Posted: March 26, 2014 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing, Housing benefit, Social housing, Welfare reform | Tags: Iain Duncan Smith, welfare cap |
The debate about the welfare cap seems to be all about the politics. It should be about the contradictions at the heart of the policy too.
The coalition parties and the opposition are all supporting the measure that will place a legal restriction on most welfare spending from 2015/16 so, despite an expected Labour rebellion, it seems more or less certain to go through.
The cap started off as a political trap set by the Conservatives and Labour support reflects a determination not to fall into it.
Judging from his appearance on the Today programme this morning, Iain Duncan Smith seems determined to act as though Labour doesn’t really mean its support. But the example he chose says much about his priorities and the way the cap will operate.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
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 23, 2014 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Buy to let, Housing benefit, Private renting, Universal credit | Tags: Fergus and Judith Wilson, housing benefit, private landlords |
So are private landlords about to pull out of the housing benefit market or not?
It’s one of the most crucial questions for the future of the housing system but the answer may be more complex than recent publicity suggests.
The alarm was raised when Fergus and Judith Wilson, the King and Queen of buy to let, revealed that they were evicting all of their tenants on benefit. A poll yesterday by the website spareroom.co.uk found that only 18 per cent of landlords currently rent to claimants, down from a third two years ago.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
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: December 16, 2013 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Homelessness, Housing benefit, Private renting, Welfare reform | Tags: DCLG, DWP, housing shortage, Joseph Rowntree Foundation |
So what is really happening to homelessness in the wake of the financial crisis, housing shortage and cuts in benefits?
Where the Homelessness Monitor 2013, published on Friday by Crisis and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, paints a picture of a grim situation that is bad and getting worse, the DWP and DCLG seem to see only sunshine and happy smiling faces.
Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing
Jules Birch 