Time for ministers to listen on the LHA cap
Posted: May 2, 2017 Filed under: LHA cap, Local housing allowance, Supported housing Leave a commentOriginally posted on May 2 on my blog for Inside Housing.
When not one but two all-party committees of MPs call on ministers to think again about a controversial policy you might think they would listen – but will they?
The Work and Pensions and Communities and Local Government Committees say the government should scrap its plan to impose a Local Housing Allowance (LHA) cap on supported housing and pay top-up funding via local authorities and devolved administrations.
Ministers claim the intention is not to save money but to ensure better value for money and monitoring of the quality of services.
But the MPs conclude that ‘the funding proposals, as they stand, are unlikely to achieve these objectives’ and that LHA is ‘an inappropriate starting point for a new funding mechanism’.
Watching the benefit cap
Posted: April 6, 2017 Filed under: Benefit cap, Local housing allowance, Welfare reform Leave a commentOriginally posted on April 6 on my blog for Inside Housing.
What did see when you watched last night’s Panorama on the benefit cap?
Most people reading this here will, I think, have seen the impact of an arbitrary policy that leaves thousands of people with 50p a week towards their rent.
But outside my timeline on Twitter the view was very different. Roughly 95 per cent of tweets with the hashtag #benefitcap were hostile, but to the people featured in the programme rather than the policy.
There is nothing new in this divide of course – exactly the same thing happened with Benefits Street and How to Get a Council House and a Dispatches documentary on the cap last month– but this was an hour on BBC One on primetime.
Part of the problem lay with the way that Panorama framed the issue. This was clear in the first two minutes.
