Keeping it in the family

Posted: November 1, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Civil service, Welfare reform | Tags: , | 2 Comments

How would the government’s own policies fare under the new families test?

The test published by Iain Duncan Smith will apply to all new laws and policies ‘to make sure they support strong and stable families’. It follows a speech by David Cameron in August promising family impact assessments of all domestic policies as part of a wider speech about family-friendly policy.

As I blogged at the time, Cameron was careful to avoid giving the impression that he only meant traditional families. However, his speech exposed a huge gap between rhetoric and reality on everything from the benefit cap to the bedroom tax, out-of-area homelessness placements to the private rented sector and troubled families to wider welfare reform.

So who better to set out the detail than a secretary of state famed for his ability to believe he is right regardless of the inconvenient facts?

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

Double vision

Posted: October 28, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Television, Universal credit, Welfare reform | Tags: | 1 Comment

Universal credit came under scrutiny on TV and radio last night and whether you look from above or below things are not looking good.

Dispatches on Channel 4 covered the problems from below by looking at the experience in Warrington, where the job centre was one of the first to pilot the new all-in-one benefit. We heard from a succession of people whose claims were delayed, or processed wrongly or were simply not told what was happening and from Golden Gates Housing Trust on the problems this has caused.

The pilots are of course only meant to cover the simplest cases. However, single people don’t necessarily stay single: Jay moved in with his girlfriend and baby and found himself in a nightmare of delayed payments and rent arrears. ‘Me, my partner and my child will be homeless and you just don’t know what’s going on,’ he said. Jay started off as a fan of universal credit but they survived on coffee and crisps until the problems were sorted out.

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

Visions and promises

Posted: September 29, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Housebuilding, Social housing, Welfare reform | Leave a comment

As the parties hold their final conferences before the 2015 general election, housing has a high political profile. Here are five themes I’ve noticed so far.

1) Priorities, priorities

‘Building as many homes as we need’ is the fifth of Ed Miliband’s six national goals by 2025. The big questions remain how we achieve that and whether it will be possible without substantial extra investment in new affordable homes. So it was definitely good news that the Labour leader had this to say too: ‘We will also make housing the top priority for additional capital investment in the next parliament.’ However, that can taken at face value or as an indication that it will not be top priority in its initial investment plans.

Read the rest of this entry »

Mirror image

Posted: September 16, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Housing benefit, Labour market, Private renting, Social housing, Welfare reform | 1 Comment

Nobody pretends that reform of housing benefit will be easy but a report out today underlines the scale of the task.

The report by the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) does a great job of making the links between policies on housing, welfare and the labour market. The sobering conclusion for the government is that everything it has done so far has only succeeded in reducing the rate of growth of the housing benefit bill rather than reducing it.

So as fast as the government introduces cuts like the bedroom tax the bill keeps rising faster because of inflationary factors built into the system. Between 1997/98 and 2012/13 the total bill rose by 48 per cent in real terms.

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

The long goodbye to the bedroom tax

Posted: September 8, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Housing benefit | Tags: , | 1 Comment

Three images spring to mind in the aftermath of Friday’s momentous vote to amend the bedroom tax.

The first is of a bunker deep in the bowels of DWP headquarters Caxton House. Iain Duncan Smith sits at a desk surrounded by a dwindling band of loyalists who still believe in the policy: his ministers Mark Harper and Lord Freud plus a loyal special adviser and perhaps a press officer.

AS IDS raves that nothing has changed (and that the universal credit is on time and on budget) I imagine the others exchanging nervous looks between themselves as they assure him that the removal of the spare room subsidy really is saving £1 million a day and making housing fairer.

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

Beyond belief

Posted: September 2, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Housing benefit, Labour market, Welfare reform | Tags: | 1 Comment

So is it time to celebrate the rise in housing benefit claims by people in work as a reflection of the government’s success in getting people off benefits?

That was the claim made by Iain Duncan Smith at work and pensions questions yesterday as he answered Labour jibes about the soaring numbers of working households now dependent on state help with their rent.

The work and pensions secretary told Labour’s Emma Lewell-Buck:

‘The figure the hon. Lady did not give is that out-of-work housing benefit claims are falling, and that is because people who were claiming it are now going into work. That means that they are earning more money, which means that the likelihood of their being in poverty is far less. I wonder whether the hon. Lady would like to get up sometime and congratulate us on getting more people back to work and spending less on housing benefit as a result.’

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

 

Mind the gaps

Posted: August 18, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Bedroom tax, Poverty, Welfare reform | Tags: | 2 Comments

Spot the gaps between rhetoric and reality in the speech by David Cameron about family-friendly policies.

The prime minister spoke on Monday about how he will put families at the centre of new domestic policy-making. He asked three questions on this, none of which are directly housing issues but all of which touch on housing: How can we help families come together? How can we help families stay together? And how can we help troubled families and those children who don’t even have families?

Cameron also promised to introduce a family test as part of the impact assessment of all domestic government policies. That has to be good news even if the government has a track record of ignoring inconvenient evidence from impact assessments. However, it also prompts the obvious question of how existing government policies would fare under the test.

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

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

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