Affordable Homes Bill

Alison Seabeck Excerpts

Friday 5th September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

If hon. Members do not mind, I am going to move on because I am sure they will want to make contributions of their own.

I have referred to some of the elements of the unfairness, but the incompetence in how the policy has been advanced has also angered many of us. I am talking not only about the dodgy statistics, but the fact that, as the hon. Member for St Ives said, the original savings figure of £490 million has been downgraded and downgraded. It has been questioned by the National Housing Federation, the National Audit Office and a range of different bodies, and in some areas it is pretty uncertain that any saving will be made at all. Of course there was also the loophole. So, again, when the Minister stands up to tell us a decided figure of £1 billion, I merely say to him that he does not even know how many people were affected by the loophole. He does not even know how much that has cost, and that has already come into operation. So I do not understand how he can make wild accusations about the cost of the Bill on the basis of a calculation done on the back of a fag packet.

Other elements of the incompetence of the policy have already been referred to by my right hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Mr Raynsford). Many people are being forced out of properties that have been specifically adapted for them in order to go to smaller properties, which end up being more expensive because they are in the private sector or more expensive in the social sector because the local authority has to re-adapt another property. Adaptations that were made specifically for one person are not necessarily right for another person, so we see a waste of time, energy and money.

[Alison Seabeck (Plymouth, Moor View) (Lab)]

I wholly agree with what my hon. Friend says. I introduced a ten-minute rule Bill in the previous Session which exactly highlighted the costs for domestic violence victims and the adaptations to their homes, and it simply does not make good financial sense not to have these exemptions.

[Chris Bryant]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right about that. The hon. Member for St Ives also made the point about people in work who are in receipt of housing benefit, because the number of hours does not add up for them. There is a real danger that if they are forced to move to properties that are not easily accessible from their work, are too far away or where no family support network is in place, they simply will not be able to stay in work. We, thus, end up shoving up the welfare bill rather than tackling the real problems in welfare. That is far from an invented problem; it is a very real problem, which I suspect many hon. Members will have encountered. Constituents, especially single parents, will have come to them saying, “I have a job. It is close to where I live. It means I can turn up when there is an emergency at school. All those problems are solved. But if I have to move to a property 5, 10 or 20 miles away, I simply will not be able to stay in work.” That is the kind of problem the Government are coming up against.