Housing Benefit

Anne Begg Excerpts

Tuesday 9th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Miss Anne Begg (Aberdeen South) (Lab)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to the debate. I am keen to make sure that we do not get bogged down in a debate about what is happening to the caps in London, which has been the tenor of the debate in much of the media and, indeed, here today. I understand why my hon. Friends representing London constituencies feel angry and annoyed about the impact of the changes on their constituents, but I would like to look further afield at the impact across the country.

The difficulty with the emphasis on the caps that might apply only in London is that we need to acknowledge that the real cap is the 30 percentile that will apply in each of the broad rental area markets. It is not right to look at four-bedroom houses that can be had for less than £400 a week in an individual constituency and then say, as did the hon. Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Angie Bray), “Well, that’s fine; you can get that if you are on housing benefit”. That is simply not the case.

We already know, as alluded to by my right hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Mr Raynsford), that even at the present 50 percentile level many of our constituents still have to supplement their housing benefit to pay the rent. We know that people, even today, before any of these changes come into place, have to spend perhaps £10 or £20 out of their benefit to pay their rent. We know that because on a Select Committee visit, we encountered an elderly gentleman at a citizen’s advice bureau who had found it very difficult to get a house or a one-bedroom flat within the money afforded under the BRMA—broad rental market areas—level at 50 percentile. He already had to spend £10 a week out of his pension credit to supplement his rent.

Another point worth noting is that the people who receive housing benefit are not all of working age, so the Government’s purpose of incentivising work does not apply to them. What incentive does an old-age pensioner have if they stand to lose perhaps a considerable portion of their rent, and what incentive is there for such a pensioner to have to move home in order to find an affordable rent?

I hope that we can start to concentrate on some of the people who are not in the percentages quoted—the people who can move and can find somewhere affordable. For every 50% of the people who can move, there are 50% who cannot move; for every 50% who can easily find affordable rented accommodation, there are 50% who cannot. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire South (Mr Alexander) said, only £65 million of the savings on the housing benefit budget will come from the cap, which will apply predominantly in London, whereas the full savings amount to £1.8 billion.

I would like us to consider what is happening in Aberdeen—not a typical place and probably an exception, but it might help to highlight some important issues. Only 6% of housing benefit claimants—910—in Aberdeen are in the private rented sector. Of them, only 370 of them—about a third—are likely to be worse off. Moreover, only 9% in the private rented sector actually claim housing benefit. If we accept what the Government are saying, this 9% should find it easy to find a house within the 30 percentile—obviously, because only 9% of them are trying to find it. That appears to be a no-brainer, but that is not the case. The reason is that they are competing with people who are already on low pay but perhaps do not have housing benefit and are trying to find somewhere else to live.

We also know that there is a housing shortage in Aberdeen, as there is in many other places, so many landlords will not rent for housing benefit. That might not be true elsewhere, but it is true in an area where we have a buoyant housing market. If only 6% of housing benefit claimants are in the private rented sector, it cannot be true that it is housing benefit rates that are pushing up the rents in Aberdeen. We know that rents are going up. It cannot be true that landlords will therefore reduce their rent because we know that there are plenty of other people who will be willing to take these houses if the housing benefit person cannot afford them. There will be areas in which the market will not operate effectively, as my ‘hon. Friend’—I call him that, because he is on the Select Committee with me—the hon. Member for North East Hertfordshire (Mr Heald) said, but although it may be true in some areas, it will definitely not be true in other areas that already have a buoyant market.

Lastly, even if we accept the Government’s argument that landlords will reduce the rent, there will inevitably be a time-lag for all that to happen. I do not think that people will move all that often in Aberdeen. Constituents have come to see me because they cannot afford the deposit on their new house or they cannot afford their first month’s rental or they cannot afford the bond that they are expected to find—I believe that applies just in Scotland. The cost of moving is difficult for people to meet. Landlords, however, will not reduce the rent initially; they will need to be persuaded in some way that they cannot get that rental anywhere else. In the meantime, individuals will have had to move at great cost and it might be difficult for them to find somewhere until the market adjusts. Even accepting the argument that the market will adjust, we are still looking at a six-month period in which people will be either forced to move or build up a huge amount of arrears. It is going to be difficult for this group of people to negotiate lower rents.

I have tried to show that there are issues beyond what is happening in London. Different areas can have different problems. There is no single solution that will have the same effect across the whole country. I hope that the Government will listen to that argument.