The long goodbye to the bedroom tax

Posted: September 8, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Housing benefit | Tags: , | 1 Comment

Three images spring to mind in the aftermath of Friday’s momentous vote to amend the bedroom tax.

The first is of a bunker deep in the bowels of DWP headquarters Caxton House. Iain Duncan Smith sits at a desk surrounded by a dwindling band of loyalists who still believe in the policy: his ministers Mark Harper and Lord Freud plus a loyal special adviser and perhaps a press officer.

AS IDS raves that nothing has changed (and that the universal credit is on time and on budget) I imagine the others exchanging nervous looks between themselves as they assure him that the removal of the spare room subsidy really is saving £1 million a day and making housing fairer.

-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing

Beyond belief

Posted: September 2, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Housing benefit, Labour market, Welfare reform | Tags: | 1 Comment

So is it time to celebrate the rise in housing benefit claims by people in work as a reflection of the government’s success in getting people off benefits?

That was the claim made by Iain Duncan Smith at work and pensions questions yesterday as he answered Labour jibes about the soaring numbers of working households now dependent on state help with their rent.

The work and pensions secretary told Labour’s Emma Lewell-Buck:

‘The figure the hon. Lady did not give is that out-of-work housing benefit claims are falling, and that is because people who were claiming it are now going into work. That means that they are earning more money, which means that the likelihood of their being in poverty is far less. I wonder whether the hon. Lady would like to get up sometime and congratulate us on getting more people back to work and spending less on housing benefit as a result.’

-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing

 

Hard sell

Posted: August 28, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Housing benefit, Right to buy, Social housing | Leave a comment

As sales pass 20,000, what’s been the impact of England’s ‘reinviograted’ right to buy so far?

Figures released by the DCLG last week show 20,027 sales since April 2012, when the maximum discount was increased to £75,000. This followed David Cameron’s Conservative Party conference speech in October 2011, when he said the proceeds would be reinvested in new affordable homes.

The government continues to introduce extra sales incentives. These include a new maximum discount for London of £100,000 from April 2013, £100 million to improve access to mortgage finance plus right to buy sales agents, annual inflation uprating of discounts and an increase in the maximum percentage discount on a house. Finally, the Deregulation Bill will reduce the qualifying period from five years as a tenant to three once it completes remaining stages in the Lords and gets Royal Assent.

That’s the context. But what are the numbers? And what about the wider impacts warned about by critics? Here’s an assessment so far:

-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing

Feeling the pinch

Posted: August 15, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Affordable housing, Housing benefit, Labour market | Tags: | 1 Comment

Mark Simmonds is not getting much sympathy after claiming that MPs’ expenses make it ‘intolerable’ to live in London but has he also revealed a deeper truth about our housing system?

The MP for Boston and Skegness resigned as a minister on Monday and will leave parliament at the next election after claiming that he can’t find anywhere to rent in the capital on his £35,000 a year housing allowance.

Simmonds and his family do not exactly sound like they are among the ‘housing pinched’. These are the 1.6 million households identified in a report by the Resolution Foundation as spending more than 50 per cent of their net household income (after tax and benefits) on their rent or mortgage.

-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing

Housing benefit and the coalition

Posted: August 14, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Housing benefit | 1 Comment

What has happened to housing benefit in the four years since the government inherited a system it claimed was ‘out of control’?

New housing benefit statistics published this week cover the period up to May 2014. They reflect not just successive government cuts but a changing pattern of claims and changing tenure over the last four years. Here are five things that struck me:

1) The housing benefit bill continues to grow despite all of the coalition’s reforms. The May 2014 figures show just under five million claims for an average of £92.69 a week, a total of £24.0 billion. That compares with £20.8 billion in May 2010 (4.8 million claims averaging £84.20 a week).

The coalition never claimed that its reforms would reduce the total bill, just that they would reduce the rate of growth from previous forecasts. The bill has grown by 15.4 per cent over the last four years. However, the annual increase has slowed from 6.2 per cent in 2010/11 to 1.3 per cent in 2013/14.

-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing

Working it out

Posted: August 5, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Housing benefit, Labour market | Tags: | 1 Comment

As Labour and the Conservatives renew hostilities about the housing benefit bill, which of them will do something about it?

In the latest round of Labour’s The Choice summer offensive, shadow work and pensions secretary Rachel Reeves released figures from the House of Commons Library showing that the total bill is set to rise to £27 billion by 2018/19.

Within that, she highlighted the soaring number of claims by people in work from 617,000 at the last election to 962,000 now and 1.2 million by 2018/19. That doubling in working claims will cost a total of £12.9 billion or £488 for every household in Britain between 2010/11 and 2018/19.

-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing

In case you missed it

Posted: July 15, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Housing benefit | Tags: , , | 2 Comments

Today looks like a very good day for the DWP to sneak out independent research on the impact of the bedroom tax and cuts to the local housing allowance.

While Iain Duncan Smith seems to have survived the Cabinet cull of middle aged men, the two reports offer in-depth scrutiny of two of his most controversial policies. There is as yet no DWP press release or comment but you can find the reports here and here on its website.

This blog will concentrate on the independent evaluation of what the DWP calls the removal of the spare room subsidy. The report by the Cambridge Centre for Housing and Planning Research and Ipsos Mori analyses the effects on and the responses of tenants, landlords, local authorities, voluntary and statutory organisations and advice agencies and lenders.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tax year

Posted: May 28, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Housing benefit | Leave a comment

A year on and the evidence is stacking up about the impact of the bedroom tax.

Over and over again we’ve heard from ministers that tenants affected by what they call the removal of the spare room subsidy have choices: they can downsize; or they can take in a lodger; or they can get a job. And the safety net of discretionary housing payments (DHPs) is there to help the most vulnerable.

Over and over again, landlords, tenants and others have argued that it’s not so simple: smaller homes are just not available; jobs are not so easy to come by and may be impossible for many tenants with disabilities; few will want to take a stranger into their home; and DHPs are woefully inadequate to meet the scale of need.

-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing

Making the case

Posted: May 14, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Economics, Housing benefit, Social housing, Television | 1 Comment

Why do we need social housing? The answer may seem obvious on this website but too often elsewhere the one you’ll get is ‘we don’t’.

It’s a theme I’ve blogged about repeatedly over the last few years as social housing has been eroded from within and overtaken from without by the relentless rise of private renting. As coalition ministers never cease to remind us, the sector shrank by 420,000 in England under the last Labour government, but their own policies are merely accelerating the decline while they blur the distinction between affordable and social.

-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing

Discretion and discrimination

Posted: May 9, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Housing benefit, Local government, Welfare state | 3 Comments

Shocking new figures published by Inside Housing reveal yet again the holes in the safety net provided by discretionary housing payments (DHPs).

On one level it beggars belief that in the last financial year councils turned down 70,000 requests for help from tenants facing cuts in their housing benefit and returned £9 million of DHP funding to central government.

On another, it’s no surprise that a system devolved to local authorities facing their own budget cuts has experienced problems or that one based on local discretion has varied so much between different areas.

-> Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing

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