Housing Benefit

Debate between Aidan Burley and Sheila Gilmore

Tuesday 9th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[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.

[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.