Housing Costs

Baroness Clark of Kilwinning Excerpts

Thursday 3rd April 2014 Commons Chamber

[Dame Anne Begg]

Part of the problem, as we mention in the report, is that there are not enough houses for the people in houses that are deemed to be under-occupied to move into to release the larger houses, which is the Government’s policy intention. Unfortunately, the report was already agreed and printed by the time the BBC published the results of its investigation last week into the number of people who had moved, which discovered that the figure was only 6%. Although the intention of the policy was to free up larger houses, it seems that that has not really happened simply because there are not the smaller houses for people to move to. We found evidence that people who were desperate to move could not do so because there was no house for them, and they had no option but to absorb the extra costs. They were having to find what would have been paid in housing benefit from a very limited budget.

[Katy Clark (North Ayrshire and Arran) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend and her Committee on this excellent report. Of course, there are recommendations about benefit sanctions and we are about to have a detailed debate on that issue. In my constituency, benefit sanctions have more than doubled, increasing by 123%, and we understand that one in five of the people being sanctioned has a disability. Did the Committee hear evidence on that or does it have a view about the types of groups that are being affected by that policy?

[Dame Anne Begg]

Not specifically, because a lot of that will have been covered elsewhere, although there is some confusion about people who might be sanctioned in one part of the benefits system whose housing benefit should not be affected but sometimes is. However, we did not consider that specific issue in this report.