Posted: February 19, 2014 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Housing benefit, Labour market, Local government, Social housing |
Why is there so little debate about the fact that social housing rents are set to rise so much faster than prices and earnings?
Figures out this week from the ONS show that CPI inflation rose 1.9 per cent in the year to January and average earnings rose just 1.1 per cent in 2013. Earnings have now been falling in real terms since 2010, the longest period forat least 50 years.
And yet all around the country social landlords are preparing to increase their rents by at least twice the rate of inflation, and many times more than earnings, according to recent surveys by Inside Housing.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: February 11, 2014 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Legal, Television |
Five things struck me watching the Dispatches documentary on the bedroom tax on Channel 4 last night.
First, it’s impossible for anyone to cover all the issues and angles in half an hour. That’s not a criticism of Channel 4 at all, more a comment on the complexity of the implications of the bedroom tax and the way that the effects vary around the country. I must have written thousands of words on the subject over the last two years and invariably have to cut something important or leave an angle untouched.
It sounds like lots of material ended up on the cutting room floor for last night’s programme too but, within the time allowed, it did a very good job of presenting the issue from the point of view of under-occupying tenants, social landlords and local authorities. We heard from Iain Sim of Coast and Country Housing on its 150 per cent increase in voids since April 2013 and a couple who were both in wheelchairs who face the bedroom tax on the ‘spare’ room in their specially adapted flat yet were denied a discretionary housing payment. The programme was also balanced enough to include two overcrowded families who have benefitted from larger homes being freed up.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: February 4, 2014 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Bedroom tax, Equality, Social housing, Welfare reform | Tags: bedroom tax, Grant Shapps, Raquel Rolnik., United Nations |
Seeing ourselves as others see us can be an uncomfortable experience and so it is proving for ministers responding to United Nations special rapporteur Raquel Rolnik.
Her preliminary report in September called for the abolition of the bedroom tax and prompted a furious row with Conservative party chairman and former housing minister Grant Shapps. Now his ‘woman from Brazil’ is back with a final report that uses the approved Conservative term ‘removal of the spare room subsidy’ but still recommends that it ‘should be suspended immediately and be fully re-evaluated in light of the evidence of its negative impacts on the right to adequate housing and general well-being of many vulnerable individuals and households’. You can read the full report here [downloads Word doc].
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Posted: January 14, 2014 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Housing benefit, Universal credit, Welfare reform | Tags: Iain Duncan Smith |
A remarkable thing happened iyesterday: Iain Duncan Smith used a five-letter word beginning with S.
Apologising for a mistake is just about the last thing any minister wants to do, but IDS got his chance when Labour’s John Healey asked him at work and pensions questions about the DWP’s bulletin admitting the pre-1996 under-occupation penalty error. Healey quoted the latest survey from the Northern Housing Consortium that ‘nearly half of all frontline housing workers have dealt with someone who has threatened to commit suicide’ largely because of the government’s welfare changes. ‘Will he apologise this afternoon to those people for the concern and chaos that he is causing?’
Duncan Smith replied: ‘I said it all right, and I say it again: the Department is, and I am, absolutely sorry that anybody may have been caught up in this who should not have been.’ So not just an apology but a double ‘sorry’ from both the secretary of state and his department. But before anyone gets too excited, he went on:
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: January 2, 2014 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Bedroom tax, Help to Buy, Housebuilding, Housing benefit, Housing market, Right to buy, Social housing | Tags: David Cameron, government guidance, House of Commons, housing market, housing supply, James Meek |
Not everything stops for Christmas and New Year. I’ve just written a post for Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing, on what’s happened in housing over the break.
The post features government guidance on housing allocations for local people, a House of Commons Library note on housing supply, an FT report on David Cameron’s fading interest in garden cities, a 5 Live programme on the housing market in 2014, James Meek’s London Review of Books essay on housing plus the latest on the bedroom tax.
Read more here.
Posted: December 23, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Housing benefit, Legal, Local government, Social housing, Welfare reform, Welfare state | Tags: Grant Shapps |
The first of a two-part look back about the issues and people that I’ve been blogging about this year.
1) The year of the bedroom tax
Thinking back to the beginning of January it was obvious that the under-occupation penalty would be a huge issue for housing in 2013. What soon became clear was that it would go mainstream in the national media and parliament too. The closer we got to implementation in April, the more scrutiny it received, and the more that happened the clearer the unfairness and the contradictions at the heart of the policy came into focus. All the attention seemed at first to take the government by surprise too. It wasn’t until February that Grant Shapps came up with the government’s preferred term: the spare room subsidy. That prompted me to blog about the battle of language on the issue and in the wider debate about welfare/social security.
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Posted: December 19, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Housing benefit, Social housing |
The postcode lottery facing disabled applicants for discretionary housing payments (DHPs) revealed today may be shocking but is it so surprising?
A survey by the National Housing Federation found that 29 per cent of disabled victims of the bedroom tax were denied DHPs by councils around the country.
But freedom of information requests revealed huge variation around the country, with the proportion of disabled people making successful applications as low as one in seven in parts of Kent and less than three in ten in North East Derbyshire, Basildon, Rotherham and parts of Lancashire.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: November 28, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Housing benefit |
Is it too much to imagine David Cameron telling his aides in Downing Street to ‘get rid of all this facts crap’?
The question is prompted by an answer he gave earlier at Prime Minister’s Questions. This was the question from Labour MP Andy McDonald:
‘The Disability Benefits Consortium of over 50 charities has signed a letter to the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions calling for immediate action to exempt disabled people from the bedroom tax. Why on earth do the Prime Minister and his Government refuse to listen?’
Cameron replied:
‘Obviously, what we have done is to exempt disabled people who need an extra room. This does, I think, come back to a basic issue of fairness, which is this: people in private sector rented accommodation who get housing benefit do not get a subsidy for spare rooms, whereas people in council houses do get a subsidy for spare rooms. That is why it was right to end it, and it is right to end it thinking of the 1.8 million people in our country on housing waiting lists.’
I highlight this not because I am naïve enough to expect ministers in general or the prime minister in particular to answer the questions they are asked (that would clearly be too much). Nor do I necessarily expect the answers to be the whole truth. But is it too much to expect a passing resemblance to the truth? Cameron’s answer in this instance offered two examples of misleading the House of Commons for the price of one.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: November 20, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Housing benefit, Social housing, Wales |
As the bedroom tax celebrates its debut in the Oxford English Dictionary, there is new evidence today that it is creating empty homes rather than removing ‘spare’ bedrooms.
A survey published by Community Housing Cymru (CHC) today suggests that the first six months of the under-occupation penalty have cost more than 1,000 affordable homes in Wales.
Welsh housing associations say they have 727 homes standing empty as a result the policy. Meanwhile 78 per cent have seen an increase in their rent arrears, with over £1 million attributed to the bedroom tax. Some 51 per cent of tenants are paying the shortfall, 37 per cent are part-paying and 12 per cent are not paying at all.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Posted: November 13, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Housing benefit, Social housing, Welfare reform | Tags: bedroom tax vote |
Yesterday’s bedroom tax vote has left me wondering if our political system is capable of righting what is such an obvious wrong.
A Labour motion calling for immediate repeal was defeated by 26 votes – a narrower margin than the government might have expected – while a government amendment effectively saying it is all Labour’s fault passed by 31 votes. Could things have been different?
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Jules Birch 