Housing Benefit and Supported Housing
Debate between Alan Brown and Lord Evans of Rainow(8 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Graham Evans (Weaver Vale) (Con)
I would like to put it on record that I, too, welcome the announcement on the 1%.
We spend more on family benefits in Britain than they do in Germany, France or Sweden. There is no doubt that social housing is invaluable for hundreds of thousands of people in this country who need help in getting accommodation, but it cannot be right to continue to subsidise people to live in houses that are bigger than they need while there are 375,000 families living in overcrowded conditions. Nor can it be right to subsidise people to live in houses that are out of reach or unaffordable for hard-working taxpayers.
Page 97 of Labour’s 2009 Budget summarised the problem:
“Indications…are that some claimants may be able to afford accommodation that is out of reach of working families on low incomes. Furthermore, costs of Housing Benefit have been rising above inflation despite static caseloads.”
In fact, between 1999 and 2010, the cost of housing benefit rose by 46% in real terms, reaching £21 billion. Housing benefit was truly out of control, with the maximum housing benefit award reaching over £100,000 a year. Even after the benefit cap, people can seek support for housing up to a rate of £20,000 a year. What would a working family paying tax have to be earning to afford rent of £20,000 a year? They would have to be earning £60,000, £70,000 or £80,000 a year.
Rents in the social sector increased by 20% over the three years from 2010-11 and were markedly higher on average than for like-for-like properties in the private sector. That is clearly unsustainable and helped to fuel the something-for-nothing culture that Labour presided over for 13 years. Some 1.4 million people spent most of the previous decade trapped on out-of-work benefits, while the number of households where no member had ever worked nearly doubled under Labour.
The announcements in the autumn statement followed on from reforms in the last Parliament to better align the rules between social and private landlords, ensuring fairness between those receiving housing benefit and the hard-working taxpayers who have to pay for it.
