Housing: Inherited Social Housing Tenancies

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Monday 24th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for that Answer—I think. Obviously, this House has not discussed the regulations concerned, although a regret Motion is coming up. I want to ask the Minister two questions, the first on numbers. He has told the House previously that the number of people affected by this loophole in the bedroom tax is small—the DWP says 3,000 to 5,000—but figures obtained under FOI by Labour show that, with more than a third of councils still to reply, already well over 23,000 people are likely to be affected. The new guidance, to which I think the Minister referred, may increase the number still further. Can he therefore tell the House precisely how many people will be affected by the loophole?

Secondly, I want to put to the noble Lord the following statement:

“I worry about what Labour chooses to call the bedroom tax, because so often what is a spare room is in fact a vital part of looking after an elderly person. It enables their relatives to come, it enables carers to be there … I think we introduced that rather without thinking it through very well, and I think that’s costing us”.

It is costing all of us, in discretionary housing payments, in rent arrears and in human misery. Surely the Minister agrees.

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, as I have said in this House previously, the numbers involved with this particular loophole are small. This particular inheritance issue does not change our estimates. A figure of around 5,000 has been attributed to the DWP in defining “small”.

On the FOI figures, it is worth making the point that local authorities are now getting to grips with the actual numbers. The Birmingham figures were quoted quite extensively. It was reported that Birmingham alone had 2,100 cases, the significance being that they make up a large proportion of the figure that we have been looking at. More recently, Birmingham put out a clarification, saying:

“We haven’t finished identifying them at Birmingham so can’t give you an exact number, but the number of possible cases has dropped substantially below the 2100 that was reported in the papers.”

So we can see that some of the FOI responses to which the noble Baroness referred—if that was an example—may be clarified.

We have a process for supporting local authorities and people to make the adjustments through discretionary housing payments, which we have increased in recent years from £20 million to £180 million in the current year—indeed, the signs are that that figure will be underspent. The number of people being affected is coming down reasonably rapidly; it is now below half a million.