Solve this appalling situation

This makes the fact that potentially thousands of the country’s most vulnerable people could see vital housing benefits capped, in some extreme cases ending up homeless, all the more shocking.

Although local authorities decide on housing benefit payments and are therefore to blame for the immediate damage this is doing, the real culprit is bureaucracy. Poorly worded legislation has allowed councils such as Sheffield and Walsall to successfully argue they should not be paying additional housing benefit for vulnerable people who need more expensive homes because of their disability, a position upheld by the social security commissioner.

These councils are making a dubious moral choice, but it is also the case that they are making these additional housing benefit payments from their general funds and so the temptation is clear.

There have been several tribunal and court cases on this issue to date and it finally looks as though the Department for Work and Pensions is willing to come to the table with charities and housing providers to find a solution.

What needs to happen is as follows. First, an interim solution has to be found that safeguards the additional benefits on which many vulnerable people depend. Without rewriting the legislation it is within the DWP’s gift to issue guidance to local authorities to this effect.

Second, the department must now grasp the nettle of long-promised housing benefit reform. It makes no sense to resolve this current problem in isolation and, so long as a workable interim solution can be found, the provision of funds for some of society’s most vulnerable people should be debated as part of the benefits system as a whole.

If nothing else, DWP minister Helen Goodman should be appalled at the situation some of these vulnerable people face - funding shortfalls of up to £10,000. It is in her power to do something about it.