Rent Officers (Housing Benefit and Universal Credit Functions) (Modification) Order 2023

Baroness Lister of Burtersett Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I move this Motion on behalf of my noble friend Lady Thornhill, who cannot be here today because she tested positive for Covid last night. She sends her apologies to the House, and I am sure we all wish her a speedy recovery. I draw the House’s attention to the wording of the Motion. Special attention is drawn to the instrument in the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee’s 27th report.

No one in our society should be without a home but, due to successive freezes in local housing allowance, more and more people are being pushed into homelessness. This evening I will challenge the Government to reconsider urgently the decision to impose further real-terms cuts on local housing allowance this year. Last week the chief executive of Crisis described this decision as

“nothing short of crushing for people who rely on this vital lifeline”.

More than 1.87 million private renters on low incomes rely on local housing allowance to help pay their rent —this is more than one in three private renters.

It was right for the Prime Minister to act to protect these households during the pandemic, when as Chancellor he invested in the local housing allowance so that it would cover the cheapest 30% of rents in a local area. That meant that people were able to sustain tenancies during a period of hardship, and it also helped people who had been trapped in homelessness into tenancies. It is worrying that this progress has not been sustained. Despite inflation and rising rents, local housing allowance remains at the same cash level as three years ago, based on rent levels from four years ago. As the report by the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee highlights, the Explanatory Memorandum did not “explain the policy objective” of the Rent Officers (Housing Benefit and Universal Credit Functions) (Modification) Order 2023 or explain what its effects would be on the recipients of local housing allowance.

However, the Government’s own figures show how severe the consequences are. Landlord repossessions increased by 98% at the end of last year. For every household facing eviction or rent rises it cannot afford, moving house is incredibly difficult to afford; for some, it is impossible. Advertised rents have risen at record rates since 2020, with Zoopla estimating an increase of 12.1% in the last year alone. Some areas have seen particularly high increases: rents are up 15.6% in Manchester, 14.1% in Glasgow and 17% in London.

In recent weeks, DWP Ministers have said that local housing allowance is not intended to cover all rents in all areas—nobody is calling for that, but surely the Government agree that it should cover some rents in all areas. Dataset after dataset shows that, in significant parts of this country, a household would simply not be able to find any properties to rent at local housing allowance levels. In July last year, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that only seven properties were advertised at local housing allowance levels across Wales. More recently, in February, the Bevan Foundation found that 16 local authorities in Wales did not have a single property advertised that was affordable on local housing allowance. Last autumn, Crisis and Zoopla found that only 8% of properties advertised across England over the previous 12 months were affordable on local housing allowance. In Watford, only 4% were affordable on local housing allowance. Overall, nearly a quarter of local authorities had fewer than 20 properties available at local housing allowance rates, and more than 100 local authorities had 3% of properties or fewer affordable on local housing allowance. For context, 38% of private renting households rely on local housing allowance to help pay their rent.

With an acute shortage of social housing, we need far more housing for social rent. As Members in this Chamber today have constantly pointed out over recent years, our building rate of social housing for rent has simply been far too slow. With that acute shortage of social housing, many people on low incomes have no alternative to renting in the private sector. As that becomes unaffordable, homelessness is rising. Having made progress in ending rough sleeping during the pandemic, the Government have now overseen a 26% rise in rough sleeping in England in the last year.

Investing in local housing allowance prevents people experiencing homelessness and makes it easier for people to move out of homelessness. As well as being one of the most effective ways to prevent homelessness, uprating local housing allowance would lead to savings across public services. Almost 100,000 households are stuck in temporary accommodation in England, including more than 125,000 children. Temporary accommodation costs local authorities nearly £1.6 billion a year. Staying in temporary accommodation, including unsuitable hotels and B&Bs, also has a damaging impact on people’s lives, making it harder for people to work, get their kids to school and stay healthy.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies has been clear that the choice to freeze local housing allowance is resulting in wide geographic disparities, whereby low-income renters in some areas can get the cheapest rents almost covered, whereas those in other areas must find an extra £150 a month to top up their rent, or face homelessness. Last month, Sam Ray-Chaudhuri of the Institute for Fiscal Studies said of investing to uprate local housing allowance:

“This isn’t an expensive policy”.


In a debate that can be overly focused on averages and aggregate costs, I will conclude with the experience of what it feels like for people on the brink of homelessness. One person—who it is not possible to name, but it is on the public record—has described how the rising cost of living was affecting him. He said,

“I wasn’t even earning enough money to be able to pay for the rent that I had currently for two years been paying, which was £870 a month, plus all of the other bills. And then of course when [the landlord] came back to me he said, ‘I put it up to £1200 because that is the going rate,’ and I just thought I have no hope … of being able to find that extra money, because it was hand to mouth pretty much all the time … to be able to find another £400 a month was just absolutely impossible. So, I had to tell the estate agent that I wasn’t going to be taking the lease on again and I was going to have to find other accommodation.”

There are plenty of people like that, and the other accommodation that they would like is just not there. Hostels, sofas and rough sleeping are what remains for far too many people, and the instrument we are debating does not offer them a route out. Unless the Government change their approach, thousands more people will be forced into homelessness over the coming months. With that, I beg to move.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, for tabling the regret Motion and to the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, for moving it. I hope that the noble Baroness will be better soon.

The regret Motion follows a highly critical report from the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee. The importance of the issues it raises was reflected in the unusually large number of very helpful briefings I received when I tabled an Oral Question on the issue recently and the “huge amount of evidence” on the impact of the freeze received by the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee recent inquiry into the private rented sector. As the Commons Library briefing on the LHA notes:

“Numerous bodies, including homeless charities, the representative bodies of local authorities and private landlords, are making the case for LHA rates to be uprated to cover at least the 30th percentile of local rents, alongside relinking rates to the real cost of renting for future years.”


According to the IFS, the freeze means that just 8% of low-income private renters now have all their rent covered by housing benefits, compared with almost half in the mid-1990s. For nearly a third of them, the amount of rent not covered eats up at least a third of non-housing benefits income, a situation faced by just 14% of the group in the mid-1990s.

This is one reason why analysis from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation indicates that the cost of housing for private tenants is a key driver of poverty today, most starkly for families with children. The more that private tenants are having to use their non-housing universal credit to meet their rents, the less that next month’s 10.1% increase in universal credit and other benefits—which no doubt the Minister will pray in aid —will help them to meet other basic costs, such as food.

A recent report by the JRF and the Trussell Trust shows how universal credit is too low in any case to meet the most basic of needs. A piece in my local paper, the Nottingham Post, just last week cited the growing gap between the LHA and increasing rents as an important factor in the worrying increase in arrears and everyday living debts seen by the local Citizens Advice.

In his helpful letter following the uprating debate, the Minister said that DWP is working closely with DLUHC to monitor rental shortfalls. Could he tell us what their assessment is of the average shortfall and of the numbers affected? Following my Oral Question, he promised to write to the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, with a reply to his question as to what proportion of those receiving the LHA are unemployed and therefore more reliant on this money to pay their rent. Could he share that information—in a letter, if necessary—with the rest of us and include other private tenants without earnings?

The other reason that this is so important is that the inability to meet the full rent can tip people into homelessness, as the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, said, and as the homelessness charities have warned. So far, the Minister has carefully avoided answering questions as to the likely impact on homelessness of freezing the LHA yet again. I cannot believe that the Government have not done some kind of assessment of the likely impact, so I would be grateful if he could share it with us.

Hitherto, whenever this issue has been raised in either House, the ministerial response has been woefully inadequate. There seems to be three stock justifications, none of which is convincing. The first is simply the cost, which, it is suggested, cannot be borne in addition to the general benefit uprating. I have already indicated why this is short-sighted from the perspective of individuals suffering the consequences, but as the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, has highlighted, it is also short-sighted from a public-spending perspective, because of the knock-on effects on public services through homelessness, short-term accommodation and both physical and mental health. Have the Government made an estimate of those knock-on costs? From last week’s Westminster Hall debate, it would appear not, which betrays a very narrow approach to assessing the cost of policies to the public purse.