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

Survey story – part one

Posted: July 23, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Housing market, Private renting, Social housing | 1 Comment

It’s time again for a welter of new information about housing in England. Here’s the first of a two-part blog on what caught my eye.

The English Housing Survey also covers stock conditions, energy efficiency and fire safety but this blog concentrates on the story on households. Information from it was first released in February but more followed today. Here are the first three of six themes that seemed significant to me.

The slow death of the property-owning democracy continues: I blogged about the key trends in tenure in February. It wasn’t just about the rise and rise of private renting (it had been clear that it would overtake social renting for some time) but a huge shift within owner-occupation.

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

A room of their own

Posted: July 18, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Social housing | Leave a comment

What does the Lib Dem change of heart mean for the future of the bedroom tax?

It is not quite the u-turn that’s being claimed in some quarters but it is a significant change of direction. It’s not quite the mature change of mind in the light of the evidence that’s being claimed by the Lib Dems either: the evidence has been there from the beginning and the independent evaluation that supposedly triggered the change in policy must have been available at the DWP for weeks before it was sneaked out on Tuesday.

Read Rob Gershon’s great blog for a forensic analysis of Wednesday night’s statement by Treasury chief secretary Danny Alexander and all the previous evidence that he seems somehow to have missed. I’d add only one thing to that: Danny could have asked his dad.

This is of course not the first time that the Lib Dems have withdrawn support from the bedroom tax. In April it turned out that Tim Farron meant the party but not the bit of it that’s in government. This time around the leadership is falling into line with the grassroots to call for specific reforms to the policy.

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

Shuffling the deck

Posted: July 16, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Civil service, Housebuilding, Planning, Universal credit | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

So housing seems to have kept the politicians who should have gone and lost the one who was making a difference.

Speculation ahead of the reshuffle suggested that Eric Pickles and Iain Duncan Smith would leave their posts as part of the cull of middle aged men in the Cabinet. True, some of the stories seemed a bit thin (a woman with a posh accent overheard talking on the phone didn’t seem like much to go on) but I lived in hope. I also looked forward to the DWP press release arguing that it proved that universal credit is ‘on track and on schedule’.

Instead it’s business as usual at the top of their two departments with a shake-up lower down the ministerial scale. After just over nine months in the job, Kris Hopkins is now the former housing minister and is shunted sideways into local government. Brandon Lewis moves from that job and gets a promotion to minister of state for housing and planning. Penny Mordaunt comes in as junior minister responsible for coastal communities.

-> 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 »

Chance of a lifetime

Posted: June 27, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Affordable housing, Bedroom tax, Cornwall, Second homes, Shared ownership | Tags: | 1 Comment

MPs will get the chance to back major housing reforms including new significant exemptions to the bedroom tax later this year. Will they take it?

Andrew George, the Liberal Democrat MP for St Ives, has what he describes as ‘the chance of a lifetime’ to change things through legislation after coming first in the ballot for private member’s bills. Talking to him yesterday gave me a fascinating but slightly depressing insight into how the system – and party politics – work.

He consulted his constituents on a shortlist of options including housing, a Cornish Assembly and health care standards and after more than 2,000 comments has decided to plump for an Affordable Homes Bill with four key elements:

  • Extension of Help to Buy or a new Affordable Homes Investment Bank to underpin the ‘intermediate’ market (shared equity/shared ownership/mutual housing) to construct a new lower rung on the housing ladder for those who cannot afford full ownership.
  • New exemptions to the bedroom tax for anyone who has lived at an address for more than three years or who lives in a home with disabled adaptations
  • A new Use Class for ‘non-permanent residential use’ to empower local planning authorities to control the number of second homes in their area.
  • Enhanced powers of compulsory purchase for local authorities where developers land bank development sites or fail to use sites for which planning permission has been granted but development has not advanced or where need for affordable homes cannot be met on ‘exception’ sites through community land auctions/trusts.

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

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

Frank words on welfare reform

Posted: April 9, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Housing benefit, Poverty, Social housing, Universal credit, Welfare reform | Tags: , | 5 Comments

Getting the same criticism from different people is usually a sign you’ve got something wrong. How about for IDS and the DWP?

Three different reports published this morning amplify earlier warnings about the implementation of the bedroom tax, the wider impact of welfare reform on tenants and landlords and the prospects for universal credit. But it would surprise nobody if the work and pensions secretary saw them as yet more evidence that his reforms are a success.

Two of them come from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF). Steve Wilcox finds that what he neutrally calls the ‘housing benefit size criteria’ has affected fewer people than expected but that half of those are in arrears and 100,000 who want to downsize are trapped and unable to move. Anne Power concludes that welfare reforms may end up making tenants more, rather than less, dependent and are making them more vulnerable.

The third is from the work and pensions committee and warns that it is still not clear that universal credit will work. The MPs on the all-party committee think that implementation will be delayed even further and have some strong words about Iain Duncan Smith’s attitude towards their scrutiny.

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

One size does not fit all

Posted: April 2, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Housing benefit, Social housing, Welfare reform | Tags: , | Leave a comment

Today’s report from the work and pensions committee is an all-party challenge to the fundamental principles of the government’s reforms of housing benefit.

To my mind it is the most serious attack on the bedroom tax, the benefit cap and a swathe of other reforms since the government was forced to overturn House of Lords amendments to the Welfare Reform Act on the grounds of financial privilege.

But you would not guess it from reports in the national media this morning. On Radio 4’s Today programme it was only judged the third most important select committee report of the day and the second most important housing story behind the Nationwide house price index. It’s also downplayed elsewhere with headlines about ‘distress’ and ‘hardship’ or even stolen by Tim Farron rather than about the committee’s call for wholesale changes that could benefit hundreds of thousands of people.

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

Many unhappy returns to the bedroom tax

Posted: April 1, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Housing benefit, Universal credit, Welfare reform | Tags: , | 3 Comments

Stop carping, you lot. The removal of the spare room subsidy is a success.

Today is of course the first of the month as well as the first anniversary of the introduction of the bedroom tax and a wave of other welfare reforms. But I am paraphrasing Iain Duncan Smith and Esther McVey rather than making a token effort at an April Fool.

 

Yesterday’s work and pensions questions brought inevitable attacks on the policy that has caused so much controversy since its introduction a year ago.

Labour’s Kate Green quoted last week’s reports from the BBC that just 6 per cent of households affected by the bedroom tax have managed to move and from Real Life Reform that eight out of ten are in debt and their borrowing is increasing by £52 a week. ‘Rather than preaching about careful budgeting, why do Ministers not just scrap this hated and unworkable tax, which is sending people spiralling into debt? Read the rest of this entry »

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