Housing Benefit

Caroline Lucas Excerpts

Wednesday 26th February 2014 Commons Chamber

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

I am pleased to be able to speak relatively soon after the hon. Member for South Derbyshire (Heather Wheeler), because there was a sense of breathlessness when we were listening to the complacency and, frankly, arrogance of her comments about the kinds of people I see in my surgeries day in, day out. Those people are suffering partly because there is not enough affordable housing. Nobody is saying that there is enough affordable housing, and all Governments in recent years should have done a lot more. However, the idea that pushing people out of their homes into properties that do not exist is in any way helpful, either in economic terms or for the housing crisis, is deeply misguided.

At the start of this month I tabled early-day motion 1057 to pray against the statutory instrument that we are opposing in today’s debate. When the Leader of the Opposition came and asked whether he could put his name at the top of the prayer to push the debate forward, I was of course happy to agree. I welcome his support and the continued strong opposition to the bedroom tax from colleagues across the smaller parties and, indeed, some senior Liberal Democrats. Many Members of the House are joined in opposition to the Government’s bedroom tax and their attempt to undo a drafting mistake they made when they pushed through this nasty legislation. We know that the legislation is cruel and counter-productive.

As others have said, the Government’s drafting mistake means that some people are exempt from the charge and should not be made to pay it, but now the Government want to ensure that from March all those people will finally be trapped by the bedroom tax. I hope that Ministers will listen today, because it is not just rhetoric. The strong cross-party opposition to the policy comes from our listening to the people we see in our surgeries. We are not talking about a “spare room subsidy”, or about the taxpayer subsidising the unnecessary luxury of an extra room. In case after case, we see that the rooms are not spare, but essential. As we have heard many times, DWP statistics show that more than two thirds of those affected are likely to be people with disabilities. The tax is pushing disabled people from adapted properties. It is sending people to alien places, away from the support networks they have relied on all their lives.

The effect of the policy is to turf out the person with severe mental health problems who has been settled for years and is deeply distressed by change, but who perhaps has a tiny box room in their home. They cannot take a lodger because of their unpredictable episodes and they cannot afford the rent because the box room means that their rent has gone up, yet there is no smaller property available locally. I asked Ministers a year ago what was supposed to happen to those people. They did not answer then and they are not answering now.

This is a policy that springs from a reactionary, anti-benefits narrative that takes no account of people’s real circumstances. In Brighton and Hove, the minority Green administration is doing everything it can with the tiny amount of money given to it to protect people from this Government’s pernicious policy but, as predicted, people are massively struggling. Without even counting housing association tenants, there are 286 council tenants newly in arrears because of the bedroom tax, 199 of whom have a disability.

As well as being callous and cruel, the bedroom tax is counter-productive. There are simply insufficient smaller properties for people to move to, as the Government have repeatedly been told. People are faced with poverty and debt or with moving into the expensive clutches of the private rented sector, where their housing benefit bills will be even higher. Pushing people from their homes is not saving money and it is not solving the housing crisis either.

The bottom line is that we have nowhere near enough affordable homes—I would certainly agree with the Government about that. Successive Governments have caused the housing crisis, not the poor people who are now struggling to cope with it. It is not the fault of people who cannot get a job, or of disabled people or people who need overnight care. The crucial problem—this is where the fault lies—is the epic failure of both this coalition and the previous new Labour Administration to build sufficient council housing. The Tories pushed the decimation of the stock with the right to buy, ignoring the right to rent; new Labour tweaked the enormous discounts but did not grasp the nettle and build council housing. In 2007-08, for example, only 350 new council homes were built across the country. However, it is deeply unjust to penalise people who are struggling at the bottom of a deeply distorted housing market, over which they have little or no control, for the omissions of previous Governments.

What do the Government say? Lord Freud called the exemption that we are trying to preserve today an “anomaly” and says that the number of people affected is “small”. That detached language shows how out of touch the Government are. We have heard already from the Opposition Front Bench that the figures are vastly higher than that—at least 20,000 and probably much more, because that figure is based on only council returns so far. What precisely will Ministers do to rectify the injustice done to individuals who have been denied their full benefit entitlement? What about the people who, as a result of the error, have newly fallen into rent arrears, which have negatively affected their credit rating, for example? What about those who have left their homes in response to the tax and given up their security of tenure, when they did not have to pay the tax in the first place? How will they be compensated? The mess made by this mistake is surely yet another reason to scrap this contemptible tax entirely.

In conclusion, the tax comes from an aloof Government, some of whose members are detached from reality, who simply do not know what is going on and moreover do not care. I hope the regulations are stopped today, because any hon. Member who walks through the Lobby to extend the reach of the bedroom tax will be harming even more people with disabilities, with even more people pushed into debt, forcing more people away from their communities. The only way to clean up this mess is to scrap the entire bedroom tax once and for all.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Eilidh Whiteford (Banff and Buchan) (SNP)]

I am pleased to be able to contribute to the debate. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) for all that she has done to bring this issue to public attention.

The loophole in the regulations that we are discussing exposes just how poorly thought through the bedroom tax legislation has been from the start, and affords us a timely opportunity to take stock of how the legislation has been working in practice since its introduction last year. Today’s debate has revealed that the policy was, from the start, nothing more than a cash grab from those on the lowest incomes who were already living in the cheapest houses.

In Scotland, 80% of the homes affected by the bedroom tax are the homes of people with recognised disabilities, who already have the least choice about where and how they live. There is a broad political consensus in Scotland that the tax is proving to be unworkable, and that it is only harming disadvantaged tenants but damaging councils and local housing associations, undermining social cohesion in our communities, and harming the social fabric as a whole. Under the terms of the Scotland Act 1998 this area of policy is reserved to Westminster, so we have been stuck with Ministers whom we did not elect, imposing a policy for which we did not vote. Nevertheless, Scottish local authorities, the Scottish Government, and our housing associations and advice bureaux have had to mop up the mess over the last 10 months.

There is now clear evidence that the bedroom tax is costing taxpayers more than it is saving. The Convention of Scottish Local Authorities has analysed the cost of implementing the policy in relation to its projected savings, and concluded that a policy that was supposed to save about £50 million a year in Scotland is actually costing about £60 million a year to implement. Detailed research undertaken by COSLA with six councils also revealed disturbing trends in the patterns of arrears accruing in the social rented sector. In the first six months of the policy, an additional 31% of tenants affected by the tax were in rent arrears, and many of them had never been in debt before. Squeezing the bedroom tax from people on very low incomes who just cannot afford it is causing huge distress and worry to tenants, including those who are managing to pay, but it also has serious implications for social landlords and for the solvency of housing associations in particular.

[Caroline Lucas]

The hon. Lady is making a powerful case but does she agree that this is about a lack of affordable housing and, until we address that, the things that we are talking about will not get solved?

[Dr Whiteford]

I agree that the lack of affordable housing is a core issue, but there is also a chronic mismatch between the needs of prospective social tenants and the available housing stock. I have made the point many times in the House that, across Scotland, over 60% of tenants need a one-bedroom property, yet only 23% of the housing stock is one-bedroom size. Even if everyone were to be allocated a home of the requisite size, there are just not enough smaller houses to go around.

There has been a lot of talk today about the shortage of housing. The Scottish Government have managed to deliver more social housing than any other Administration in the UK, even on a fixed budget—a diminishing budget. It is a matter of political priority. If we understand there is a housing shortage, we need to fix it. There is no excuse.

Local authorities, housing associations and the Scottish Government have all had to take action to minimise the unwanted side effects of the bedroom tax, not least by topping up the budgets for discretionary housing payments by £20 million in the last year, which is the maximum amount allowed under section 70 of the Child Support, Pensions and Social Security Act 2000, and by this year making available £35 million for discretionary housing payments, which would, in effect, enable councils to mitigate the entire impact of the bedroom tax for everyone affected. However, as I have said, this remains a reserved matter, and the Scottish Government have had to request permission from UK Ministers to increase the DHP budget. As far as I am aware, the Deputy First Minister is still awaiting a reply to her letter of January to Lord Freud making that request, so can I press Ministers today to listen to the Scottish Parliament’s view on this matter—a view supported by four parties, including their own coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats—and impress upon their ministerial colleague in the other place to crack on and signal his consent? Frankly, it is a travesty in the 21st century that a democratically elected Parliament has to ask permission from an unelected peer to spend its own people’s money. I hope that that is one anachronism that we can put right this September.

The money we are having to find to do that in Scotland must be found from budgets for other devolved policy areas, but given the substantial knock-on costs the policy is having for devolved institutions and housing associations, the democratic consensus around the issue and the distress it is causing to disadvantaged people, I do not think standing aside is an option. Although today we are debating a technicality, it is a technicality that exposes deeper flaws in the housing benefit legislation and exposes the warped values and misconceptions that have informed it.

From the start, the bedroom tax was unfair and ill conceived. Now, nearly a year on, it is not only failing to meet its own policy objectives, but creating needless bureaucracy and displacing large costs on to other parts of the public sector. A policy that costs the public purse more than it saves is a bad policy. A policy that harms our most disadvantaged citizens is a bad policy. A policy with big technical loopholes is a bad policy. I urge the Government to do the right thing and abandon the policy today.