Seeing red

Yvette Cooper has just returned to her parliamentary office after a morning in west London where she spoke at a conference organised by the London Labour Party. The former housing minister’s aim was to raise awareness of the potential impact of the coalition government’s plan to cut its welfare bill, and to rally opposition.

The shadow secretary of state for the Department of Work and Pensions maintains a professional composure, but does not hide her disgust at the government’s proposals to reduce housing benefit by £1.8 billion a year. ‘I think this is shocking and it’s savage and people haven’t realised the scale of the full impact,’ she states.

Ms Cooper is the highest profile opposition MP to add her weight to calls to rethink housing benefit reform. Her husband, fellow politician Ed Balls, may be approaching the end of the race of his life for the Labour Party leadership. (The successful candidate is due to be announced at the Labour Party Conference tomorrow.) But Ms Cooper is also running her own race - one against time, to raise awareness about what cuts to housing benefits will mean to families, children and pensioners up and down the country.

Finding an alternative

Armed with reams of statistics showing exactly how people living in every part of England and Wales will be affected by the proposed cuts, announced by chancellor George Osborne in June, Ms Cooper says there’s not a minute to waste.

‘We [Ms Cooper and her team] think that the government’s likely to bring forward the secondary legislation [which will allow the cuts to go ahead] before Christmas to bring in next April’s changes, so I think it’s really important that we build up the campaign before that legislation goes to parliament.’

Inside Housing is also acutely aware that time is running out for our What’s the Benefit? campaign, which has been running since shortly after the cuts were announced. We want the housing sector to reach a consensus on alternative ways to bring the £21 billion housing benefit bill down before the government’s comprehensive spending review next month.

For her part, Ms Cooper reels off a list of alternative reforms, including the introduction of a housing tax credit, which, she argues, would better support work incentives.

Forty-one-year-old Ms Cooper was first elected to her Pontefract, Castleford and Knottingley constituency in Yorkshire - which now also covers Normanton - in 1997. One of ‘Blair’s Babes’ her appointment as Labour’s sixth housing minister in June 2007 proved popular with the sector, but in January 2008 she moved to the Treasury. In June 2009 She transferred to the Department of Work and Pensions where she was secretary of state until her party lost the general election in May.

Life as an opposition MP is new to Ms Cooper and the former economic researcher now has a more hands-on role. ‘Previously, if I wanted to know what the impact of a housing benefit change was, I’d commission research from other people, whereas now I spend a lot of time looking at tables of figures or looking up things myself on the internet,’ she says.

Mounting the attack

She’s put together a briefing pack that she’s circulating to all MPs. It shows the number of people in each English and Welsh local authority area that will be affected by cuts to local housing allowance. The document also reveals the amount of financial help they will lose every week from April next year if the legislation Ms Cooper expects makes its way through parliament.

The information is based on tables published by the Department of Work and Pensions in an explanatory memorandum to the social security advisory committee in July 2010. ‘The [information was] so hidden in their tables that you couldn’t see it. It was very difficult to find,’ she says.

One reason for presenting regional figures is to highlight the fact that the impact of cuts to local housing allowance will not just be felt in headline grabbing London - where 159,000 households will lose out as a result, according to the statistics. This will be a countrywide problem, warns the shadow secretary of state.

‘There’s a whole series of myths that this is just about the most expensive properties in London, but actually, there’ll be more than 6,000 people who live in one-bedroomed flats in Blackpool, who will lose £8 per week,’ she says, reading from the pages of figures which lie on a table in front of her.

‘A one-bedroom home in Gedling, Nottinghamshire, will lose on average £15 a week,’ she continues. ‘If you go to north Tyneside, a one-bedroomed flat is going to lose £9 per week. In Darlington, you’ll lose a tenner on a two-bedroomed flat a week.

‘We’re not talking about huge properties in the richest areas of the country. We’re talking about ordinary homes… all over the country and people still being very heavily hit,’ she adds, barely pausing for breath before moving on to talk about the social consequences of these changes.

‘Obviously you will have huge numbers of people in poverty, a significant increase in homelessness and also people being forced to move house, to move away from their local community and away from the public services they might depend on as well,’ she states matter-of-factly.

She adds that the cuts will total £2.3 million, not the £1.8 billion stated by the coalition. The difference, she explains, is because her calculations include other measures to bring down the benefit bill, such as plans to prevent claimants from keeping up to £15 difference between their housing allowance and actual rent.

‘The thing that’s probably most shocking of all is that this still looks like a very heavy impact on people on the lowest income, but even these figures [in my report] only account for about £550 million of the £2.3 billion total savings from housing benefit,’ she states.

Choosing priorities

Ms Cooper has clearly been so busy working up the opposition to the government’s planned benefit cuts, that she hasn’t had time to unwrap the colourful paintings that lie in bubble wrap on the floor of her Parliament Square office, a few minutes walk from her former DWP workplace. The walls remain blank, but black and white photos of her and Mr Balls’ three children, aged six, nine and 11, are firmly in place by her desk.

An Oxford, Harvard and London School of Economics graduate, Ms Cooper has long been tipped for the top. Indeed, when Mr Balls announced he was putting himself forward as a Labour leadership candidate there was outcry that she wasn’t standing - provoked further when it was suggested that this was because of the age of their children.

‘I know the extra commitment, energy and resilience that the Labour leadership needs on top of what I already do, and I know it won’t work for me while the children are young,’ Ms Cooper, who is also shadow minister for women and equalities, wrote in The Guardian in May.

As far as housing is concerned, it’s probably best that Ms Cooper is staying where she is - fighting the coalition over its plans. It appears she has always been highly thought of in the sector. A search of Inside Housing’s archive reveals our first interview her when she became junior housing, planning and regeneration minister in 2003. It recalls how she ‘impressed delegates’ at the Chartered Institute of Housing conference in Harrogate that year ‘by delivering a highly personal speech about her priorities for housing’.

Helen Williams, assistant director of the National Housing Federation, says: ‘It’s good to see Yvette Cooper in her role in the DWP raising concerns about the housing benefit proposals. In her time as housing minister she had a definite commitment to social housing.’

During her first full month as housing minster in July 2007, Ms Cooper summed up the consequences of a lack of affordable homes in the House of Commons. ‘Unless we act now, by 2026 first time buyers will find average house prices are 10 times their salary. That could lead to real social inequalities and injustice.’

More than three years later, she raises the subject again: ‘I don’t think we were building enough houses in Britain for a good 30 to 40 years, of all kinds, but including social housing and affordable housing,’ she says. Yet she also talks about the lessons she learned during her seven-month stint as housing’s representative in government.

‘Some housing associations do some really good work in terms of helping people into work…it’s not just about whether or not they send off an application for a job, it can be all kinds of issues in their lives you need to deal with, so it might be about childcare, it might be about housing, it might be about trouble getting public transport,’ she explains.

Voice of experience

Housing doesn’t always receive the attention it deserves, Ms Cooper states. ‘For too long it was not seen as an important public service, whereas in the immediate post-war period, you were talking about housing alongside health and education being the most important things people need. We need to do that again.’

When Ms Cooper was housing minster, she was able to attend cabinet meetings - a privilege not bestowed upon current housing minster Grant Shapps. ‘That’s a real backwards step for the government,’ she comments. ‘It does show that they’re not taking housing seriously enough.’

However, Ms Cooper acknowledges that the appearance of her Conservative counterpart, pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith, at the NHF conference in Birmingham yesterday could signal a step forward.

‘It would be good if he would use the opportunity to withdraw some of the proposals on housing benefit, for example, the cuts for pensioners [who make up 34 per cent of housing benefit recipients according to Ms Coopers’ figures].

‘It would be very good if he would listen to a lot of the expertise in the housing sector about how you really help people into work, and also about the realities and importance of housing to people.’

A woman on a mission, it is clear Ms Cooper will not wait to see if the coalition government’s ministers take on board the housing sector’s arguments against its planned benefit cuts. She’s relying on individual councillors and MPs of all political persuasions to refer to the figures, realise the potential impact of its proposals, and use their power to vote against the legislation that could make these ‘shocking’ and ‘savage’ cuts a reality.