Wales: Cost of Living

Baroness Morgan of Drefelin Excerpts

Monday 2nd December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morgan of Drefelin (CB)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Ely, on securing this important debate. It is great to have a spotlight on Wales. I know that time is very short so I will confine my remarks to the findings of an extremely revealing snapshot report published by Shelter Cymru in November this year. It looked at “the bedroom tax”—I do not want to cause offence to the Minister by not referring to it as “the spare room subsidy”—and, based on Shelter’s direct experience, working with people in housing need in Wales, it reported a real increase in the number of people threatened with homelessness as a result of the spare room subsidy, or bedroom tax. It said that landlords were pursuing possession proceedings, sometimes when the bedroom tax was the sole source of arrears, and that some vulnerable people, very worryingly, were facing real injustices because of the failure of their local authorities to provide the level of service suitable to their needs.

All this paints a worrying picture but I ask the Minister to respond to two specific important points. First, what can the UK Government do, in partnership with the Welsh Assembly Government, to encourage social services to work together with housing agencies to ensure that vulnerable people are not unfairly subject to possession proceedings? Shelter Cymru has seen a number of cases where the bedroom tax has caused serious difficulties for people who should have been protected due to their vulnerability. In one case, a woman in a three-bedroom house was facing possession action for rent arrears but was unable to move. She was in the process of having her two children returned to her from care. If she downsized, she would not have been able to have her children back. However, because the children were not resident, her discretionary housing payment application was turned down. Only after Shelter Cymru’s intervention did social services agree to clear the arrears and consider paying the shortfall until the children could be returned to their mother. What does the Minister feel that she can do to help bring those agencies together in the interests of vulnerable people?

Secondly, I ask the Minister for her response to the handling of the discretionary housing payments, specifically for disabled tenants. We all know that this was a key measure in the Government’s approach to the introduction of the spare room subsidy—or bedroom tax. The provision of funding for discretionary housing payments was, as I understand it, intended to soften the impact, albeit in the short term. However, while discretionary housing payments have indeed offered a temporary lifeline for some households in Wales, some landlords are not routinely letting tenants know about DHPs and there is great concern about the future increase in homelessness that this will lead to down the track when people’s awards run out.

In particular, there is serious concern that many housing benefit departments are counting disability-related benefits as income for the purposes of DHP, making it considerably less likely that disabled people can successfully apply. We know that it is within local authorities’ discretion to disregard income from disability-related benefits when making their assessments for DHP, since these benefits are intended to be used for the extra costs of disability. Surely it must be good practice for these disability-related benefits to be completely disregarded in calculating eligibility for these important transitional payments. If not, it means that disabled people need to work extra hard to justify their case in applying for DHP. As we know, there is nothing in the letter of the law to prevent local authorities from doing this, but I would argue that this really is extremely poor practice. It means that while disabled tenants are more likely to be affected by the bedroom tax, they are less likely to be able to access this assistance. They have fewer options to self-mitigate the impact of these reforms as they will often have to wait longer in order to achieve a downsize option.

Shelter Cymru and a coalition of disability charities in Wales are compiling a detailed report on this matter. Is the Minister prepared to meet them to look at what can be done to mitigate such a difficult situation for disabled people in Wales?