Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Lord Best and Baroness Hollis of Heigham
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
But councils with retained stock—and that stock is not coming forward as fast as government would wish—will have a levy in view until their own vacant stock is forcibly sold. That levy has to come from somewhere. Why on earth should some local authorities be expected to fund RTB discounts out of their money when other local authorities are not? What is the basic fairness in that? I absolutely take the noble Lord’s point that this is a redistribution from some local authorities but it means that those with retained stock will have to pay double the size of the levy or double the number of sales to make good the fact that a very large proportion of more rural district councils do not have any retained stock.
Lord Best
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Porter, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, are in agreement on this. They both oppose the fact that this levy will be solely on those authorities that have retained stock and a housing revenue account, and that it will be a very large sum of money—£4.5 billion per annum on those councils that have retained their stock, and nothing on those councils that have transferred their stock. The noble Lord, Lord True, can read my script at his leisure. He felt I was saying that housing associations should not contribute but councils should. I am absolutely not saying that councils should carry the burden of the right-to-buy discounts for housing association tenants, as he thought that I might be. I am saying that neither councils nor housing associations should pay for this new policy and that we should see new investment, which is what we need to replace homes that are lost, and to build new homes. We need new investment.
I happen to know a bit about the Richmond Housing Partnership, which is the body to which the stock of Richmond has been transferred. It is a really excellent example of a housing association that has received the council stock and is doing extremely important things to build more homes. It is doing exactly the right thing. It would be a terrible shame if, instead of councils or the Government paying for these discounts, that organisation were taxed with a levy—that would be very detrimental to the interests of Richmond—and had to pay for the right-to-buy sales. It is making some serious economies at the moment. It is having to make efficiency gains on a big scale because its rents have been reduced due to welfare reform pressures. Nevertheless, it is doing a great job. It would be a very big shame if the idea gained any momentum at all today that housing associations were the cash cow from which could be extracted the resources to pay the £4.5 billion per annum. That would simply take resources out of the development programme for the very people for whom we need to build the new homes of tomorrow.
Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Lord Best and Baroness Hollis of Heigham
Lord Best
Perhaps the noble Lord will give way on that point. I think it is fair to say that the National Housing Federation also made clear its public opposition to the way in which these discounts were to be funded. There may be common cause here on the way in which they are to be funded—including with the noble Lord, Lord Porter.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, if the noble Lord, Lord Best, will forgive me, I am not sure that that is correct. The chief executive of the National Housing Federation said:
“How this policy is paid for is a matter for the government, not for the National Housing Federation”.
That is known as the washing-of-hands defence.
Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Lord Best and Baroness Hollis of Heigham
Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)
My Lords, I support the amendment, because I think there is a real issue here. Speaking as a former local authority leader—many people in this House are either former or current local authority leaders—I had three ombudsman judgments against me, of which two were correct and one, in my view, was not. That was over about 25 years, and most were associated with planning issues.
Throughout all my ombudsman experience, both in this sector and in the health service, the issues were between the ombudsman service and a publicly accountable body, such as a local authority or a health authority, in which there were members concerned to maintain the reputation of that authority, and to respond, if not precisely to the ombudsman’s proposals—the ombudsman had no enforcement powers—at least in a positive way. The ombudsman had no powers to make us do anything, but people would respond positively by trying to address the problem and see whether it was largely procedural or whether policy needed to be changed in some substantial way. That was because the ombudsman was overseeing a public organisation that had a reputation, with trustees, councillors and so on, who were accountable for their decisions in public, in the press.
If the Minister cannot support an amendment like Amendment 17, I hope that she will tell us how she would apply that same degree of scrutiny and enforcement to rulings against rogue landlords. There is a real issue here. Local authorities will respond, even if they cannot go all the way, but a private individual, knowing that the ombudsman has no statutory powers of enforcing a decision, may decide to go in a different direction and weather hostile criticism. Can the Minister help us by telling us in what ways the Government would ensure that the naming and shaming effect of ombudsman practice could apply in the private sector?
Lord Best (CB)
My Lords, I declare my interest as the chair of the council of the Property Ombudsman, and so I am on familiar ground. As chairman of an ombudsman scheme, I am very much in favour of the principle of having ombudsman services. They save having to go to court, spending a lot of money and being at loggerheads for longer. If one can resolve matters through the mediation services that, in effect, an ombudsman provides, it can be beneficial to everyone. I am also familiar with the Housing Ombudsman scheme because it is the body to which people take their complaints if they are tenants of housing associations and local authorities. I have had responsibility for housing associations and, like the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, I have had judgments against my organisation for, hopefully, rather trivial matters. The Housing Ombudsman has a very good reputation and is doing a very good job. It is sorting out many complaints and provides a good model for ombudsman-ery.
However, in the circumstances of both the Property Ombudsman, who looks after complaints from estate agents, letting and managing agents and corporate bodies, and the current Housing Ombudsman scheme, which looks after the mostly responsible local authorities and housing associations, one is in completely different territory to the 1.8 million individual private landlords. I see severe practical difficulties in applying the principles of ombudsman-ery—which require you to deal with a corporate entity, a body whose reputation needs protecting and who has a great deal to lose from the process—to the 1.8 million individual landlords, which, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Foster, is perhaps the current figure, 72% of whom have just one property.
It is extremely expensive if one gets bogged down in an individual dispute. Cases which involve the Property Ombudsman in dealing with disputes between agents and tenants who complain to us can sometimes go on for a very long time. However, the agents will try to get matters sorted: they will have their own complaints procedures and will work things through. They will show a willingness to go with this and, at the end of it, when we make an award—if we do make an award—against the agent, then the agent will pay up. We have sanctions if they do not.
When dealing with individual landlords, who sometimes do not have an office or an address and do not reply, these disputes can run and run and be extremely expensive to administer. This, I am afraid, is a criticism of having a system which has 1.8 million landlords looking after the properties. The practical difficulties of simply applying the ombudsman system to all private landlords are enormous. I suggest that if one were to have a pilot scheme to test out whether one can apply ombudsman principles to this sector, it would be a good idea to go with the corporate entities first. These landlords are private companies and have status. There is therefore an opportunity for legal processes to be brought into play if they do not pay up on awards and so on.
Forget the great mass of individuals for the moment because they could be expensive. I am afraid 96p per landlord will not do it because if tenants and landlords get into a dispute it can be ongoing. Even when one is half-way through trying to fix a dispute the landlord/tenant relationship can break down again on a new issue and the case could run and run. It is a big undertaking. So, to start with, I would stick with the corporate entities.
The Housing Ombudsman scheme is able to take on board corporate players. Some of the good landlords we have are already in membership of the Housing Ombudsman scheme on a voluntary basis. If one was seeking to extend the principles of ombudsman services, the first step would be to make this compulsory, as it is for housing associations and local authorities. Corporate bodies which are landlords should have somewhere to go. As with when we complain about our electricity, telephones or anything else, there should be a service. I suggest a pilot should start there, but it should be a little less ambitious than the scheme suggested in the amendment which, in many ways, is going in the right direction.
Local Government Finance Bill
Debate between Lord Best and Baroness Hollis of Heigham
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, I will be brief. Many years ago, as a Norfolk and Norwich councillor, I found that the then MAFF, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, was giving grants to Norfolk farmers to drain the Broads wetlands and that the then DoE was at the same time giving the same farmers grants not to take up the grants. We have a similar problem here in the interaction of the Bill with the Welfare Reform Act. That is not helped because the interaction between the two departments, at least on this issue, is clearly fraught. That is most obvious over housing benefit, which came up in our previous debate.
DCLG has a more appropriate definition of bedrooms to families than has DWP. DWP’s new HB rules penalise couples where one has a moderate disability—asthma or arthritis—and needs a separate bedroom but will receive HB not for the two bedrooms that they currently have and need but for a one-bedroom flat, if they or their social landlord can find one. Middle-aged couples, one with disturbed and disturbing sleep, but who are reduced to a one-bedroom flat, will be sofa-surfing in their new home if they cannot afford to take the benefit cut that they would face if they stayed put. Someone with asthma or emphysema, sofa-surfing at 55 in their own home—it is awful.
We could perhaps help one small group of disabled people with more severe needs. They are those disabled people whose socially rented property has an extra bedroom and would normally be in a higher band—say, band C—but, because of their disability needs, have had their council tax banding dropped from C to B. However, for housing benefit purposes, they may well be judged to be underoccupying and have their benefit cut. The amendment states simply that anybody who has had a band reduction by DCLG should not thereby be caught by DWP’s underoccupation rules for housing benefit purposes; they should be exempt.
We are not talking about large sums here. Sam Lister from the Chartered Institute of Housing has kindly produced for me an estimate of those affected, based on top-down departmental statistics, for which I am most grateful. It is an estimate, but it accords with my own hunch work, bottom-up from several authorities and grossing up those figures. There are 125,000 properties in England with a band discount, usually on grounds of disability. Leaving aside band A, which would not normally be overoccupied, that gives 110,000 people in discounted properties. Excluding owner-occupiers, whom HB would not affect, and pensioners, who would not be affected by HB, we estimate that the number of households affected across England—and, perhaps, Wales—would be between 2,200 and 3,000. The cost of protecting their current HB levels so that they are not hit by an underoccupation charge would, including Wales, come to between £1.8 million and £2.1 million.
In some cases, their properties may have been adapted for them by the social landlord, and DWP has allowed that it would be a false economy to shuffle them into somewhere smaller and then have to readapt the new property. However, many such couples—perhaps most—are simply in large properties, such as the middle-aged couple who need all three bedrooms of their flat or bungalow, one each for sleeping and the small, third bedroom for equipment. Anyone who has cared for a disabled person, as many in this Chamber today have, knows how much equipment can be needed: the wheelchair, the oxygen tanks, the nearly new mattress that has been temporarily replaced by a water mattress, the commodes, the tray tables, the cradles, the backrests and the banana boards. I could go on.
Under the new HB rules, those 2,500 disabled families with a reduced CTB because, according to DCLG, they need that extra space, could still be hit by the bedroom tax contrived by DWP, which says that they do not need that extra space, at a cost to them of between £15 and £20 or more. This amendment would simply allow those with a reduced band by virtue of their disability, as recognised by one part of government, to be exempt from the bedroom tax imposed by another part of government. This would bring consistency between the two departments and would be the right thing to do for families who are usually poor and certainly disabled. It seems self-evidently just. It may be that the Government propose to protect such families and I very much hope that the Minister can say that they will do so, in the same way as she was helpful in Committee in telling us that council tax band reductions would continue. If not, I hope that your Lordships will support this amendment. I beg to move.
Lord Best
My Lords, I have put my name to this amendment as well. As a long-time campaigner on the famous bedroom tax, I am very supportive of this amendment, which I think affects only between 2,000 and 3,000 households. For them, however, it would be very important and to have a double whammy would be disastrous for that group. I support the amendment.
Housing Benefit (Amendment) Regulations 2012
Debate between Lord Best and Baroness Hollis of Heigham(12 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Best
My Lords, the Minister is well aware of my disquiet, and I am unlikely to be satisfied in relation, in particular, to underoccupancy—the bedroom tax. I know that he has made some important efforts and I think that he is going to be able to be reassuring on one or two points that noble Lords have raised. I am sure that we will hear that full-time students will not have to lose their bedroom and regain it by a convoluted process while they are away at university. Also, I think that we now have a date when it will be the case that taking in a lodger will not mean that benefit will be cut by the amount received in rent, which will be helpful to some people. These measures are not going to change the world, but they are good things to do and I am grateful to the Minister for putting them in place. There may be more.
I want to talk about discretionary housing payments, which are the way out when you can see that a situation is quite untenable and any reasonable person would say, “Of course, in that particular case, this whole business is a complete nonsense and we must allow those people to stay where they are”. I am now getting the kind of letters that hundreds of MPs are going to get when this really big change gradually dawns on the world outside. I shall read to the Committee from a letter and will give the kind of reply that I would like to be able to give and explain the difficulties I have in giving it.
There is a woman in a relatively rural area of Norfolk who lives with her husband. They are not of pension age. He is a bit disabled. She looks after him, and she also looks after her elderly mother in the village. She sees her mother in the morning, at lunchtime and in the evening. She does a great job with her 81 year-old mother. She is in a three-bedroom council house. They have been there for 23 years and have brought up their children, who have gone. She uses two bedrooms because she and her husband do not sleep in the same bedroom. She will be paying another £25 a week because she is deemed to have two empty bedrooms.
The council has said that it has some one-bedroom flats in the nearest town, which is 16 miles away, that it may be able to move her into, but not now because the one-bedroom flats in the town are rather precious. Later, it might be able to move her in, but in the mean time, she will have to stay where she is. She says, “I can’t afford the extra £25 a week bedroom tax. What am I to do?”. In my letter back to her, I should like to say that there are things called discretionary housing payments. I am hinting at it but what hope can one give to people in such circumstances? It would clearly be completely foolish to move her out, although she cannot afford to stay; she cannot afford the extra £25 a week. However, moving her 16 miles away would mean that her mother had to be looked after by social services at considerable cost and her husband will not be properly housed—it is a nonsense. I should like to be able to say that the local authority should have the opportunity, where anyone can see that it would be sensible, to fill that gap and pay the bedroom tax, enabling her to stay where she is.
We know about discretionary housing payments that take care of some of the local housing allowance and the private rented sector. We know about the sums that relate to the total benefit that people can get from the universal credit—the £500 limit. We know about these other aspects of using discretionary housing payments. However, I cannot find anywhere any money for discretionary housing payments to pay the bedroom tax, except in respect of two special categories. These are thoroughly commendable, although I was startled to hear that the money was taken from the rest of the bedroom tax payers.
There are two kinds of special case. One covers adapted properties that have been physically changed for the people who live there. It would be a nonsense to move them out because there is a spare bedroom. It would cost everyone an arm and a leg. The other exception is a case where there are foster children. They do not count as part of the family but, obviously, they must have a bedroom. There is £30 million a year, which will continue indefinitely, for those two exceptions. That is great but they are very restricted categories. My middle-aged couple in Norfolk would not fall into either group.
I am afraid that noble Lords and, in particular, Members of the other place will all get such e-mails and letters, so they should be prepared. I had another letter from someone with two daughters, one aged 11 and one aged 13. One daughter is severely disabled. She needs a very large bed and, therefore, her own bedroom. However, the two girls are expected to share because they are aged under 15 and are therefore underoccupying by having two bedrooms. That will cost the family £14 a week from their disability allowance. They do not have £14 a week; they have great difficulty in getting by on what they do have. Everyone says that they must stay where they are. This is where a discretionary housing payment could come in. However, as I read the numbers I can see nothing. What does the Member of Parliament say in replying to his constituent?
I hope that the Minister has up his sleeve the opportunity to put in place more discretionary housing payments to get us through what I suspect will be rather a large number of cases in which anyone would agree that it would be best to let people stay put. I do not think it requires more legislation. We will not get the results of the very important, thoroughgoing research—I have congratulated the Minister on it—until some way down the line. Then we will see how things are working out. If it is not already the case, I advise the Minister to talk to his Treasury colleagues and provide a bit more discretion for local authorities to pick up cases that otherwise will just be hopeless. I have no idea how we and the people concerned will be able to cope.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, I declare an interest as chair of Broadland Housing Association, which spans Norfolk as a major traditional housing association. I also congratulate the Minister. We appreciate the reviews that he is seeing through and respect his respect for the evidence. It is welcome to be working with a Minister who is evidence-based. We appreciate that and it should be recorded.
Despite what the Minister said, these regulations are not about overcrowding. The people who are overcrowded and the people who are underoccupying are two different populations and in two different sets of places—they do not match. If the Minister were really serious about the issue of overcrowding, he would actually be looking, as some of us have tried to do, at the underoccupation among pensioners who, of course, are the biggest source of underoccupation. Although I am not suggesting that we should do that, if the Minister were serious about this, he would not confine his efforts to families, many of whom have children.
Secondly, the regulations are not about treating social housing in the same way as private rented housing. This is the second line that the Minister has offered us. What we have learnt over the last six months is that, far from the local housing allowance pressing down private sector rents, which was the mythology offered to us throughout the past year, the reverse is happening. Private rents have soared because, as my noble friend said, no new housing is being built. Private renting is not becoming a transitional tenure but a longer-term tenure. Demand is going up as a result, as are rents, as will the housing benefit bill. So, far from this exercise pressing down housing benefit, I am confident that we will see housing benefit in the private sector rise, because there are not three housing markets in this country, there is one. As new building has stopped in the owner-occupation sector and the social rented sector, the pressure on the private rented sector will increase, rents will go up and, as a result, the housing benefit bill will rise.
So neither of these two things are at issue. This is not about matching underoccupation and overcrowding— it does not fit. The Minister knows the statistics— they do not fit. It is not about following the example of the private rented sector, where rents are soaring and HB bills are likely to go up.
Like others, I do not want to repeat the arguments aired at great length in Committee. I have not been persuaded by anything since that the Minister was correct in his analysis. As a chair of a housing association whose tenants will lose the best part of £1 million in forfeited benefit, I have some questions for the Minister. What advice will he give me, given that his colleagues in DCLG have ensured that, instead of having £42,000 on average for a grant for a new house, it is now down to £16,000? As we cannot build without a grant of a minimum of £26,000, we cannot build. For the first time in 40 years my housing association is not building any new property. Given that, we have no possibility at all of “balancing our stock” to build the new single-bedroom properties that are pivotal to this scheme. As a result, our tenants know that they are faced with only our existing stock and occasional re-lets.
Occasional re-lets, when they come up, if they are attractive and in the right places, are for the most part pursued by pensioners. However, in future, pensioners who would like to leave a three-bedroom house and move into a one-bedroom flat or bungalow, will not be able to access any re-lets in our villages. This is because people currently in two-bedroom properties who are in the client group affected by the benefit cuts will now have to move to any available one-bedroom property against their will. I have yet to discover how that in any way adds to the sum of human happiness.
Many of our tenants have functional illiteracy and may therefore be re-classed as vulnerable, with the result that we will enjoy their housing benefit direct. However others, such as couples with children, will find it hard to manage; they will have debts, the banks will lean on them, and although I am trying to get them into credit unions, that may not be possible as they do not operate throughout Norfolk. They may well run into arrears. What would he have us do? If we let the arrears run, that will affect the estate, other people will stop paying their rent, we will go into the red, our books will not balance and we will go into special measures. The alternative is to evict, but the local authority will hope that we do not, because those families will go into bed and breakfast accommodation. This may be 10 miles away, the children will have to leave their schools, the younger ones may be bed-wetting, they will all be crammed into one room, and the cost to the public purse will actually increase because the cost of a bed and breakfast will be something like £300 per week, as opposed to the rent for their current accommodation at about £70 or £80 per week. So we have made that family deeply unhappy, broken up the pattern of managing their lives and very fragile incomes, and put them into accommodation at greater cost to the public. However, as they are a family they are entitled to be rehoused, so the local authority will ask us whether we can help. We will reply that the only property we have available is the same three-bedroom accommodation from which they were evicted because they could not afford to pay for it.
Local Government Finance Bill
Debate between Lord Best and Baroness Hollis of Heigham
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
To reinforce my noble friend’s point about advice agencies, my local Norwich CAB, whose income for the current year will be £1 million, will find a fall of £400,000, down to £600,000 next year, because every penny of the £400,000 it gets from the Lord Chancellor’s department is being withdrawn. As a result, people are not going to be able to use its services, staff will be laid off and the very issues that my noble friend has raised will impact on those who most need help.
Lord Best
My Lords, sadly, I have to accept that there are cases where local authorities have acted in an insensitive and inept manner in using bailiffs to pursue the debts of vulnerable people who owe council tax. However, I fear that local authorities are the victims too. They have no desire to be sending bailiffs to hound poor people to pay their debts.
The very worst aspect of this Bill is the expectation that councils will have to start collecting council tax from the very poorest households—the 20% or so of those of working age. They will be asked to find the money from their extremely low incomes, which have been provided mostly through benefit for other essential expenditure. The Bill means that councils are bound to face more arrears and more wasted expenditure in trying to extract small sums from poverty-struck people who simply do not have the money to pay. It is no fun for local authorities to be sending in the bailiffs when they feel that they must pursue these debts.
I support this amendment to protect vulnerable households from the heavy-handed action of unscrupulous bailiffs and I am grateful to the Zacchaeus 2000 Trust for bringing these matters to our attention today. However, the solution to the problem of these cases growing in number is to allow councils to avoid having to start taxing the poorest by giving councils the flexibility to raise the funds required by the Treasury in other ways—for example, as I suggested last week, through the painless reduction of the single person discount from 25% to 20%, on average. Councils are victims in this matter too.
Local Government Finance Bill
Debate between Lord Best and Baroness Hollis of Heigham(12 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Best
My Lords, I shall be brief in supporting the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Warner. We all owe him a debt of gratitude. He was one of the three Dilnot commissioners, along with Dame Jo Williams and Andrew Dilnot. Their report remains the key piece of policy guidance to which we all look to reform the system fundamentally.
I have declared my interest as president of the Local Government Association, which is right behind this amendment. The LGA has made adult social care its highest priority. It is the issue about which it is most concerned at the moment. If we take out the dedicated schools grant, social care is already much the largest area of local government spending. The 28% cut to central government support for local authorities over the current spending review period has not, I am glad to say, led to a 28% reduction in social care services for older people, adults with learning difficulties and others in need of care. Local authorities have absorbed some 85% of those cuts through service redesign and efficiency savings. However, this can go on for only so long before very painful results become apparent.
The cost of adult social care services is now set to rise, on a trajectory that the LGA has calculated, from some £14.4 billion to £26.7 billion over 18 years. That is an increase of 85%. By the time we get 18 years down the road, we very much hope that a series of measures will be in place to head this off before we get to the point at which virtually all local government expenditure must be on social care. However, there is the period in between in which things may get worse and we do not want this legislation to heighten those dangers.
It seems unlikely that a Bill could be introduced before the next election. If something came forward in 2015, it would probably be enacted in 2016 and become effective in 2017-18. We would already be several years down the road. The King’s Fund has estimated that by 2014-15 the gap in social care provision will already have reached £1.2 billion a year. Central government support needs to be in place now. We will get a reset in 2020 but in the intervening period funding for social care is a really important consideration for the Government. Although there may not be an expectation of the noble Lord’s amendment being accepted in its entirety, the sentiment behind it is strongly supported by the Local Government Association.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
I support my noble friend’s amendment. I am confident that the Minister will not reproduce the rather unwise remarks that we sometimes get on the Floor of the House that in seeking to cut the deficit you cannot afford to spend money on social care. There are sources of finance that could be available to government—any Government, including mine, which could and perhaps should have done this as well so I am not making a partisan point—which would adequately fund the Dilnot proposals on pension tax relief, about which some of us know something and others know relatively little. I may be in the second group.
At the moment pension tax relief is £30 billion and the difference between the standard rate and the higher rate is £7 billion. In the past we weaned the country off mortgage tax relief, first by bringing it down from higher rate to standard rate—that was done by a Conservative Government; the noble Lord, Lord Lamont, I think, but it may have been the noble Lord, Lord Lawson—and subsequently it was abolished altogether. The point about this is that in all our thinking about funding people’s long-term savings and their ability to cope with long-term care and so on, we think there is something called work and something called retirement, and that you should save from the one and transfer it to the other. We have to start thinking much more about people’s longevity, which is a good sign, and moving money from work to early retirement and from early retirement to later retirement; there are three categories.
If you were to ring-fence the money that is currently spent on higher rate tax relief down to lower rate tax relief, which is enjoyed by higher rate taxpayers on their way in, even though they pay only lower rate tax on the way out, it would be redistributed within the pensioner community from younger pensioners in their 60s and 70s to that same group of pensioners as they age into their 80s and 90s. For what it is worth, it would also redistribute, to some degree, from the better off to the poorer. As far as I am concerned, it would hit every winning duck that we want to hit: we would make pension tax relief fair; we would redistribute within the pension community in a ring-fenced way; we would redistribute from the better off to the poorer; and we would, I am sure, be able to commend it to the public in terms of fairness, because most people will be postponing income they might have got in their 60s and 70s to be able to have it in their 80s and 90s.
Before the Minister says that we cannot possibly do anything about this given the deficit—and I realise that this is for HMRC and the Chief Secretary and so on to think about—I would like to put this into play because I would be very sorry indeed if the proposal coming out next week was put into the long grass on the grounds that there can be no funding available and therefore we have to struggle on from an interim ad hoc base, as we are doing at the moment. There is a way if there is political will, and I am quite sure it is the sort of proposition that could command support right around the House and from all political parties. It would be fair, decent and affordable and it would give people security.
Welfare Reform Bill
Debate between Lord Best and Baroness Hollis of Heigham(12 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Best
My Lords, this combined amendment seeks to achieve a compromise on the so-called bedroom tax, the underoccupation penalty that reduces the housing benefit entitlement—later the universal credit entitlement—for those of working age in a council or housing association property.
Perhaps I might recap on the position we have reached on this measure. I have argued since Committee that the Government should stay with the current definition of underoccupancy from the Department for Communities and Local Government, which allows a household one spare room, which may actually be a room that is occupied all the time; for example, where children are not sharing because one has a disability or because a teenager wants a separate bedroom to do her homework and so on.
Requiring people settled in their council or housing association homes to move or pay a fine of what will now be £728 per annum on average seems very harsh. The housing benefit of these tenants will be cut by this amount so they will have to find the bedroom tax out of other benefit income. For an unemployed separated father who has a spare room so his children can stay, this represents a cut of nearly 20 per cent in his income from jobseeker’s allowance. Even though £14 a week may not seem a huge sum to most of us in this House, it means a very significant reduction in living standards for all households affected.
Your Lordships will recall that the earlier amendment on this theme was carried in this House with significant support from all parts of the House. It did not go so far as to allow families one spare room, but it changed the position so that the penalty would only become payable if the tenant refused an offer of a smaller, suitable flat. This amendment would still require all 670,000 households—rising to 740,000 households as the pension age rises—to move if they were to avoid paying the tax, but no one would have to pay until they had been offered and had turned down an alternative tenancy. This took away the surely inequitable requirement to pay the penalty for staying put even where there was nowhere else to go.
As your Lordships know, the majority of council homes built from 1920 onwards have three bedrooms. Requiring a move to a two- or one-bedroom flat can mean waiting for vacancies for some time; for example, in rural areas there are places where all the council houses have three bedrooms so if the tenants are to downsize they must leave the village, perhaps after living there all their lives. Some urban councils purposely avoid putting families into tower blocks, so singles and childless couples have been allocated larger flats there. To suddenly impose the underoccupation penalty on all these households before they have any chance to move elsewhere seems most unjust, and your Lordships voted for the amendment that would provide some relief for this problem.
It is important to note that the earlier amendment did not abolish the bedroom tax, and the penalty would still kick in for those who felt that they could not accept the alternative flat offered to them. Their reasons for refusing to downsize might be very compelling, but regardless of those reasons, the amendment—the compromise from the position of permitting a spare room—meant they would still have to pay if they did not accept the offer of the smaller accommodation.
This Lords amendment was rejected in the other place, though with a relatively small majority of 42, and with support from the amendment from all parties, including 12 Liberal Democrats and two Conservatives. This gives me some hope that if an amendment that cost half as much were to be presented to the other place, it might indeed gain acceptance there.
I am therefore bringing forward an even more modest amendment, in the hope of salvaging something here. The new amendment confines the postponement of the imposition of the bedroom tax to certain categories only, rather than to all tenants. I deeply regret abandoning hundreds of thousands of households who, even if this amendment is approved, will still be caught by the penalty charge on the 1 April next year. Even if they are willing to move, they will be trapped where they are because there are no smaller flats available. However, needs must, and the new amendment reduces the cost in the early years from perhaps a maximum of £300 million by around half, a far cry from the billions referred to in earlier debate. In due course, the Government will collect the great majority of the tax if, as gradually some people are offered a smaller home and do not take up the offer, they are then required to pay up. The cost implications are not, I suggest, too frightening.
Therefore, for the categories spelt out in this new amendment, no fine, penalty, tax, or housing benefit cut would apply unless and until they turned down an alternative offer of something smaller that is defined in regulations as “suitable”. The categories given relief in the amendment are: first, claimants who are not required to work for reasons already set out in the Bill in Clause 19, including those with,
“regular and substantial caring responsibilities for a severely disabled person”,
or for,
“a child under the age of 1”.
These are households for whom pressures to take a job—which, as the Minister has explained, is a key policy driver for the Government—are not relevant. For these people, the penalty simply represents a substantial loss of income with no escape. If the household felt that they could not accept an offer of an alternative flat, they would still have to pay, but only after that offer had been made.
Secondly, the amendment covers claimants who have already been exempted from the household benefits cap, mostly because they are disabled, but also including war widows. These are people who the Government recognise as having extra costs. My amendment simply replicates the categories which the Government have acknowledged should not be penalised by the benefits cap. Many of the 70 charities that are urging parliamentarians to accept an amendment on this issue represent people with disabilities, who are particularly badly affected by having to share bedrooms. Again, I fear that these would not be exempt from paying the tax unless they moved out, but the tax would not be payable until they turned down another home, deemed to be suitable, but smaller.
Each household would still have a very tough decision to take. For one it would be, “Could we move and put our disabled child with his special bed into the same room as his sibling, or should we take the cut in our living standards and stay in this house with a separate bedroom?”; or, for an older couple, where one is under pension age—under 61 years and 5 months next April—the choice could be, “Should we move from our two-bedroom flat to a one-bedroom flat, even though we often sleep apart when my husband is ill, and we frequently use the other room when my daughter comes to give me a hand for a few days?”; or, “Must we move, because £14 per week off my husband’s state pension would be just too much?”. I fear that these difficult choices would still have to be faced even if the amendment is carried, since the amendment only postpones the moment of truth until an offer of a suitable alternative flat is made. Thirdly, this concession would apply where the household regularly takes in foster children. Barnardo’s and other children’s charities are keen to see the nonsense of taxing foster parents removed.
What are the arguments against my case for a now extremely modest element of relief from the proposed underoccupation penalty? It cannot be said that granting this relief takes away the pressure on scroungers—people able to work but not working—since the revised amendment does not cover anyone required by the benefits system to seek work. Can it be argued that the Government have already announced a sufficient safety net to cover the most extreme cases? They have made available £30 million against the expected savings of £470 million, which the bedroom tax would yield, for discretionary housing payments which local authorities can use to cover the tax for deserving cases. The Government have mentioned two groups in particular to be helped by local authorities; namely, those living in homes that have been specially adapted and for whom downsizing would require the smaller home also to be adapted, no doubt at considerable cost, and households with foster children where the underoccupying rule is particularly inappropriate.
The funds for this discretionary power to bail out some hostels is confined to these special cases. If something was left over, it would leave local authorities with an invidious task; that is, how to assess the relative hardship of the bedroom tax in each of the other 670,000 cases where the discretionary housing payments are available to help only one in 16 of those affected.
Nevertheless, I confess to having been thankful for this small mercy—until I learnt that the £30 million for these discretionary housing payments is to be paid for not by the Treasury accepting any reduction in the gains achieved through the bedroom tax but by increasing the tax for the other tenants by another £50 per annum from the previous £13 per week to the new £14 per week.
What about the argument that those on very low incomes could find the money to pay the penalty charge from their savings? I fear that it is more likely that such households will be struggling with debts, perhaps depending on payday loans and even resorting to the loan sharks, rather than sitting on a pile of savings. While older tenants may have put aside a bit, few will be able to cope when faced with a new tax of £728 every year on top of the rises in their heating bills and other costs.
One other remedy suggested by the Minister is for these households to take in lodgers. That is certainly to be strongly encouraged, although the current disregard as to the amount that tenants are allowed to keep without losing benefit has not proved a sufficient incentive to date. Obviously, however, taking in lodgers is not appropriate for most of those in the priority categories of the very vulnerable and disabled people now covered by this new amendment. By all means promote lodgers’ schemes among those not helped by this amendment but it seems unrealistic to expect this idea to be of much help for those singled out in my new amendment.
I hope that since the earlier, more expensive amendment gained such a high level of support from all parts of this House, this lesser version will be acceptable. As noble Lords know, there is backing for any such measure. It comes not just from the many charities concerned with children and disabled people but from the social landlords—the councils and the housing associations. These social landlords have expressed grave concerns, not only on behalf of their tenants but because of the administrative and financial problems that the Government’s proposals will create for them.
The landlords will be asked to be the tax collectors of the £14 per week from each liable tenant to make up the weekly deficit on the rent that the penalty will create. They know that they will have a huge job identifying who may be eligible. I am grateful for the reassurance from the Minister that there will not be an army of snoopers to check on whether a young person has left home or is away for just a few weeks. But landlords will have the problems of collecting the £14 per week or £25 per week if there are two rooms. That will not be covered by housing benefit any more.
Even if the housing benefit is paid directly to the landlord because the tenant is classified as vulnerable or has run up arrears, the extra sum—the penalty charge—will still have to be collected directly from the tenant. This will not be easy. A gradual accumulation of rent arrears seems inevitable, meaning in turn evictions in due course and less money for renovations, new homes or regeneration. The gain to the Treasury is likely to mean losses for housing, as well as the misery of loss of income for those unfortunate tenants who have to pay up.
This will be a particularly painful levy on communities in the north-east and the north-west where 45 per cent of the relevant tenants will be hit, and in Northern Ireland, where rather higher standards have justifiably applied, 68 per cent of these tenants will be affected. In this House we are not troubled by postbags full of protests from aggrieved constituents, as I strongly suspect will be the case in the other place, but I know that many of your Lordships feel strongly that we have a role in restraining government where measures seem excessive or unfair. Even though this amended, amended amendment is now providing much less relief than I feel the situation requires, it nevertheless draws a line by mitigating at least some of the hardship for at least some of those on the lowest incomes, and now exclusively for those who are not in a position to go out to work because they act as carers or are disabled themselves, I hope very much that noble Lords’ support for these households will be sustained.
I pay tribute to the Minister who has worked extremely hard and effectively on this important legislation. I congratulate him on the changes he has achieved, but I know that he feels the hot breath of the Treasury on his collar. I therefore ask him to feel emboldened by the strength of feeling in your Lordships’ House to accept this very modest new amendment. I beg to move.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, universal credit is about using benefits to encourage behavioural change, and above all to encourage people to seek work by reducing its risk and increasing its reward. Like most people in this Chamber, I am deeply supportive of that, as the Minister knows. The House is extremely grateful to the Minister for the care and attentiveness with which he has introduced the changes made by universal credit through the stages of this Bill.
However, this amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Best, has nothing to do with universal credit, nothing to do with behavioural change and nothing to do with urging people into work. It is simply a means of making savings that will come from cuts which will fall on some of the poorest. The Minister has already said, by referring to Moody’s, that we cannot afford to lose those savings, yet none of them falls on me although they could do so. I would be happy to indicate to the Minister, if he so wishes, where they might. In my view, this is about political and moral choices. Do I pay or should a disabled child suffer?
I want to make three brief points. First, I believe that at the core of the policy on underoccupation is a fundamental dishonesty. I do not accuse the Minister of this, but the position is a dishonest one. That is because it states that people of working age must downsize if they have one spare bedroom but, as the Government acknowledge in their own impact analysis, those smaller flats and houses to which people should move do not exist. The Government acknowledge that 85 per cent of people will therefore have to stay put. If they do not, and instead move into the more expensive private-rented sector, the savings will not be made. Let us think about this. The Government are publicly requiring people to downsize and then, knowing that the stock is not there, they hope and expect that people will ignore what the Government are telling them to do—otherwise they will not make the savings. The Government are calling for one outcome but want people to do the exact opposite. We are asking the House not to collude in that false choice.
Secondly, the Government’s position, as has been well outlined by the noble Lord, Lord Best, is deeply unfair to particular groups of people. I shall take just one: the couple with disability who need a bedroom each on occasion. He may have early prostate cancer and be going to the loo half a dozen times a night; she may have a respiratory problem and cough heavily through much of the night. On most nights, they need a separate bedroom otherwise one is being required to go without sleep or the other to sofa-surf in her own home night after night—a 60 year-old woman is being asked to sleep on a sofa night after night because of the change.
The same problems apply to disabled children being expected to share bedrooms with their siblings. If those disabled children need regular night-time care, their siblings are going to go to school without enough sleep, tired and upset, and almost certainly underperforming. Do we really believe that such families should carry the cuts on behalf of us all? I think not.
The third and last point is the consequences for housing associations such as my own—I declare an interest as chair of Broadland Housing Association, half of whose housing is in rural Norfolk. I cannot currently rehouse pensioners in rural Norfolk who want to downsize because I do not have the stock in the villages in which they want to live, yet it is among pensioners that underoccupation is most common. In future, the disabled family which does not want to move will be required to move, while to the pensioner who wants to move we will have to say, “You’ll have to stay put”. Can your Lordships think of a more foolish as well as—in many ways—more selfish policy, whereby people who do not want to move are made to move, and those who do want to move cannot, even though the costs of the one and the other would balance out? That cannot be right.
What will we do? As the noble Lord, Lord Best, said, families who cannot move, including those with a disabled child, will have to take a hit on their housing benefit through no fault of their own because they cannot move, and they will within weeks fall into arrears. What do we then do in a housing association? Either I evict a family with a disabled child into temporary accommodation or bed and breakfast—how I can do this to them?—or they stay put and arrears mount. I have already trebled the amount in my accounts for increased arrears. As the noble Lord rightly said, the money is not available to pay the debt charges of new building, which alone will solve the problems of getting our stock right in the longer term.
The Minister says that such people may make a contribution out of their benefit, by which he means, frankly, that they must either eat less or heat less. A disabled child and their family are being asked to eat less or heat less in order to bridge the gap between their housing benefit and the home in which they live.
I return to my opening point: we do not have to do this. It is about our political and moral choices. Families with a disabled child will lose £14 a week, while most of us enjoy a tax-free winter fuel allowance or find for the second year running that our council tax has been frozen. Not a penny of these cuts is falling on me or, I suspect, on very many of your Lordships, yet we are asking disabled families and families with disabled children to carry those cuts for us. I hope that your Lordships will put themselves on the side of the very modest amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Best, put themselves on the side of disabled children, disabled people, war widows, foster carers and kinship carers, and support the noble Lord’s amendment.
Welfare Reform Bill
Debate between Lord Best and Baroness Hollis of Heigham(13 years ago)
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Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, I will be very brief. The amendment indicates our very real concerns about the effect of all these cuts to housing benefit. We fear that if there is any reverse in our decision today on underoccupancy, housing associations will face mounting arrears, and spend more time and employ more staff chasing deficits in rent. As a result, there will be even less chance for those housing associations to build the new housing stock we badly need. I know the Minister thinks my fears are exaggerated. I hope he is right. The House has alleviated most of my concerns, but we cannot properly calculate the behavioural effect of all these changes on tenants. The Minister is evidence based—something we all welcome and respect—and he wants UC to work, as we do. I therefore hope that by the time the Bill has gone through its full passage in both Houses he will, if it is appropriate, find the resources to ensure that we have the research to undertake an independent review of its effects on tenants in social housing. Frankly, if we do not have that protection, I fear the worst. I beg to move.
Lord Best
I support the amendment. We already have up and running, thanks to the good work of the Minister, a really first-class piece of research looking at the impact of the housing benefit changes on families, poverty and a whole range of issues. I strongly congratulate him on taking that suggestion seriously and bringing forward a significant piece of research. It engaged a consortium of the top people at Oxford University, Sheffield Hallam University, Ipsos MORI polling and the IFS. I wondered whether that team might have its work somewhat extended to embrace the research suggested by the noble Baroness. It would not involve quite as much work because it would examine the 150,000 or so households that will now be affected by the underoccupancy arrangements. There is much important research to take place.
Welfare Reform Bill
Debate between Lord Best and Baroness Hollis of Heigham(13 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Best
I am glad to start with that affirmation in advance. I am speaking to Amendments 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 44, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83 and 84. This group of amendments relates back to the underoccupation penalty, about which we have heard so much.
I was deeply impressed by the array of speeches from the noble Baronesses, Lady Hollis, Lady Turner, Lady Lister, Lady Sherlock and Lady Hayter—the opposition Baronesses. I wondered what the plural was and I thought of it by the end: it is “a battery of Baronesses”. I thought that I might feel annoyed that they had stolen all my speech in various instalments, but I did not. Instead, I felt admiration and was in entire agreement with what they said.
My amendments in this group include two, Amendments 44 and 84, which relate to the fundamental point here: the definition of an underoccupied home, one in which people will either pay a penalty, have to move or make some other arrangements. The amendments suggest that we should stay with the standard that we have used in the past; that is, the standard used by the Department for Communities and Local Government and the Tenant Services Authority. This allows you the basic bedroom standard plus one bedroom. The amendments call for that status quo to be resumed. I have been involved in housing matters for some 42 years. During that time, we have grappled a lot with issues around underoccupancy in managing property that I have been responsible for and trying to incentivise people to move when that has been sensible. I do not think that it is possible to insist on the basic bedroom standard and expect people to live in the homes that they would then be required to live in. That is not how we occupy our properties in this country; 83.9 per cent of owner-occupiers fail this test straightaway. Most other people, in these terms, underoccupy the homes that they live in. Indeed, we build accommodation on the basis that you are going to underoccupy it. The housebuilding industry knows that people like to be able to tell their parents that they have bought a three-bedroom house. It is actually a two-bedroom house with a box room added. We do not expect people to occupy all those rooms in the real world of owner-occupation, and people move when they fill them up. I cannot believe that social housing tenants’ lives are so different that they will be able to cope with the basic bedroom standard.
The noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, gave some illustrations. The example that I might well have quoted was read out by the noble Baroness, Lady Lister—I received the same, very impressive e-mail about a family with two daughters. I give my own example. Let us try not to pull the heart strings. It is just an ordinary case of a family where there are two girls, of 14 and nine, who are not at the moment sharing—thank goodness, because the teenage girl of 14 does not want to share with her nine year-old sister. People have lives to lead as well as homework to do; they want to invite their friend in and listen to music or whatever they want to do. The 14 year-old does not want to share with a nine year-old who goes to bed at a completely different time. Theoretically, they have to move out. They will move down from a three-bedroom to a two-bedroom home. However, it will not take long before the 15 year-old is 16 and can get a room of her own. They can then move back again—of course, the former home will not be available. It will not be long, though, before that older girl leaves home, and then the family will have to move out again. This is ridiculous—people moving around to try to fit in with the rules.
Let us face it: the impact assessment makes it quite clear that it is about saving money. Reducing the cost of housing benefit is of course a very important objective, but the great majority of ordinary people, even those who do not have small children or children of the wrong sex who will not be able to be fitted together in the right boxes, need an extra room. Their children come back—does no one realise that they have not gone for ever? Sometimes, their coming back saves other people a lot of money because the parents will put them up and look after them during some period of crisis in their lives—marriages break down; all kinds of things happen. Indeed, you in your older age or even in your middle age may get sick and need a member of the family to come back and occupy the spare room and a keep an eye on you for a bit. To have that one spare room available, even when you do not have children to put in it, is the way that the rest of us live, and it has to work for social housing—I have never found a way of persuading people otherwise. This measure is a way, I fear, of raising money. It is a fundraiser, because almost nobody in these circumstances will move. They will just have to pay—or forgo, as it is—£13 a week, which is a serious amount of money for people on very low incomes. It begins to tot up.
The consequences of that will be shared. They will be felt by the individuals, who try to cut their living standards at a time when fuel bills and everything else are rising. It will be felt also by the landlords, because it will be extremely difficult to collect the money which has not been received by way of housing benefit. That means that arrears will begin to accumulate.
At first, landlords will be tolerant and helpful and try to see this through, but eventually—and I have been responsible for social housing—you get to the point where, pour encourager les autres, you have to proceed with eviction. After a while, arrears become too much. If they cannot be paid, people are going to have to be moved out, and then you get all the cost of that.
I cannot believe that people are going to move. It costs a great deal to move. Your carpets will not fit the place to which you are moving; your curtains will not fit. You have to pay disconnection charges for your electricity suppliers, and so on. People are not going to keep moving; they are just going to be stuck there and have to pay up, or forgo the money. I do not think that it is fair. The rest of us do not feel, for a moment, that that is how we would expect to live. I do not think that people, just because they are in social housing, should be expected to.
The amendment says that if you have two rooms which, using the basic bedroom standard, would be regarded as unoccupied—they would probably be a study or whatever—you would pay the penalty, but you would not do so for one bedroom, using this very tight definition. That is the effect of Amendments 44 and 84.
Is there a solution to the problems of underoccupancy? I am not going to burden you with a long speech on this, but underoccupancy is mostly about people over pension age. They are specifically excluded from this measure. However, they are the ones who are actually underoccupying, often in a three-bedroom home, and who—if only we could find the incentives and the ways of moving people—could be moved on, and families could take those homes.
I declare my interests: I chair a housing association called Hanover. Hanover has 19,000 properties, but they are all retirement properties. We concentrate exclusively on older people.
Our target is the underoccupying elderly person, whose home, even though they feel quite reluctant to move, is not suitable any more. If it has three bedrooms, stairs, a garden that needs to be kept up and heating bills that are higher than they should be, it is a great idea if we can move people out of those three-bedroom houses. They are desperately needed by families. Housebuilders have tended to build just flats, and not houses with gardens, so these are really valuable to the rest of society. The incentives to move are what we need.
We have shown in my housing association—others have done just as well—that if you provide something that is really good, then people will move. They are not going to go to scruffy old bedsits in sheltered housing that has seen much better days. But they will go if it is to somewhere manageable, clean, bright, open and companionable.
Lord Best
Well, preferably a bungalow, but mostly we just do flats, but they can be smart apartments. Yes, you could move.
There are some 240,000 families who are overcrowded. We have far more elderly people who are underoccupying than that. We could give incentives to older people, the incentive being the really nice apartment elsewhere. It gives you two-for-one, because you release your family home. This is not the approach being taken in this legislation.
If we are going to have to reconcile ourselves to there being this penalty, then the other amendments in this group come into play, which are about exemptions, exceptions and letting some people off. I hope it does not come to this, but if it does, a series of exemptions is outlined in the amendments that follow.
Amendments 38 and 79 would remove the underoccupation penalty for the 100,000 properties that have been specially adapted to meet the needs of a disabled tenant—we have heard a little about that already. It would be daft to move a household with a disabled family member to smaller premises if the costs of fitting out the new home—for example, with a level-access shower or removal of steps—far exceeded the savings from cutting the housing benefit and left wasted adaptations behind because no other household needed the particular adaptations made to the previous home.
Similarly, Amendments 39 and 80 would exempt the 200,000 households in receipt of disability living allowance, or the new personal independence payment, in the same way that DLA recipients have been excluded from the proposed total housing benefit cap. Some extra space for those with disabilities can even save money when that allows a carer to move in during a difficult period for the disabled person, saving the cost of hospital or residential care. Amendments 40 and 81, which are supported by the Fostering Network and Barnardo’s, as well as the housing charities, which are behind all the amendments, would exempt properties where families are providing foster care placements.
I am sure that it is simply a fault of the drafting, but, at present, the Bill would not count foster children as part of the household. Therefore, any rooms they occupy would be classified as unoccupied. That is clearly nonsense, and I am sure that the Minister will explain how that will be put right in future.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
Am I right in believing that, to become a foster carer, you must have a spare bedroom? If you have a spare bedroom, you are hurt and hit by the HB rules.
Lord Best
I fear that that is exactly the position. Others may wish to come in on the amendment about foster parents.
Amendments 43 and 83 would not require an underoccupying tenant to move out where there was simply nowhere for them to downsize to—the fundamental point behind the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis. For example, the National Housing Federation has demonstrated that about 180,000 social housing tenants would be classified as underoccupying their two-bedroom homes and would need to move on, but that only about 68,000 one-bedroom social housing flats come available for letting in a year. Even if every one of the one-bedroom flats was allocated to those who are downsizing—which of course would be impossible as there are serious demands from tens of thousands of other such households—it would take years before they could be accommodated.
In the past, we built social housing between the world wars and afterwards. Mostly, we built three-bedroom housing. Now we have a lot of households that require something smaller, but we do not have enough houses to put them in. Here, again, the impossibility of people moving means that the exemption would kick in. If they were expected to downsize into less secure private rented properties, rents are likely to be much higher and therefore the benefit costs, the universal credit costs, would be much higher—about £66 per week more in south-east England. That is not a great saving. The housing benefit bill would be likely to rise dramatically although people were occupying less space.
Moving creates the familiar barrier to employment. Moving to somewhere with a higher rent itself intensifies demand on the private rented sector, which will push up rents more generally.
Of the amendments, my preferred option is to define underoccupying as exceeding the bedroom standard plus one—that is, having two “spare” bedrooms. That would cut the gains to the Government from the underoccupation penalty to 150,000 households from the 670,000 that the Government are expecting to be caught by the new penalty.
If the Government cannot accept that, I hope that, alongside the exclusion for older people—the category most likely to be underoccupying at the moment— exemptions could be put in place for disabled people in adapted property, recipients of disability allowance, families classified as underoccupying because foster children are not counted, those unable to move because no suitable alternative exists, and those in supported or sheltered housing where a spouse or partner dies or leaves them and who are below pensionable age and would be compelled to move out. Added together, those exemptions would certainly reduce the hardship and extra costs implicit in the underoccupation penalty. I look forward to hearing comments from other noble Lords and the reaction of the Minister.