Housing Benefit (Abolition of Social Sector Size Criteria)

Debate between David Morris and Geraint Davies

Wednesday 17th December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a great pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Blaydon (Mr Anderson). He is completely right: our party stands for a strong economy and a fair society, while the Conservatives have overseen a complete economic catastrophe, with the amount of debt escalating to 80% of the economy now.

[David Morris (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Con)]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that he and his colleagues have collective amnesia about what happened during 13 years of Labour Governments?

[Geraint Davies]

Share of debt has gone to 80% from 55%, the Conservative-led Government have now borrowed more in four years than we did in 13 years, and the economy is flatlining when it had grown by 40%. Their economic incompetence and the bankers’ errors are being borne on the shoulders of the most vulnerable, the most needy and, in the views of the Tories, the people least likely to vote. This is completely cynical and disastrous, in particular in poorer areas such as Wales.

In Wales, 46% of tenants are affected, versus 31% in the rest of the UK. Some 60% of people who have been inspected since a year last April are now driven into arrears, so the council has got less money still for repair and renewal. We have a situation where money has been spent on disability changes for flats and houses and those need to be decommissioned. The whole thing is horrendous.

The reason, allegedly, is twofold. One reason is housing benefit escalation, which has doubled in 10 years, but 70% of that is because of private rents going up. We need more homes. We do not need the Government, as they are doing, to use the funding for lending scheme through the Bank of England to spend more and more money on mortgages, to inflate the price of existing houses rather than building new ones. The money to small business is cut by 40% so wages, productivity and innovation do not grow. This is an horrendous, cynical and incompetent business and social experiment that is going disastrously wrong.

According to the House of Commons Library, the level of under-occupancy in the social sector is 10.2% versus 15.7% in the private rented sector and 49% in the owner-occupied sector. It is being said that people in social housing should not have homes. The reason why that rate is so low, of course, is that we build two-bedroom or three-bedroom houses and then the kids grow up and there is a part-empty home for them to be able to come back and see mum and dad or whoever. Then people die and those houses are recirculated. That is why that housing is efficiently used. In the owner-occupied sector that does not happen, of course, but the Conservatives do not care about these people on estates who need stable communities to build stable futures and jobs, and security for all of us. The whole thing is a complete disgrace.

We know that two thirds of the people affected are disabled. The Government are pretending that everything they are doing is right, but in fact they are hitting people in many different ways. For example, a couple with two children in which the woman is earning £10,000 and the man is earning £25,000 will now be losing £9,417 unless they separate. The Government have set in train incentives for families to break up as well as stripping them bare of their money.

The bedroom tax is one of the most horrendous examples of the Tories ripping the food out of the mouths of the poorest to the extent that, at Christmas time, they have to go to food banks. In Swansea, we are really being hit. The amount of money going to public servants has been frozen and the amount going into the public sector is going down. The amount of money in the local economy has been massively reduced. On the benefits side, tax credits for people on low wages are being cut, as is housing benefit. We are seeing desperate people being driven into the hands of loan sharks and having to use food banks.

This new Dickensian society that the Tories have created must be ended, and I hope that we will soon see the advent of a new, stronger Labour Government who will deliver a strong, united Britain in place of the weak, divided future that the Tories are heralding.