Small mercies

Yesterday’s events in the House of Commons have left me looking for some good news among the bad.

As if the reversal of the Lords amendments on the benefit cap and the bedroom tax were not enough to depress all those who have campaigned against them, the government has now claimed financial privilege to kill off any further debate on the Welfare Reform Bill.

On the housing clauses, David Orr has condemned the ‘economically suspect and socially divisive’ policy. On the wider Bill, campaigner Sue Marsh has angrily accused the government of lying and betrayal.

So what are my two bits of good news? I don’t mean the usual mix of discretionary housing payments and reviews that were a feature of last year’s housing benefit cuts and seem to have been enough to buy off enough Lib Dem opposition yesterday.

On the cap, the good news is the nine-month grace period for anyone who loses their job. That is three months more than the period sought by Lord Best in an amendment that he withdrew in the Lords last week and it should help limit the number of families who risk losing first their job and then their home.

Work and pensions minister Chris Grayling explained yesterday: ‘We will not penalise those who are in work and doing the right thing. We will put in place a nine-month grace period for those who have been in work for the previous 12 months and lose their job through no fault of their own. We have always intended to make this measure, and I am happy to make that clear to the House today.’

Questions remain. It’s easy to see how the grace period will apply to people in continuous full-time work but what happens to people who can’t get enough hours to be exempt from the cap (16? 23?) and do people who’ve lost one job and then found another still get the grace period? However, nine months is still better than six and considerably better than nothing.

My second piece of good news is on the bedroom tax, though admittedly this is scraping the barrel a bit. Despite the defeat, it’s worth noting that there were not just 14 Lib Dem MPs who rebelled against the coalition but two Conservatives as well.

It’s maybe no coincidence that both of them have strong connections with social housing. Gordon Henderson, MP for Sittingbourne and Sheppey, grew up on a council estate, while Andrew Percy, MP for Brigg and Goole, was previously a councillor representing the estate where his father grew up and his grandmother still lived.

This is not the first time that Andrew Percy has rebelled on a housing issue. During the third reading debate on the Localism Bill last year, he voted against the government on scrapping security of tenure on the grounds that we were talking about ‘homes’ and ‘not merely a facility that belongs to the council’.

He made a similar point yesterday: ‘I am sure that the ministers understand this, but I plead with them to take account of the fact that houses are not only public assets; they are also people’s homes, and people have an attachment to them. This is not a simple matter to resolve, even though we should encourage an end to under-occupancy.’

In the scheme of things it’s a very small compensation that the housing message has got through to at least some government MPs and that not all of them (to quote work and pensions minister Maria Miller) regard claimants and tenants as ‘these people’. But it’s still good to see.