Homelessness

Baroness Morgan of Drefelin Excerpts

Wednesday 7th September 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morgan of Drefelin (CB)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, on securing this important, albeit short, debate, and on his comprehensive opening remarks, which captured the broad nature of the challenge before us. Homelessness is undoubtedly one of the most important and pressing social issues of our time, and I greatly appreciate the opportunity to discuss it in the Chamber. While I do not have a string of interests to declare, I am personally passionate about this issue.

Homelessness is, by its nature, a complex issue, as we have already heard. The causes can vary from person to person and, unsurprisingly, there is no panacea—but this complexity must never lead us to view homelessness as something that cannot be addressed: an unavoidable feature of modern society. It is not; it is something that we can tackle. Homelessness is avoidable and doing something is firmly within our control. Indeed, there are many tools at the disposal of the Government for both tackling and, importantly, preventing homelessness, and I believe that they have an obligation to use these tools as effectively as possible. Given the short time available, I will focus particularly on one of these tools, which has been touched on.

Last year, the Chancellor announced a four-year freeze on rates of local housing allowance—that is, housing benefit paid to those living in the private rented sector. Almost 400,000 working families in England receive local housing allowance, and they contain almost 750,000 children. Local housing allowance is a lifeline for those families. It provides support to bridge the gap between wages and the essentials of living. For many, it is the difference between keeping the roof over their head and homelessness.

Analysis from the housing and homelessness charity Shelter shows that if the freeze continues, by 2020, families in four-fifths of the country could face a gap between the support they need to pay their rent and the maximum support they are entitled to. This could affect 330,000 working families. Furthermore, this gap is likely to be significant. We are not talking about a few pounds here. In almost a third of the country, working families will face a gap of more than £100 a month between the support available and the rent due.

What does this mean? Private tenants could be at risk of homelessness if they cannot find the money to meet the shortfall. Families will be put at increased risk of homelessness if they are evicted because of arrears or they cannot find an affordable property when their tenancy ends. Let us think about that. That means that rents are detached from the support available. Landlords will potentially view households on housing benefit as a far riskier prospect because of this, further reducing the pool of properties available to lower-income households. We therefore find ourselves in the bizarre situation where a government policy designed to help people meet their housing costs not only fails to do so but may even increase their risk of homelessness in the process.

Local housing allowance rates should reflect the real cost of renting in each area to ensure the availability of affordable properties and prevent shortfalls and therefore homelessness, just as they were intended to. I therefore urge the Minister through his good offices to think very carefully about the freeze on local housing allowance. If we are looking at a cross-departmental strategy, that should be part of it.

I am of course not alone in calling for this. The problem has been highlighted on numerous occasions, most recently in the CLG Select Committee report, which urged the Government to review local housing allowance levels so that they would more closely reflect market rents.

I hope that with the new Government, this issue will be thought about. I certainly admire the Prime Minister’s commitment to make Britain a place that works for everyone, including these families.

Wales: Cost of Living

Baroness Morgan of Drefelin Excerpts

Monday 2nd December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morgan of Drefelin (CB)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Ely, on securing this important debate. It is great to have a spotlight on Wales. I know that time is very short so I will confine my remarks to the findings of an extremely revealing snapshot report published by Shelter Cymru in November this year. It looked at “the bedroom tax”—I do not want to cause offence to the Minister by not referring to it as “the spare room subsidy”—and, based on Shelter’s direct experience, working with people in housing need in Wales, it reported a real increase in the number of people threatened with homelessness as a result of the spare room subsidy, or bedroom tax. It said that landlords were pursuing possession proceedings, sometimes when the bedroom tax was the sole source of arrears, and that some vulnerable people, very worryingly, were facing real injustices because of the failure of their local authorities to provide the level of service suitable to their needs.

All this paints a worrying picture but I ask the Minister to respond to two specific important points. First, what can the UK Government do, in partnership with the Welsh Assembly Government, to encourage social services to work together with housing agencies to ensure that vulnerable people are not unfairly subject to possession proceedings? Shelter Cymru has seen a number of cases where the bedroom tax has caused serious difficulties for people who should have been protected due to their vulnerability. In one case, a woman in a three-bedroom house was facing possession action for rent arrears but was unable to move. She was in the process of having her two children returned to her from care. If she downsized, she would not have been able to have her children back. However, because the children were not resident, her discretionary housing payment application was turned down. Only after Shelter Cymru’s intervention did social services agree to clear the arrears and consider paying the shortfall until the children could be returned to their mother. What does the Minister feel that she can do to help bring those agencies together in the interests of vulnerable people?

Secondly, I ask the Minister for her response to the handling of the discretionary housing payments, specifically for disabled tenants. We all know that this was a key measure in the Government’s approach to the introduction of the spare room subsidy—or bedroom tax. The provision of funding for discretionary housing payments was, as I understand it, intended to soften the impact, albeit in the short term. However, while discretionary housing payments have indeed offered a temporary lifeline for some households in Wales, some landlords are not routinely letting tenants know about DHPs and there is great concern about the future increase in homelessness that this will lead to down the track when people’s awards run out.

In particular, there is serious concern that many housing benefit departments are counting disability-related benefits as income for the purposes of DHP, making it considerably less likely that disabled people can successfully apply. We know that it is within local authorities’ discretion to disregard income from disability-related benefits when making their assessments for DHP, since these benefits are intended to be used for the extra costs of disability. Surely it must be good practice for these disability-related benefits to be completely disregarded in calculating eligibility for these important transitional payments. If not, it means that disabled people need to work extra hard to justify their case in applying for DHP. As we know, there is nothing in the letter of the law to prevent local authorities from doing this, but I would argue that this really is extremely poor practice. It means that while disabled tenants are more likely to be affected by the bedroom tax, they are less likely to be able to access this assistance. They have fewer options to self-mitigate the impact of these reforms as they will often have to wait longer in order to achieve a downsize option.

Shelter Cymru and a coalition of disability charities in Wales are compiling a detailed report on this matter. Is the Minister prepared to meet them to look at what can be done to mitigate such a difficult situation for disabled people in Wales?