Hunt’s statement of intent

Posted: November 18, 2022 | Author: | Filed under: Benefit cap, Cost of living, Energy efficiency, Housing market, Local housing allowance, Social housing | Leave a comment

Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.

Eight weeks after Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng shrank the economy with their growth plan, chancellor Jeremy Hunt completed his reversal of almost all of their plans in his Autumn Statement.

He was speaking against a backdrop of dire forecasts of recession, unemployment, falling living standards and rising taxes that spoke of bad news to come for housing and tenants and landlords alike.

The complete rewrite of the Autumn Statement leaves a long list of tax increases and spending cuts in its wake, even if many of them will not take effect until after the next election and so may not happen. However, there was still a little hope amidst the gloom.

Here are five points I picked up from the statement itself and the background documents.

The cap and the freeze

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the statement – with a nod to expectations management by the Treasury – is that there is also some good news. The announcement that the government will stick to previous pledges to increase benefits (and pensions and the minimum wage) in line with prices was not completely unexpected but will still come as a relief to tenants and landlords alike.

But Jeremy Hunt’s decision to increase the overall benefit caps by the same amount is much more of a surprise. Without this, thousands more households faced being capped as their benefits rose to hit thresholds that have been frozen since they were cut in 2016. The main thresholds for families will now increase to £22,020 a year outside London and £25,323 in the capital. The cost is estimated at £315 million in 2023/24 and almost £2 billion over the next five years.

And yet… these are still far below the average earnings figures that were misleadingly used to justify the cap in the first place. And they leave people who are already capped facing rent increases with no extra income to pay for them.

Finally, buried deep in the background documents is more gloom: the assumption that Local Housing Allowance rates for private renters will remain at 2022/23 levels, which have themselves been frozen since April 2020. This despite rapidly rising rents. If confirmed, the result will inevitably be rising rent arrears and homelessness.

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Action for now, solutions not yet

Posted: May 26, 2022 | Author: | Filed under: Benefit cap, Cost of living, Energy efficiency, Local housing allowance | Leave a comment

The £15 billion energy cost support package announced by Rishi Sunak rightly benefits the poorest households most but it remains to be seen what it will do about the cost of living in general and the cost of housing in particular. 

Under the package announced by the chancellor on Thursday, 8 million households on benefits will get a one-off payment of £650 paid in two lump sums in July and the Autumn. Add that to the £400 energy support payment (rather than a loan) that will go to everyone and the £150 payment already made (at least in theory) to those in Bands A-D for the council tax, and the Treasury says this amounts to £1,200 help towards the cost of living for the most vulnerable.

Background documents confirm the one-off payment will not count towards the benefit cap, unlike the £20 a week uplift to universal credit during the pandemic. That should avoid many more households seeing the help disappear as fast as it arrives.

Sunak had been under pressure to do more on benefits not just because of energy costs but also because of the large gap between the 3.1 per cent uprating of benefits in April (based on last September’s inflation rate) and the current 9 per cent rate of CPI inflation.

He said his one-off payment would be worth more than bringing forward next year’s uprating of benefits, as some had suggested. 

And he also confirmed that the April 2023 uprating will be based on next September’s inflation rate, which could easily be more than 10 per cent, rather than retaining the option of declaring it to be unaffordable.

So far, so good, then and this is probably the package that the chancellor should have delivered in a Spring Statementthat looked inadequate at the time and has seemed even weeker with each passing week. This package looks to be both more generous and more redistributive than many people were expecting.

However, that also reflects the scale of the cost of living crisis. Add the £800 increase in the energy price cap expected in October to the £700 increase already seen in April and that is already more than the chancellor’s £1,200 for the most vulnerable and that is before you get to large increases in the price of food, fuel and other essentials. 

And there was one major cost that was as absent from Sunak’s statement this week as it was from the one he made in March and the Queen’s Speech earlier this month. No prizes for guessing it must be housing. 

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Benefit cap surge is a warning of worse to come

Posted: August 7, 2020 | Author: | Filed under: Benefit cap, Coronavirus, Local housing allowance | Leave a comment

Originally published as a column for Inside Housing on August 7.

Step away from planning reform for a few moments and grim news out today (Thursday August 6) reveals a more immediate crisis in the benefits system with even more alarming implications for the future.

Figures published by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) show that the number of households subject to the benefit cap almost doubled to 154,000 between February 2020 and May 2020. Of those, 140,000 had children.

More households have moved on to Universal Credit over time so the grey line for total capped households is the one to watch – note that the increase is much bigger than when the benefit cap was reduced in 2016.

Capped households

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Social housing reforms let down tenants

Posted: December 4, 2018 | Author: | Filed under: Affordable housing, Bedroom tax, Benefit cap, Social housing | Leave a comment

Originally posted on December 4 on my blog for Inside Housing.

Go back to the days when the government’s confidence in its marketising agenda for social housing was at its greatest and one consistent justification was made by ministers for their policies.

The introduction of affordable rent would mean more new homes for the same money, fixed-term tenancies in the Localism Act would ‘end the lazy consensus’ and free up more lettings for people on the waiting list and Welfare Reform Act measures to remove the spare room subsidy would free up larger properties for overcrowded families.

Figures released last week show the combined impact of the policies and the results are not pretty. Read the rest of this entry »

A look ahead to the Budget part three: welfare and tax

Posted: November 20, 2017 | Author: | Filed under: Benefit cap, Budget, Local housing allowance, Tax, Universal credit | Leave a comment

Originally published as a column for Inside Housing on May 20. 

Some very big questions on housing, welfare and tax are looming ahead of this Budget.

If there is not the same sense of raised expectations that surrounds the prospects for land and investment, the answers given by Philip Hammond on November 22 will still go a long way to determining what type of housing system we will have going into the 2020s.

I’ve written many times before about the way that the aftermath of the financial crisis in 2008 and the policies adopted under George Osborne since 2010 have combined to create a system in which older and better-off home owners have gained at the expense of younger and poorer renters.

A piece in the Financial Times last week used figures from the Resolution Foundation to quantify just how much: housing costs for households below average incomes rose by £714 between 2007/08 while they fell by £271 for those on above average incomes. The biggest gains went to the richest 10% of households, whose average housing costs fell by £1,206.

And that these figures do not include substantial increases in housing wealth over the same period as house prices have risen.

Many factors have driven this including falling rates of home ownership and rock bottom mortgage rates but policies on tax and welfare set by central government have also played a part.

So what could Hammond do to redress the balance?

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Look beyond the rate rise for the real housing squeeze

Posted: November 2, 2017 | Author: | Filed under: Benefit cap, Mortgages, Poverty, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Originally posted as a column for Inside Housing on November 2.

Today’s first rise in interest rates for a decade is an important symbolic moment but it will make little or no immediate difference to the housing costs of millions of home owners with a mortgage.

The increase from 0.25% to 0.5% could see average mortgage payments rise by around £15 a month but it will not apply straight away to people with fixed rate mortgages and in any case it only restores the base rate to what was a record low between 2009 and the aftermath of the referendum.

Compare that with the continuing squeeze on benefits and tax credits/universal credit that the Institute for Fiscal Studies forecasts today will help to increase the percentage of children in relative poverty after housing costs from 30% now to 37% by 2022.

And contrast it with the latest overall benefit cap statistics also published today: as at August 68,000 families were hit by the lower cap that came into effect a year ago and nearly a third of them are losing between £50 and £100 a week. The cap is now £26,000 in London and £20,000 elsewhere.

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Watching the benefit cap

Posted: April 6, 2017 | Author: | Filed under: Benefit cap, Local housing allowance, Welfare reform | Leave a comment

Originally 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.

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Cutting the cap

Posted: November 1, 2016 | Author: | Filed under: Benefit cap, Private renting, Social housing | Leave a comment

Originally published on November 1 on my blog for Inside Housing

You might think a policy that threatens more than 300,000 children with destitution and homelessness would be attracting more attention.

The reduction in the overall benefit cap starts in just six days’ time (Monday November 7) and will be introduced in different areas over the next few weeks. It is the first of a series of crucial events for housing this month that I blogged about yesterday. But only now is it getting much attention in the national media. That’s partly thanks to new analysis by the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH), which suggests that 116,000 families will be affected and a total of 319,000 children.

The cap is being reduced from £26,000 a year to £23,000 in London and £20,000 elsewhere (lower limits apply to single people with no children). The cap essentially works via housing benefit. The more children people have, the higher their non-housing benefits will be and the more their housing benefit will be cut. At the levels of the lower cap, widespread rent shortfalls are inevitable unless people qualify for one of the exemptions or a discretionary housing payment (DHP) from their local authority.

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The ides of November

Posted: October 31, 2016 | Author: | Filed under: Benefit cap, Homelessness, Housebuilding, Housing benefit, Prefabrication | Tags: | Leave a comment

Originally posted on October 31 on my blog for Inside Housing

The last four months have seemed to offer a series of new possibilities for housing from Theresa May’s new government. From the prime minister’s rhetoric about ‘a country that works for everyone’ to housing minister Gavin Barwell’s emphasis on the importance of all tenures, the signals have been pointing to a significant shift away from the stance of the previous Tory administration. Friday brought good news when the Homelessness Reduction Bill won a second reading with the support of the government.

But events in the next month or so will go a long way to determining where those signals are really leading us. For all the rhetoric we don’t know much more detail than when the government went back to work at the beginning of September. While the dates of some events are already set, others are expected “shortly”. Here’s a selected list:

November 7

A week today sees the start of the reduction in the overall household benefit cap from £26,000 to £23,000 in London and £20,000 elsewhere.

An updated impact assessment published in August estimates that 88,000 households (107,000 adults and 244,000 children) will be affected by the lower cap, including 64,000 who would not have been covered by the original cap.

That is much less than in the original impact assessment, one reason being that the government has introduced new exemptions for guardians and carers in response to defeat in the courts. It also seems on the low side given that it means housing benefit will not cover the rent for families in more expensive areas and with higher rents and for larger families everywhere, even in social housing. And it will only encourage more landlords to restrict their lettings of ‘affordable’ homes to ‘working families’.

To borrow a line from Steve Hilditch, if October ended with the Homelessness Reduction Bill’s second reading, then November will kick off what can only be a homelessness expansion policy.

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Back to work

Posted: August 31, 2016 | Author: | Filed under: Benefit cap, Pay to stay | 2 Comments

Government resumes this week after a summer in limbo following the Brexit vote and change of prime minister. The unanswered questions for housing are stacking up.

The Cabinet met to discuss Brexit and parliament returns on Monday for two weeks before MPs take another break for the party conferences.

And the next few months should bring answers to some of the questions that have been hanging over housing ever since the referendum result and change of government.

What part will housing investment play in the fiscal ‘reset’ expected in the Autumn Statement? Will the new government offer any flexibility in the spending review settlement?

Is Theresa May’s vision of ‘a country that works for everyone’ and ‘giving people more opportunity’ just rhetoric or does she want a housing system that works for everyone too?

Will Sajid Javid and Gavin Barwell offer a change of approach at the DCLG? Will they be any less obsessed with home ownership? Or any less willing to devolve funding and decision making? Will they give full government backing to the private member’s Homelessness Reduction Bill?

But the more you look beyond the big picture and look at the detail the fuller the ministerial Pending and In trays become.

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