Dubious Dave
Posted: November 28, 2013 Filed under: Bedroom tax, Housing benefit Leave a commentIs 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
Universal debit
Posted: November 7, 2013 Filed under: Universal credit, Welfare reform Leave a commentAs we wait for the rescue plan, yet more scathing criticism of the universal credit will surprise nobody.
Today’s report from the Public Accounts Committee is a follow-up to September’s critical review by the National Audit Office but the weight of detail only confirms the impression of a project that long ago spun out of control.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Make a wish
Posted: November 5, 2013 Filed under: Bedroom tax, Housing benefit, Legal, Welfare reform Leave a commentIf ministers thought the furore over the bedroom tax would die down once it was introduced in April, they were sadly mistaken. What they insist on calling the removal of the spare room subsidy has now been in operation for over 200 days and, if anything, the controversy is still growing.
What began as a harsh but arcane cut in housing benefit – the under-occupation penalty or social sector size criteria – has instead forced its way into the public consciousness. As James Green, external affairs manager of the National Housing Federation, explains: ‘When we started our work on the Welfare Reform Bill it seemed like it would be impossible to make it mainstream or get any traction. Now you can go into any pub in the country and say ‘bedroom tax’ and people know what you’re talking about.’
At a political level, it’s become a symbol of the unfairness of the government’s welfare reforms. At the Lib Dem conference, nobody from the party leadership defended one of their own government’s policies. At the Labour conference, Ed Miliband shook off his party’s caution on welfare to pledge that he would repeal it. At the SNP conference, Alex Salmond used the imposition of the bedroom tax from Westminster as a key part of his appeal to the Scottish people to vote for independence. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some Conservative backbenchers are becoming uncomfortable about the policy as they realise its full implications.
Read the rest of my feature on the human, political and legal implications of the bedroom tax at 24 Housing
Beyond facts
Posted: October 23, 2013 Filed under: Housing benefit, Welfare reform | Tags: Benefit cap Leave a commentThe routine is familiar by now: researchers question government policy, government rubbishes researchers.
Last week it was the University of York, the bedroom tax and Esther McVey, today it’s the Chartered Institute of Housing, the benefit cap and Mike Penning but the gist was the same.
Where McVey embarrassed herself on the World at One, Penning had definitely got out of bed on the wrong side before he arrived in the Today programmestudio. That was compounded when presenter Justin Webb introduced him as Mark rather than Mike. ‘Let’s start as we mean to carry on, shall we?’ he harrumphed before attacking ‘the BBC and The Guardian’ for being the only media outlets to report the story. Read the rest of this entry »
2020 vision
Posted: September 24, 2013 Filed under: Bedroom tax, Housebuilding, Local government, Planning Leave a commentEd Miliband’s conference speech was much vaguer about housing than the advance briefing but it still sounds like good news.
The Labour leader said that ‘we’ll have an aim that at the end of the parliament Britain will be building 200,000 homes a year, more than at any time in a generation’.
He said that in 2010 there were a million too few homes in Britain but that the shortfall would rise to two million – the equivalent of five cities the size of Birmingham – by 2020 if we carry on as we are.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Sanctions impact
Posted: September 23, 2013 Filed under: Homelessness, Labour market, Welfare reform Leave a commentAs everyone focuses on the bedroom tax, there is worrying evidence today of the impact of another part of the benefits system on vulnerable homeless people.
Tougher benefits sanctions were introduced in October 2012 for people on job seekers allowance (JSA). The period that benefit can be stopped increased from between one and 26 weeks to four weeks and three years. Changes for those on employment support allowance (ESA) followed in December 2012.
The changes are part of steadily escalating conditionality requirements, including the claimant commitment that will be introduced in 100 job centres a month from October as part of the government’s conviction that ‘looking for work should be a full time job’.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Jules Birch 