Posted: May 13, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing benefit, Welfare reform |
‘She was fine before this bedroom tax. It was dreamt up in London, by people in offices and big houses. They have no idea the effect it has on people like my mum.’
I’m not sure how the architects of what ministers prefer to call the spare room subsidy will react to the words of Steven Bottrill or the tragic suicide of his mother Stephanie. A spokesman for the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) told BBC radio news yesterday that it would be ‘inappropriate to comment’ on an individual case but that did not stop a ‘source’ from adding that the government had made discretionary help available.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: April 18, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing benefit, Labour market |
Amid claim and counter-claim the benefit cap began this week with a deepening mystery about how many people will be affected and how much it will really save.
As the four guinea pig boroughs in London – Haringey, Croydon, Enfield and Bromley – began applying the cap on Monday, the Department for Work and Pensions revealed in ad hoc analysis that it now expects 16,000 fewer households to be affected by the time when it is introduced in the whole country over the next few months.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: April 10, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing benefit, Private renting, Social housing |
If the housing legacy of Margaret Thatcher Mark I was about dismantling much of what had gone before, Mark II created even more of what we have now.
Thatcher’s first two terms saw the right to buy, cuts in subsidies to council housing and the promotion of home ownership (see the first part of this blog). Mark II added big changes for private renting, housing associations and housing benefit, though not without some hiccups along the way.
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Posted: April 6, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Budget, Football, Housing benefit, Social housing, Welfare reform |
This is a tale of two cities. Of one city and two different planets. And of one City and one United.
On Monday a wave of welfare reforms began to hit claimants and tenants across the country. Today the top rate of tax is cut from 50p to 45p on earnings above £150,000. For the connection between the two, in the immortal words of Carlos Tevez:
The city is home to the richest football team in the English Premier League, Manchester City, and the most successful, Manchester United (give or take the location of Old Trafford). It is also the bedroom tax capital of the UK with more than 14,000 tenants facing an average loss of £624 a year. They have lost a total of £168,000 this week – less than many of the footballers earn in a week on their own – and will lose a total of £8,736,000 this year.
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Posted: March 29, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing benefit, Legal, Northern Ireland, Welfare reform |
Northern Ireland could be set to scrap the bedroom tax as fears grow about the impact on tenants when it is imposed elsewhere from Monday.
The Northern Ireland Assembly has still not approved the Stormont Welfare Reform Bill and is not due to discuss it again until April 16.
However, housing organisations believe the Northern Ireland government is now increasingly likely to decide not to impose the size criteria despite the fact that it will have to meet the £17 million cost from elsewhere in its budget.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: March 21, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing benefit, Housing finance, Housing market, Right to buy, Social housing |
Here’s my take on the four key questions for housing coming out of the Budget so far.
1) Is Osborne just blowing bubbles? There are sound reasons why the government might want to help people buy new homes or help first-time buyers get mortgages. The equity loan and mortgage guarantee schemes under Help to Buy are extensions of the existing FirstBuy and NewBuy schemes.
However, put them together and you have new schemes that will go to more people and go further up the income scale (a mortgage of up to £600,000 would suggest a household income of getting on for £200,000) without any guarantees that they will result in any more new homes being built. The equity loan option will be available on all homes but is designed to exclude second home owners and buy to let landlords. However, where NewBuy only applied to new homes, the mortgage guarantee will apply to the whole market. And on the Today programme this morning George Osborne repeatedly ducked questions about whether second and multiple home owners would be able to apply. It seems that any attempt at targeting new supply or first-time buyers has been abandoned in a desperate attempt to get the housing market moving before the next election.
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Posted: March 11, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing benefit, Social housing, Welfare reform |
So three weeks left until the start of the bedroom tax: is there a still a chance of last-minute concessions?
Thanks to a steady stream of heartbreaking real-life cases in the national media, the issue is not going away for the government. Attempts by ministers from David Cameron down to make the fairness argument for the policy continue to founder on inconvenient facts.
Later today Iain Duncan Smith faces an uncomfortable time at work and pensions questions and on Wednesday Cameron is certain to face another grilling at prime minister’s questions.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: February 28, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing benefit, Social housing, Welfare reform |
With even the Monster Raving Loonies calling it a crazy policy, is there still time for changes to the bedroom tax?
It’s a measure of how big a political issue it’s become that it was one of only three nominated by voters in Eastleigh for the BBC to put to the 15 candidates in today’s by-election. Ten came out against the bedroom tax, with Howling Laud Hope of the Monster Raving Loony William Hill Party making the far too sensible point that ‘this is like going back to the pre-Victorian window tax.’ The coalition parties could only rely on the backing of the Beer, Baccy and Crumpet Party, the Christian Party (Proclaiming Christ’s Lordship) and an independent.
The by-election winner will enter a House of Commons that is at last giving the bedroom tax the sort of scrutiny it deserves. The Welfare Reform Act packed so many changes in to one piece of legislation that there was little time for detailed debate on each of them. Even when contradictions and unintended consequences were picked up in the Lords, the amendments were reversed in the Commons.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: February 21, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing benefit, Legal, Scotland, Social housing, Welfare reform |
It seems remarkable that with less than 40 days to go until we start taxing them we still don’t really know for certain what a bedroom is.
So it’s not surprising that the move by Knowsley Housing Trust to reclassify 566 of its two- and three-bed homes as one- and two-bed has attracted so much attention. Chief executive Bob Taylor told Inside Housing that a stock review showed some homes are currently classified as having more bedrooms than they actually have, because tenants are not using the extra rooms as bedrooms and were therefore paying too much rent.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: January 29, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housing benefit, Social housing, Welfare reform |
With just 62 days left the bedroom tax has gone mainstream in parliament and the national press.
The last week alone has seen three different debates in the Commons, a DWP questions in which it was the main issue, and stories in the Sun and Mail as well as, more predictably, the Guardian, Daily Record and Mirror.
Meanwhile virtually every local paper in the UK seems to be finding families affected by the tax that few of their readers would consider to have a ‘spare room’. From Bute to Torfaen and from King’s Lynn to Northampton to Hartlepool the bedroom tax is big news. In Hull, a family of seven in a four-bed house say they face losing £20 a week because of the rules on how old children have to be to get their own room.
But will any of it make any difference to what happens from April 1?
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Jules Birch 