Welfare Reform Bill

Debate between Mark Lazarowicz and Stephen Lloyd

Wednesday 9th March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mark Lazarowicz (Edinburgh North and Leith) (Lab/Co-op)]

Like many hon. Members on both sides of the House, many of my constituents and many organisations have contacted me about their concerns about the Bill. Given that many other hon. Members want to speak, I shall highlight only a few of those.

The changes in housing benefit will in due course feed into the housing element of the universal credit. Without going into all the details, there is no doubt that many people in my constituency will be seriously disadvantaged by those proposals. People will be driven into poverty, and in some cases, driven out of their current housing. The fact is that for all the press stories we read—they are sometimes repeated by Government Members—about people living in luxury housing benefit accommodation, any such cases are few and far between, if the ones we read about are genuine, which is doubtful. We should not allow the debate to be distorted by a few extreme examples that, if genuine, need to be tackled.

Hon. Members will recall that in his Budget statement last year, the Chancellor of the Exchequer referred to

“families receiving £104,000 a year in housing benefit.”—[Official Report, 22 June 2010; Vol. 512, c. 174.]

I pursued that with a number of written questions. I have still not had the exact figure from the DWP, which I suspect is because only a handful of families are in that situation. If we are to have a serious debate, we should talk about the realities on the ground, not fake figures that are designed to scare people and distort the real debate that we need to have.

There are precious few areas in which forcing down housing benefit costs will affect market rent. In most cases, the market rent will become further diverged from housing benefit. As I said, as a result, people will be driven out of their housing, and perhaps forced to leave their communities or forced to go to areas where they do not get support from family and friends either in or out of work.

It may be the case, as the hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid) said, that the Government’s changes will affect the market in cases where housing benefit tenants form a large proportion of the rented market. However, in constituencies such as mine, there are lots of student properties, holiday lets and those whom one might describe as young professionals. They are a major element in the rented housing sector, and they are certainly not going to go away, meaning that those on housing benefit will no longer be able to afford their existing housing. That is certainly a concern that has been expressed to me by housing associations in my constituency.

[Stephen Lloyd]

Does the hon. Gentleman see nothing untoward about more than 5,000 families in the UK receiving more than £25,000 a year in housing benefit, which is equivalent to earning a salary of £80,000 to £90,000 a year?

[Mark Lazarowicz]

In each case, we have to look at the circumstances of the individuals concerned. However, the idea put forward by the Government that at the top end of the scale there are large numbers of people receiving £104,000 a year illustrates the distortions that some people want to introduce into this debate.

Another concern that housing associations in my constituency have raised with me is about the over-accommodation rules, which were mentioned by the hon. Member for Manchester, Withington (Mr Leech). Those rules will have many consequences that will be detrimental to both housing providers and individual tenants. One of the housing associations in my area has made the point that it may have a perfectly reasonable policy of providing people with an extra room, so as to allow access visits by children from a relationship, but those people would then no longer be entitled to housing benefit to reflect that extra room.

Parents and carers for adults with autism have also raised concerns with me, although other hon. Members have also discussed those concerns today, so I shall not repeat them. There have also been concerns about child maintenance charges being imposed on those still required to use the child maintenance system.

I want briefly to refer to concerns about the changes to DLA. When I intervened on my right hon. Friend the Member for Stirling (Mrs McGuire), I mentioned the concerns raised with me by a number of parents of children with disabilities in my constituency. Of course I recognise that the children concerned will not be subject to regular reassessments while they remain children. However, those parents have raised with me their concerns that in years to come their children may no longer have their support and assistance in submitting applications for DLA or its successor. Those children will find themselves in a vulnerable position if they are forced to undergo regular reassessments for conditions that will quite patently not change.

Those parents are right to be concerned—indeed, it is not surprising that they are—given that the backdrop to the Government’s policies is a 20% cut in the DLA budget. The Government may say that some of the fears that have been expressed are unfounded. However, if that is the case, they have brought it on themselves by rushing the consultation on DLA, which closed only nine days before the Bill was published, and because so many of today’s measures depend on further regulations being introduced at a later stage. Unsurprisingly, that has led to suspicions on the part of those who are likely to be affected by the changes.

Perhaps the underlying reason for those concerns is that we know that today’s changes are being driven in two ways: by a wish to reform the system—I accept the Government’s good intentions in that—but also by a wish to cut spending. The fact is that the Government’s prime concern is cutting the budget as soon as possible—that is the driver for today’s proposals—not, I am afraid, reforming the welfare system, which is something on which we should all able to agree across the House, if we had the time to discuss and debate it, and if we had the time to consider the views of outside organisations that have real concerns about it.