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Kate Wareing is chief executive of Soha Housing
Sunak’s desire to balance the budget does not have to result in decimating our social protections
The new prime minister arrives at a time of new consensus around the need to balance the national budget. But this still involves a choice in how this is achieved and the most vulnerable must still be protected, writes Kate Wareing
We live in interesting times.
In the current political climate, it would be easy to miss, perhaps, a significant development: the signs of some basic consensus across the political spectrum that economic prudence matters and budgets must add up.
The biggest political question for the new prime minister will be how that balance between revenue in and expenditure out will be recreated.
What is important to remember is that there are real decision choices here – how the balance is struck between increasing taxation and cutting expenditure and on whom the impact of either will fall.
Here are my principles and reminders to our new prime minister.
Remember we have choices. The UK still has the fifth largest economy in the world and with our choices comes moral responsibility.
The markets are simply insisting that we have a plan that ensures long-term stability, not that we have to decimate our social protection or our ability to invest for the future.
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It will remain crucial to protect those who already face choices no one should have to – between paying the rent, heating and eating. This should leave to several policy decisions.
First, uprating benefits, and Local Housing Allowance levels, by at least enough to cover the increases in the costs of the basics: food, fuel and rent. Food, fuel and private sector rent increases are all outstripping the Consumer Price Index (CPI) in our area right now.
We would also like to see the government removing the benefit cap. In Oxfordshire, where most of our residents live, £1,666 per month for a family barely covers rent and fuel, particularly for those living in the private rented sector (more people privately rent in Oxford itself than own homes).
This increasingly leaves people hungry, cold and getting into unmanageable debt as they try to get through.
Finally, the government should be pausing all deductions from Universal Credit for prior overpayments or sanctions.
In a cost of living crisis, expecting families to survive on less than the minimum is inhumane and counterproductive. This is not what enables people to find and take work.
As PlaceShapers, we have signed a joint letter to the secretaries of states at the Department for Work and Pensions and Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities calling for a fair and sustainable budget, whenever that is.
We must also continue to invest for the long term to provide the affordable homes that people need. It is time to use the opportunity of planning reform to make sure that new homes can be available at truly affordable levels (in our area this means social rent).
This means not cutting Section 106 affordable housing obligations on smaller sites, and guidance to local authorities in high-cost areas to ensure through their planning powers that those Section 106 rental homes are let at social rents.
“We must ensure that the costs of this fiscal crisis do not fall on those who just cannot take any more”
We should also recognise that our ability to build new homes is founded on understanding our future rental income from those homes. Let us set rent policy with our residents.
They must be the people who determine with us what the balance should be between keeping rent rises low, and enabling us to invest in improving the energy efficiency of their homes, and building new homes to enable their communities to remain strong, inclusive places where local people can afford to remain and work.
As a community mutual association in an expensive area of the UK our staff and residents are worried – both for those in our communities who need houses like the ones we provide and for themselves.
The choices facing us, a housing association, and our next new set of leaders aren’t easy. However, as we make them, we must ensure that the costs of this fiscal crisis do not fall on those who just cannot take any more.
Kate Wareing, chief executive, Soha Housing
