Housing: Underoccupancy Charge

Baroness Maddock Excerpts

Monday 18th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, it is simply too early to reach judgments about how the introduction of the benefit cap and the removal of the spare room subsidy bed in. The kind of savings that we were looking for from those policies seems to be being borne out by the very early initial figures that we are now seeing.

[Baroness Maddock (LD)]

My Lords, does my noble friend have the latest figures for the use by local authorities of housing discretionary payments? The last time I looked at this, local councils were not using that money to help people in the short term. I would be grateful if he could update us on that.

[Lord Freud]

Again, my Lords, it is hard to reach definitive conclusions. We now have £180 million for discretionary housing payments for this year, including £20 million that is by demand, to be bid for. So far, we have had just 13 bids in for that money. Last year, some discretionary housing payment money was returned. We are monitoring this extraordinarily closely to make sure that councils are able to deal with their hard cases.