Housing Benefit (Under-occupancy Penalty)

Caroline Lucas Excerpts

Wednesday 27th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Dr Whiteford]

It is utterly daft. I have seen cases in my own constituency where relatively minor changes to local authority support services have destabilised the balancing act performed by families who provide care while juggling work and family commitments. I have met far too many family carers who are already at the end of their endurance, compromising their own health and well-being to continue to care. When carers cannot cope any more or their own health breaks down, the human cost is immense and the financial cost of primary health care spending and the need for expensive care packages are incalculable. The bedroom tax undermines the ability of families to continue to care.

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

Given that this policy will lead to greater homelessness and evictions, which are not only massively painful, but massively costly, does the hon. Lady agree that it is not just cruel, but counter-productive and another attack by this Government on the poor?

[Dr Whiteford]

The policy is not only counter-productive; it is just not thought through.

--- Later in debate ---

[Steve Webb]

We have already made one specific exemption. Someone who needs a spare room for a non-resident, overnight carer can have it. That is an absolute right, and people do not have to apply for it. However, someone who is in particular need can approach the local authority, which has discretion—after all, the D in DHP stands for discretion; there is no set of national Whitehall-driven rules—and the authority can then judge whether the household is indeed in particular need of help from the budget that has been allocated to it. We have not set out a rigid blueprint; the whole point is that local authorities will have discretion to meet people and, if they think it a priority, to meet their needs.

[Caroline Lucas]

I thank the Minister for pointing out that the D stands for discretion, but as far as I can see it stands for draconian. The Minister is trying to give the impression that people need not worry, because they can approach their council to get the extra money. Does he not realise that the extra money that he is providing is a pittance in comparison with the amount that is needed? This is essentially an ideological attack on social housing: the Government are simply trying to get rid of it.

[Steve Webb]

It is astonishing that the hon. Lady should suggest that we are trying to get rid of social housing, given that we have built more affordable housing in the last year than was built, on average, over the preceding 10 years under Labour. That is an absurd suggestion. I entirely understand that the hon. Lady opposes everything—it is a kind of nihilism, which is fair enough—but her suggestion is not a credible option for a credible Government.

The research that we will undertake will include small-scale primary research involving a range of local authorities, social landlords and voluntary organisations in England, Scotland and Wales. The researchers will consider supply issues, rural effects—which were raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Argyll and Bute (Mr Reid)—and people who are unable to share rooms. When possible, they will also consider the effects on vulnerable individuals and their financial circumstances, social networks and family life. That was mentioned earlier as well.

--- Later in debate ---

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

I pay tribute to the powerful opening speech by the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Dr Whiteford).

On the Opposition Benches, it is not a question of shroud-waving, as the hon. Member for Battersea (Jane Ellison) suggested, but a recognition of the people we see in our surgeries week in, week out. The fear of this measure is such that people believe it to be a bedroom tax, a cruel and counter-productive measure from a Government intent on punishing the poor. It is cruel because it is likely to lead to more evictions, homelessness, disruption and despair and because it takes no account of people’s real circumstances—as we have heard many times, more than two thirds of those affected are likely to be people with disabilities—and it is counter-productive because it is highly unlikely to lead to the outcomes that the Government claim to want. Not only are there insufficient smaller properties for families to move to, but the measure is more likely to cost money than save it. Evictions are not only hugely painful, but hugely costly, estimated at about £10,000 a time.

As has been revealed in this debate, the truly cynical nature of the proposal was revealed by the Government’s own impact assessment, which made it clear that the projected savings will be made only if tenants remain in their existing homes and make up the shortfall in benefits themselves. In other words, the money that this measure is supposed to raise will be raised only if the stated policy aim of getting people to move house does not actually work. That is immensely cynical. The truth is that many people are struggling in such desperate circumstances that they simply cannot find the extra money to pay.

The bottom line is that we have a major housing crisis, with nowhere near enough affordable homes. In my own constituency, for example, more than 15,000 households are on Brighton and Hove’s waiting list, but just 750 properties become available every year. It is successive Governments who have caused this housing crisis, not the poor who struggle to cope with it. It is not the fault of people who cannot get a job, of disabled people, of people who share the care of their children or of foster parents. The crucial problem—this is where the fault lies—is the epic failure of both the Tories and new Labour on council housing. The Tories pushed the decimation of the stock with the right to buy, ignoring the right to rent, and new Labour tweaked the enormous discounts but did not grasp the nettle and build council housing. For example, in 2007-08, only 350 new council homes were built. It is deeply unjust to penalise people who are struggling at the bottom of a housing market over which they have little or no control.

Ministers give blasé answers to serious parliamentary questions about this nasty measure. They say, “Get a job, get a lodger or move somewhere else.” They ignore the fact that, for many people, those options are simply not possible. On average, five people are chasing every vacancy—in some places, the figure is much higher—so how are those jobs suddenly going to appear? As other hon. Members have pointed out, the rooms in question are often too small to rent out, or not “spare” at all. Ministers have suggested that social landlords might want to redefine a property as having fewer rooms when the spare room is extremely small, but we know that most social landlords cannot reduce their rents because they need the money for repairs and for servicing the debts they have for building more stock.

What will happen to the person with severe mental health problems who has been settled for years and who is deeply distressed by change but who has a tiny box room? They cannot take a lodger because of their unpredictable episodes, they cannot afford the rent because of the box room and there is no smaller property available locally. What is supposed to happen to them?

I have not yet heard Ministers deny the existence of the acute housing crisis, yet they conveniently attack the people who are facing the worst end of it. They also overlook the cumulative impact of so many cuts. In Brighton and Hove, practically every household affected by the bedroom tax will also be affected by the Government-imposed cut to the council tax benefit budget, and a good proportion of them will also be hit by the changes to disability living allowance. Changes to the scope of what is covered under legal aid from April will mean that benefit issues will not be covered, so there will be less opportunity for people to receive in-depth advice or to challenge decisions in court.

This pernicious policy will not scratch the surface of our overcrowding crisis, as it will simply create new housing emergencies for people who were previously just managing to get by. The local authority in Brighton estimates that the total cost of an eviction process, including temporary accommodation, is around £10,000 per eviction. The Government say that it will not come to that, but they are simply not in touch with reality. Of the 1,000 or so households affected in Brighton and Hove, the majority are already struggling with rent arrears of around £2 a week. Where on earth are they supposed to magic a further £16 a week in bedroom tax from?

A constituent who is desperately worried about the bedroom tax came to my surgery last week. She shares custody of her daughter, so the room that she has for her daughter is seen as spare. She simply does not have the money to pay the tax being levied on her. In order to open Ministers’ eyes to the daily reality that some of my constituents face, I would like to read out a short amount of a testimony written by her. She says:

“I have no more basics to cut back on. I go without meals. I cannot afford the bus, toiletries, a newspaper. I wear trousers most days as I cannot afford to replace my pair of tights should they get laddered. If I had not been able to overcome my pride and seek help I do not know how my family would survive. It was difficult to overcome the sense of shame I felt for needing to turn to charity for support in meeting the family’s most basic needs. I do voluntary work in the community myself. This did not match my own sense of who I am but it is my reality and has to be faced. I now see those others who also depend on the food banks and support from charities like the City Mission in a new light. I see their resilience and humanity. We are the same.”

I was in tears by the end of my meeting with her.

We are talking about real people in real homes who are feeling real desperation, and the criticism that we are somehow exaggerating the situation is an insult to those constituents who come to see us. Ministers are recklessly and deliberately ignoring the harsh reality for the majority of those surviving on benefits. They are deliberately pandering to media stereotypes. How convenient it is to say that it is all the fault of the workshy, swanning about with all that spare space—or so the mean and mistaken narrative goes.

Going back to reality, the homes of a lot of the people affected by this policy are not too big for their needs. Their homes meet their needs, from the padded box room that a single mother uses to keep her autistic son safe when he is having an episode, to the extra room used by a disabled person to store their equipment, and to the room used for half the week by the child whose parents are separated.

There are many reasons why what appears to the Government to be spare space is in fact not spare at all, but essential. It will always be possible to find a small number of examples of people who genuinely have more space than they need, but that does not justify the Government’s crass blanket policy. The experts are saying that if we want to help people into smaller properties, we should give them support, sensitively, to find the right property. We should not force them out with the threat of eviction. We also know that the right kind of properties often do not exist. I asked a parliamentary question to find out whether the Government had carried out an assessment of how many appropriate smaller properties existed. They have not done any such assessment, because they do not care. Then, when we put that argument to them, they will come back and tell us that the discretionary housing payments are supposedly a magic wand that will solve all problems. The pot of discretionary housing payment is tiny compared to the cuts being made. It is obvious that demand will massively outstrip supply.

In Brighton and Hove, for example, the projected housing benefit shortfall has been modelled by the local authority as over £12 million, including shortfall from cuts to local housing allowance, bedroom tax and the benefit cap. The Government have given a DHP pot of just over £1 million to the city. That covers only about 8% of the housing benefit cuts that people will face. The DHP is tiny and nowhere near adequate.

The Government try to justify these cuts on the grounds that they are “making work pay”, but when Ministers use that phrase, it is really a code for punishing people for being poor. Of course work should pay; we need decent living wages pay, not poverty pay. The hon. Member for Battersea (Jane Ellison) talks about the need to cut the housing benefit budget, but one way to do that would be to pay a decent living wage in the first place. It is not the fault of people who cannot get a job or who are unable to work that employers do not pay people properly.

There will be a potential push to move people from social housing to different sized private sector accommodation, which does not have the same security of tenure and could cost more. What the Government should be doing is massively increasing the supply of affordable, sustainable, decent homes and legislating to allow for far greater security of tenure, which would go some way to holding rents down. The bottom line is that the Government must stop relying on the profit motive to supply housing for people who are poor; it will take time, but we absolutely need to fund a real programme of sustainable mass council housing.

This Government, however, are going in the opposite direction. This is a policy that will lead to bad debts and eviction, and will dramatically undermine the financial stability of the social housing model. If we combine that with the Government’s refusal to allow people the choice to pay their housing benefit directly to the landlord under universal credit, we genuinely have a recipe for the end of social housing. As landlords are faced with the lose-lose situation of either accumulating bad debt as people simply cannot pay the tax, or facing the even higher cost of debt collection and eviction, the long-term future of social housing looks bleak. How unjust this will look in the history books when the banks get bailed out and the poor get thrown out.

Before Government Members challenge me by asking how we would pay for this investment, let me say that I am not afraid of saying that it is perfectly legitimate to borrow to invest. The idea that that is somehow irresponsible, coming from this Government who have now led us into the triple-dip recession, is an absolute irony. I do not know what the Labour Front-Bench team will say on this issue, but I have no compunction about saying that it is absolutely right to borrow to invest in affordable housing and in the kind of infrastructure that we need in the 21st century. The idea that, as a Government, as a nation, as a European Union of nations, the best way of addressing the deficit is by everybody cutting spending and draining demand out of the economy has been proved to be wrong over and over again. More and more economists are saying that, too. I hope that, for the sake of us all, this Government wake up and see that very soon.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—