Oral Answers to Questions

Baroness Harman Excerpts

Tuesday 15th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

Having visited the area on numerous occasions, I am acutely aware of the importance of the new green offshore wind industry to the long-term economic prospects of my hon. Friend’s constituents and the region. I know that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change is doing a huge amount in trying to secure, for instance, the long-awaited and much discussed investment from Siemens in the Hull area, which will transform the local economy, and I can certainly assure my hon. Friend that those endeavours will continue.

[Ms Harriet Harman (Camberwell and Peckham) (Lab)]

Will the Deputy Prime Minister acknowledge that his Government’s justification for the bedroom tax—that it will mean tenants moving to smaller homes—cannot work unless there are smaller homes for them to move to? What is his estimate of the percentage of tenants for whom there is no smaller home to go to?

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

I totally accept the premise, which is that a change from one system to another involves hard cases that need to be—[Interruption.] That is why we are providing hard cash for hard cases. We have trebled the discretionary housing payments that are available to local councils. I am not in any way seeking to ignore the fact that some individual cases really do need the flexibility and the money from local authorities to enable their circumstances to be dealt with.

Let me say this to the right hon. and learned Lady. If there is a principled objection to this change, I do not understand why, in all the years during which Labour was in government, exactly the same provisions existed for millions of people in the private rented sector.

[Ms Harman]

This is the central issue in the Government’s justification for a policy that the Deputy Prime Minister has brought forward and voted for. He obviously does not want to admit that for 96% of tenants, there is no smaller home to go to. No wonder councils are saying that the discretionary housing fund is completely inadequate to help all the families who cannot move and are falling into arrears. Does he recognise that this is a cruel and unfair policy that he should not have voted for? He should repeal it now.

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

Of course I accept that for some households the change from one system to another creates real dilemmas that need to be addressed through the money that we are making available to local authorities. The right hon. and learned Lady cites a figure. To be honest, lots of wildly different figures have been cited about the policy’s impact. That is why we are commissioning independent research to understand its impact. I suspect that it varies enormously between one part of the country and another, and one local authority and another. That is why we are trebling the resources that we making available to local authorities.