Housing Benefit

Aidan Burley Excerpts

Tuesday 9th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Tony Lloyd]

I am talking about the Minister’s policy. My right hon. Friend the Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire South (Mr Alexander) made it clear what a Labour Government would have done. That was clear also from the statements of the then Secretary of State, and it was very different from the current Government’s proposals. The proposed income loss is not something that I recognise from any Labour manifesto.

The income loss will be significant for those in one, two or three-bedroom houses. In my constituency, for example, 8,000 people face an income loss of £12 to £14 a week. That sum may be trivial to a Minister or Secretary of State, but £12 to £14 is a significant part of the disposable income of somebody on housing benefit or on benefits more generally. The House ought not to countenance taking away that amount of money. It penalises the most vulnerable people in our society to prop up the Government’s policies. That is not scaremongering; it is a disgrace. Ministers and their supporters should recognise that.

There is another aspect of the proposals that we should not countenance. The Secretary of State made a long and complicated speech, which gave no comfort whatever to those in my constituency who will lose money. It gave no comfort to those who will potentially lose their homes. It gave no comfort because the right hon. Gentleman is far more concerned with the polemic of his speech than with the reality of human beings who will lose out in respect of both housing and their finances.

I hope that the right hon. Gentleman and others on the Government Benches will think again, particularly about some of the most difficult aspects of their proposals. There are parts of them which, with proper care and attention, we could all begin to agree with. The problem, at least in part, is the ridiculous speed of their implementation and the lack of acceptance of the impact that they will have. Were the Secretary of State to stand at the Dispatch Box and say that the Government are prepared to look again at the speed of their implementation, we might have a basis for real debate.

The worry among my constituents is that the proposals are driven, first, by concerns of budgetary restraint—the battle that the Secretary of State fought with the Chancellor and lost—and secondly, although this is a claim that I do not make against the Secretary of State, by the apparent desire among some of his Back Benchers to penalise the poorest and most vulnerable in our society. That rhetoric has come through in some of the debate.

[Mr Aidan Burley (Cannock Chase) (Con)]

rose—

[Tony Lloyd]

The hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I have a limited amount of time and will lose some if I give way.

The speed of the changes raises real issues. Even if I believed that rents would adjust as the Secretary of State believes, they would not do so at the lightning speed required by his policies. People will not suddenly find their landlords voluntarily reducing their rents by £12, £13 or £14 a week. That will not happen for a number of reasons.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Raynsford]

Let me say to the hon. Gentleman what I have said in many previous debates. When we came into government in 1997 we inherited a very serious problem caused by the condition of the existing housing stock, as he knows. He also knows that a great deal of money was put into the decent homes programme to improve the condition of millions of social homes throughout the country. Because that was a priority, perhaps not enough was spent on building new homes, but if he looks at the figures, he will know that during the later years of the previous Government, until the recession hit, there was a rising trend of new house construction in all tenures, including social housing. Had that been sustained, we would now be seeing levels approaching those set out by Kate Barker in her report.

Obviously there has been a recession in the meantime. It has hit the world—it has hit this country and everywhere else—but given that situation, we want to see policies that will improve prospects rather than make things worse. The problem is that the present Government have managed to destabilise every part of the housing market. House builders are in shock because of the ill-considered planning changes. The private rented sector is in difficulty. Landlords are worried about the proposed changes to housing benefit. The social housing sector has been pulverised by the Government’s proposal to remove security of tenure and to jack up rents to near market levels. That has created a serious problem of anxiety and lack of confidence in all sectors of the market. Not surprisingly, as the hon. Gentleman highlighted, there is therefore a problem with shortage of supply. That is precisely what is driving rent levels.

[Mr Burley]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Raynsford]

No. I have given way once, and I must make a little more progress.

All hon. Members should realise that the Government’s hope that the changes will lead to a reduction in rents is delusional. It will not happen, and the consequence will be that many people who depend on access to private rented housing, and on a degree of housing benefit to support it—many of them are in low-paid work—will find it harder and harder to compete in an increasingly tough market. I am afraid that the Government are making things worse.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Aidan Burley (Cannock Chase) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Cardiff Central (Jenny Willott) on her clarification. I am very glad that she has made it.

I heard so much that I disagreed with from the right hon. Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Mr Clarke) that I do not quite know where to start. I should probably take the opportunity to point out to Opposition Members, as I always do, that last year, of the £700 billion that the Government spent in total, only £40 billion went on propping up the banks, which is 6%. They can hardly go around blaming the bankers for the £170 billion deficit that they left us.

[Frank Dobson]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Burley]

No, I want to make some progress.

I wish to take head-on the accusation made by the right hon. Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill that this is all about the cuts. Of course, a lot of the changes that we are making to housing benefit, and others matters that we are debating at the moment, are a result of having to make public spending reductions. It is broadly agreed by Members of all parties that we need to reduce public expenditure to pay off the deficit and start paying off the £1.4 trillion debt.

[Mr Tom Clarke]

Can the hon. Gentleman tell the House of one single television debate in which his leader referred to housing benefit cuts?

[Mr Burley]

I can tell the right hon. Gentleman that housing benefit expenditure ballooned from £11 billion in 1999 to £20 billion 10 years later, and is forecast to reach £25 billion by 2015. The Prime Minister would agree with me that the country simply can no longer afford that. We cannot go on like this, spending £25 billion a year on housing benefit.

I wish to leave for a moment the necessity argument and the fact that we have to make these changes. Even if we were in the boom years, they would be necessary purely on the grounds of fairness. They are all about fairness, but the problem with the word “fairness” in political debate is that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. There is no single agreed definition of what is fair. Everybody in the House defines it in their own way. For Opposition Members—I respect them for it—it is about redistribution of income. It is about taxing the rich more and throwing more money at the poor. For us, it might be about fairer taxes or rewarding hard work and playing by the rules. Fairness is about being able to keep more of what one earns.

What I wish to add to the debate is what we believe is fair when it comes to housing benefit. I will start with a few basic questions of principle. Is it fair that hard-working individuals and families in this country should subsidise people living in properties that they have no realistic chance of ever affording to live in? Is it fair that when the average salary in this country is £22,000 a year, some people, as we have heard, can claim more than £100,000 a year just for their rent? Is it fair that even under the proposed cap of £20,000 a year, a person would still need to earn about £80,000 just to have that disposable income for their rent? Is it fair that the cap is being set so high? If the average salary in this country is £22,000, the cap should actually be about £7,000 a year.

[Sheila Gilmore]

If the real aim is to reduce the housing benefit bill, will the hon. Gentleman explain why his Government propose to change the way in which houses, for both councils and housing associations, are built? The tenants will be paying for the cost of building houses and rents will rise to 80% of market rents, which will put up the housing benefit bill. If that is the hon. Gentleman’s key objective, how does that help us to reduce the housing benefit bill?

[Mr Burley]

The hon. Lady should have listened to what I said. Our point is that it is not just about reducing the housing benefit bill, but the issue of fairness. We need to go back to the first principles in this debate and decide what is a fair amount for the working majority to pay towards those who do not, cannot or will not work. What is fair? The average annual earnings in my constituency is £25,279 a year.

[Michael Ellis (Northampton North) (Con)]

On the subject of fairness, is it not right that Opposition Members persistently forget one of the first principles of fairness, which is the juxtaposition between low-paid hard-working families and those on housing benefit? Housing benefit claimants should not be better off than those who are hard-working and low paid. Is that not a principle of fairness?

[Mr Burley]

That is precisely my point. People in Cannock Chase who earn £25,279 a year would frankly love to have £20,000 to spend on housing from an equivalent annual salary of £80,000, because that is what it equates to. That is dreamland for them. They have never earned £80,000 a year, so why should they be paying out of their hard-earned taxes for some people to have the equivalent of a salary of a quarter of a million pounds so that they can live in parts of London that have some of the most expensive postcodes on Earth.

[Sheila Gilmore]

If the problem is about households with very high rents, why not tackle that problem? Perhaps we could build more affordable houses in London. Why not solve the problem in a phased way? Housing benefit changes will be made all over the country and 30% of housing benefit recipients in my city are at work. Why are they being punished because there is a problem? Why not just solve the problem? The hon. Gentleman has spoken very eloquently on it.

[Mr Burley]

I agree with the hon. Lady on the need for a regional cap. Funnily enough, some of the work that the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority has done on regional caps for MPs should be considered. In my constituency, the IPSA cap to claim is £700 a month. That is what IPSA thinks is a reasonable rent for an MP and his family to claim to live in Cannock Chase. Yet under the housing benefit rules, a person can claim £1,600 a month, which is more than double what IPSA thinks is fair for an MP. How is that fair?

The charity Shelter, which has been guilty of some terrible scaremongering, has claimed that up to 80,000 people will be made homeless by the plans. It falls to it to redefine its ludicrous definition of homelessness, which includes two teenage children living in the same bedroom. That is hardly the definition of homelessness that most people in this country would understand. For most, homelessness is about someone not having a roof over their head. Even according to Shelter’s own briefing, the average loss in my constituency will be £30 a month—£7.50 a week. The total number of claimants in Cannock Chase is 10,278. Therefore, one eighth of my constituency—it is a very poor working-class constituency that used to have 52 coal mines—will have to adjust their weekly outgoings by less than a tenner. Is that really a reason to speak of weeping children, social cleansing, Highland clearances, or, worst of all, as Polly Toynbee said, a “final solution” for the poor? She somehow compared capping housing benefit to £20,000 a year to the extermination of 6 million Jews. The left has engaged in disgusting language and it should be thoroughly ashamed.

If anything, these reforms do not go far enough for me. Let me finish by saying that as a country we must start to live within our means. We need to even up the benefit that a person gets from working with the benefit that a person gets from the Government. Yes, the changes are about saving money, but they are also about fairness. It is simply not fair that people on low incomes in my constituency, in which the average income is 25 grand a year, should pay their taxes to subsidise those who want to live in some of the richest postcodes in this country, where a person would need a salary of £250,000 to afford them. That is not fair and neither is the Opposition’s motion.