Housing Benefit (Under-occupancy Penalty)

Baroness Clark of Kilwinning Excerpts

Wednesday 27th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Dr Whiteford]

The problem of under-occupation will not be solved by shuffling people around. That will do absolutely nothing to resolve the underlying problems, which I think we all know are related to the supply of affordable housing.

[Katy Clark (North Ayrshire and Arran) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady and her colleagues on their choice of subject for this Opposition day debate. Does she agree that one of the problems is the complete mismatch between the stock that housing association and councils have and what people need, and that there are simply not enough properties for people to move to?

[Dr Whiteford]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right—her point is at the core of the debate. Before I turn to that point I want to say more about the issues facing disabled people.

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[Dr Whiteford]

I will give way once more and then I really must get on.

[Katy Clark]

Will the hon. Lady use her eloquence and influence with the Scottish Government to ensure that they have a no-evictions policy?

[Dr Whiteford]

Again, I will come to that and consider some of the structural issues in a moment. First, however, I want to mention pensioners who so far have been excluded from the under-occupancy rules. That is important because many older people who are technically under-occupying are extremely anxious about the bedroom tax and frightened that it will force them to move. We must make it clear that they will not have to do so at this stage. Once universal credit is introduced, however, people of pension age who have a younger partner of working age will be subject to the bedroom tax, and again, they will be forced to move into smaller, more expensive, and often less suitable homes. That is a false economy for the Government and will have a great human cost for older couples.

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[Mr Redwood]

It is a bit of both. I entirely agree with the hon. Lady if she is urging the Government to do even more than they are currently doing to make more mortgages available so that more people can afford to buy homes. Members on both sides of the House would welcome that. I happen to know that Ministers are desperate to ensure that more mortgages are available than were available during the last few Labour years, and are working away with the banks to try to make it happen. That is very much part of the solution to the housing problem. [Laughter.] It is all very well for Labour Members to go into fits of hysterics, but they really should try to take a serious interest in the problem. Believe it or not, quite a lot of us Conservatives want better housing solutions for many of our constituents, and for people in other parts of the country.

[Katy Clark]

Does the right hon. Gentleman not accept that there was a very different view of social housing in the past? Council housing used not to be seen as a precious resource. For example, at the time of the 1951 general election the Conservatives pledged to build 300,000 new homes. There was a view across the political divide that we should build council housing to improve social conditions. Is that not the vision that we should have now?

[Mr Redwood]

I seem to remember that the Conservative Government did indeed honour their pledge—and that was many more homes than the Labour Government were building each year—but, even in those days, why did they need to do it? They needed to do it because we were short of homes. It was the post-war period, the Germans had remodelled many of our housing estates, and trying to create the homes that people needed was a big problem.

I think that under-occupation is a problem, and I think that the Government have come up with one part of the answer, but I urge Ministers to listen carefully to all those who are saying that the positive way of proceeding is through incentive, encouragement, persuasion, and giving people a better answer than the one they currently have, which may be a larger property that may not be suitable.

The Government have excluded everyone of pension age from the proposals, and I welcome that. I think that it is smart politics, and very sensitive to the elderly population. However, in my constituency, where most people own their homes—elderly people tend to own them without mortgages, and younger people tend to own them with rather big and difficult mortgages—a good many elderly residents decide to sell the family home because it has become too big and unmanageable, and to buy a smaller property such as a flat or bungalow. Many then sell again when they are becoming more frail, and move to semi-sheltered or supported accommodation.

That is a natural process of trading down in the private sector, but there is sometimes too much of an obstacle for elderly people in social housing to be able to do the same. Perhaps not enough of the right properties are available; perhaps they are not offered in the right way; perhaps there should be some incentive. I think it perfectly acceptable to try to create an atmosphere in which there can be the same sensible mobility in public sector housing as occurs naturally in areas with rather more private sector housing, so that elderly people can have housing more suited to their needs.

I hope that Ministers will consider the question of elderly under-occupation, which I think is very much part of the story, but will do so in a positive way that encourages, promotes and helps, rather than removing benefit or imposing a tax. I wish that the Opposition understood the meaning of the word “tax”. Imposing a tax means taking money from people who are earning it for themselves; it does not mean paying them less benefit. I hope that Ministers will work out an answer to that soundbite. I have heard soundbite arguments before, but I congratulate the Labour party on thinking up a brilliant and misleading one. I am afraid that it is better than the soundbites we have heard so far from this side of the House, and I urge my hon. Friends to come up with a soundbite that represents the truth. This is not a bedroom tax, but a reduction in the amount of benefit paid, which is very different.

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[Katy Clark (North Ayrshire and Arran) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to have the opportunity to contribute to what has been a very interesting debate so far. We have heard a number of very powerful speeches from Members concerned about the bedroom tax and they have outlined very fully the implications that it will have for many of the groups who will be adversely affected.

I represent a constituency that will be strongly affected by this policy, and many of my constituents already know that. They are waiting to see how the local council and the Scottish Government react to what the coalition Government have done. We have about 2,700 tenants who are likely to be affected by the new under-occupancy rules on 1 April—over 51% of them are in receipt of housing benefit. That is because of the type of accommodation that we have in North Ayrshire. As in many parts of the country, there are very few one-bedroom properties. The Scottish Federation of Housing Associations recently commissioned a report that says:

“Across all tenants, 62% need one bedroom but only 34% have this.”

This point has been made across the political divide. There is a mismatch between the types of accommodation that are available and the people who are looking for those properties. We are therefore facing a crisis on 1 April. Irrespective of the strength of some of the points that might be made about people possibly living in properties that are too big for them, this mismatch means that on 1 April people will be looking for one-bedroom and two-bedroom properties that simply are not there, and they will pay the price of this Government’s moral and economic policies.

It was only in the past few days that this country lost its triple A rating from Moody’s credit rating agency. The response that we should have seen from the Government is an understanding that we need to invest to get growth. One of the most important things we should do, given this country’s housing crisis, is to put money into housing, particularly social housing and council houses. The nationalists and the Greens were right to choose this as the topic of today’s debate, because it affects so many of our constituents, but it is tragic that we are not having a debate about how to get growth in this country and about how to make sure that we invest so that our people have decent living standards.

Council housing was created in the first place to provide decent housing for those who did not have it. The whole ethos of council housing was to build properties that were of a higher standard than those that were available previously to ordinary working people. It was not about whether someone had a spare bedroom, because the idea of a bigger living room or more space was part of what the whole project was about. As I said in my intervention on the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood), that policy was supported across the political divide before the second world war and immediately after it. It is tragic that we have got ourselves into a position where the social housing needed by ordinary people has not been built in recent decades.

Many people will simply not be in a position to move on 1 April. As my hon. Friend the Member for Dundee West (Jim McGovern) has said, the discretionary funds available to councils are nowhere near big enough to implement the kind of discretion that the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) would like to see. The money simply is not there.

People in adapted properties in all of our constituencies will have money deducted from their housing benefit on 1 April. Foster parents have fluctuating needs, because they take children at short notice. They do not necessarily take one child—they might take a family—so they do not know how many bedrooms they will need. The whole idea is that their household is able to take those children.

We know from all the work that has been done that disabled people will be at the forefront of this policy. The hon. Member for Dundee East (Stewart Hosie) has already highlighted that 79% of those affected in Scotland will be in a household that contains a disabled person. The figure for the rest of the UK is 63% and even though the figure is more extreme in Scotland and other parts of the country, this will become a significant problem in Members’ surgeries in all parts of the country. Even wealthier parts include people who face the predicaments that many of us see on a more regular basis.

The Government’s policy will have a massive impact up and down the country and on local government in particular. If the policy works as the coalition Government expect it to work, it is estimated that it will take £50 million out of the Scottish economy. That will have implications, because it will be taking money out of the pockets of individuals and communities. We all know that there are communities in which significant numbers of people are reliant on the benefits system, whether they work or not. They work and live in areas with low-wage economies, such as North Ayrshire and Arran, which has a glorious industrial past. In the 1970s, 14,000 people were employed at ICI in Ardeer in my constituency. In the 1980s, 10,000 people were employed at the Killoch pit in south Ayrshire.

It is obvious that our communities have a proud industrial past, but those jobs have gone and well-paid jobs have not come in their place, and some communities are disproportionately reliant on the state. We need to do something about that; we do not want to be in that position. That is the challenge that we all face collectively. I say to the Government that taking money out of those communities and out of the pockets of individuals who live in them will simply grind down those communities even further.

We should be talking about economic and welfare policies that put money back into communities, about investing for growth and about putting job creation at the centre of all our policies. Instead, we are faced with a policy that will end in chaos and cause misery for hundreds of thousands of people up and down the country. I believe that it is a policy that the Ministers sitting on the Front Bench will wish they had never been involved in.