Local Housing Allowance: Freeze

Lord Best Excerpts

Wednesday 4th November 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, the Government weighed all the issues involved in housing across the piece. As I was saying to the noble Lord, Lord Young, we have a housing market, and all these things are interrelated. It is not a matter of simply pressing down here and comparing it with what happens over there. In the longer term, if we do not have enough decent affordable homes, rents will keep rising. It is a simple law of supply and demand. The Government have to meet the challenge of addressing prices in the short term, which is why we have been doing lots on temporary accommodation; addressing prices in the long term by investing over £40 billion over 10 years in the long-term development of additional housing; and investing in the immediate term with discretionary support so that, where there is rent shortfall, renters can apply for help from local authorities. We have also put the first part of a multi-year settlement into local resilience support. So we are doing it across the piece but, in the end, we have to get the market sorted.

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, does the Minister accept that very few landlords are going to let to anyone on housing benefit if they know there is a gap to be filled between the rent the tenant receives as benefit and the actual rent that has to be paid? No landlord is going to take the risk with such tenants, and this is already leading to a drying up of accommodation provided by private landlords for anyone on the lowest incomes.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, there is certainly a relationship—at least, we assume so—between the amount of money the state will spend supporting housing and how much landlords charge. That cashes out in various ways, as I have just been trying to describe. The reality is that a significant number of people in the private rented sector who receive housing support, either housing benefit or universal credit, apply and get help from their councils through discretionary housing payments and the wider crisis and resilience fund. It will carry on being there to support them, and they can use that to help to pay their rents.