers, MPs and peers in the House of Lords.
A former opposition and then government whip throughout the late 1990s, Mr Betts has obviously learned how to influence politicians. ‘He’s a formidable voice for the sector,’ comments Ms Taylor. ‘He knows the ins of outs of how parliament works.’
Putting housing first
The former local authority leader, who captains Parliament’s cross-party football team, is now pushing forward with all things local government and housing-related. In a finance debate in the House of Commons at the end of last month he expressed his concerns about the coalition government’s commitment to localism. ‘I find it difficult to understand how a localist agenda involves a secretary of state telling local authorities how to collect their refuse,’ he mused, a reference to the communities minister’s insistence that bins must be emptied weekly.
In the same finance debate in June, Mr Betts ‘expressed concerns about the future of the housing market’. ‘I think the significant cuts in public expenditure underway could well stagnate the private sector housing market. If there are no market rent houses being built then cross-subsidy is stalled, and social housing grant goes less far.
‘We could be facing a situation where there are more people wanting social housing as people aren’t in the market to buy and fewer social houses being built - I think we could be in for a really difficult time in the next few years,’ he explains.
One of the coalition government’s most pressing concerns, in Mr Betts’ opinion, is ‘sorting out the housing revenue account’. ‘Local authorities need to be able to plan ahead,’ he says.
When it comes to housing and local authority finances Mr Betts says Labour was ‘beginning to sort things out when the election arrived.’ Having been voted in by MPs from all political parties, he believes he has a ‘clear mandate’ to press forward and start scrutinising the Lib-Con government and make sure the work Labour started is continued.
The CLG select committee was scheduled to meet for the first time earlier this week, and its chair wants to ‘try to start the ball rolling with one or two inquiries before the recess,’ which begins at the end of this month.
‘More affordable homes - that’s something I think at some point we’re going to want to explore on the committee,’ he says with confidence. Inside Housing’s What’s the Benefit? campaign will hopefully also get a mention. If anyone can raise its profile within parliament its Mr Betts, whose popularity among fellow MPs, red, yellow and blue obviously comes down to more than the cross-party appeal of a light summer suit.
Scandal and enduring support
Before meeting Clive Betts it was, of course, obligatory to run his name through Google. The result shows that Mr Betts has consistently raised the profile of housing, speaking up about the decent homes programme, the importance of guaranteed security of tenure and the need for more affordable homes. It also throws up events the CLG select committee chair would probably rather forget.
In 2003, Mr Betts, who is now openly gay, was suspended from the House of Commons for seven days for hiring an ex-rent boy as an assistant. ‘That was not an easy period - when your private life, your sexuality is blasted all over the pages of national newspapers,’ says Mr Betts.
Likewise, the expenses scandal this time last year wasn’t a pleasant experience for him. ‘It was difficult through that trying to explain to people that I live and work Sheffield and I also have to work in London and live in London,’ comments the MP. ‘Alright, the nature of the scheme we devised clearly didn’t have public support - we moved to a new system and hopefully we can now get on with it.’
While others have fallen after scandals such as these, Mr Betts’s political status is undiminished. He held his Sheffield Attercliffe parliamentary seat in the 2005 election, and was voted back in with a sizable majority when the boundaries of his constituency of 18 years changed in May this year. And, of course, he won the support of MPs when he was voted in as CLG select committee chair.
‘I believe this support came because of my knowledge and experience in local government, housing and planning, but also because I have always worked consensually and inclusively,’ he said at the time.
What’s the Benefit?
What’s the Benefit is Inside Housing’s campaign to find a fairer way to reduce the housing benefit bill than the government’s proposed cuts. Here Mr Betts explains why he is backing the campaign.
Our demands
- A parliamentary inquiry into the potential impact of the changes
- To get 500 people to sign a petition voicing concern about the changes and supporting alternative action to bring housing benefit under control
- To work with our readers to devise an alternative solution to curbing the housing benefit bill that will be presented to the government ahead of the October comprehensive spending review
How to get involved
- Sign our What’s the Benefit petition
- Send your suggestions for alternative, fairer benefit reforms to editorial@insidehousing.co.uk
- Join our backers by emailing a picture of yourself and a line explaining why you support the campaign
- Tweet about the campaign using the hashtag #housingbenefit
- Visit our campaign on our website for up-to-date news and more information about how to support the campaign through social networking sites
Readers’ questions
Before Inside Housing’s interview with Clive Betts, we asked readers if they had any questions they’d like to put to him:
Question: After the Communities and Local Government Select Committee inquiry into Supporting People last year, it provided a positive and rounded report focussing on the many strengths and impacts of the programme. There were, however, a number of concerns raised by the committee about the future of SP without a ring fence around its funding – does Mr Betts have any comments to make on this?
Answer: There are some very vulnerable people who have clearly been helped by some of the work we saw on those programmes. [Some Supporting People programmes] were very imaginative and responsive to particular circumstances and conditions, and it’s clearly one of the areas at risk of future cuts. In general, I support removing ring fences because I think there has to be flexibility and freedoms for local authorities to deliver, but equally we want to be able to monitor those particular services to very vulnerable people – [and make sure they are not overlooked because] they don’t shout the loudest.
Question: Last year, the select committee felt that it was important that local authorities should be held to account if they transferred funding away from SP services. The previous government made an important commitment to enabling to happen by continuing to provide local authorities with the details of their Supporting People allocation in the area based grant in the future. Will the committee be seeking assurance that this transparency will continue?
Answer: Eventually I want to move to a situation where local authorities are accountable to communities in a very real way – once you do that, you get examples of good practice that can be highlighted. I think most of the good practice originates from individual local authorities not central government diktat. Maybe we got into too strict a regime with assessments. An element of light touch monitoring to make sure that programmes for the most vulnerable are being delivered is something I’d be inclined to support.
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