Affordable Homes Bill

David Ward Excerpts

Friday 5th September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

The hon. Gentleman should listen more carefully to my speeches. I was always in favour of the right to buy scheme and enabling people to buy, and live in, their home—an Englishman’s home is his castle and all of that kind of stuff, and that applies equally to the Scots, Welsh and Irish—but local authorities were not allowed to replace that housing stock with social housing, and we set ourselves a long-term economic problem from which we have still to recover. If the hon. Gentleman wants to have another go and attack me by saying the Labour Government did not do enough when we were in power, he is absolutely right: we did not, and we acknowledge that, which is why one of our key commitments is to guarantee that by the end of a Labour Government in 2020—by that general election—we will be building 200,000 properties in the United Kingdom.

[Mr David Ward (Bradford East) (LD)]

rose—

[Chris Bryant]

If the hon. Gentleman does not mind, I will make a little progress.

The bedroom tax was ill prepared and it has been very poorly implemented by the Government. It is riddled with logical inconsistencies—as we have heard several times already today—and it has a central injustice at its very heart: the poor and the vulnerable are being made to pay for a recession that was caused by irresponsible lending not by them but by the wealthy in the City of London and in other countries around the world.

Some Government policies introduced since 2010 have been incompetent, and others, I believe, have been unfair, but this one manages to combine unfairness and incompetence to a phenomenal degree—quite a feat—and I am delighted that not only the two hon. Members from the Liberal party who have already spoken will be joining us in supporting that conclusion today, but that, I hope, all the other Liberal Democrat Members will do so as well. What particularly galls me and many on the Opposition Benches is that this was not only predictable but was predicted by countless Members of this House and by countless organisations—the National Housing Federation, the Local Government Association, local authorities up and down the land, individuals coming forward to newspapers—yet all the warnings were completely ignored.

I am sure the Conservative Minister will tell us that the aim of the bedroom tax is solely to end overcrowding in the social housing sector—the hon. Member for Hornchurch and Upminster (Dame Angela Watkinson) was, I think, trying to suggest that earlier. The declared aim was to force the nation to use the social housing stock more efficiently. I am sorry, but I simply distrust Conservatives talking about the social housing sector. We now have the lowest number of social housing completions in 20 years. I have already talked about the way in which the right to buy was implemented. In 2010, one of the first things this Government did was to slash the affordable housing budget by 60%. How on earth can people make an argument in favour of social housing when they have just slashed its budget by 60%?

From the outset, the Government knew that the vast majority of people would not be able to move into smaller accommodation—not because they did not want to move, but simply because there were no other suitable properties. Indeed, such is the cynicism of this Government that that was factored into the original financial assumptions that they made. They did not presume that 75% of the people affected by the bedroom tax would move, or 50% or even 20%. Their working assumption was that fewer than one in 10 families affected would be able to move to a suitable property, yet they went ahead with their retrospective change to a benefit that goes to hundreds of thousands of people who are in work. That is another element that galls me. So often, the rhetoric—from Conservative Ministers in particular—has suggested that this is all about the workshy, but actually a great many people in receipt of housing benefit are in work. It is the matching of housing benefit and work that makes work pay and makes it possible for those people to work.

The Government’s own evaluation, published this July, makes really depressing reading on this very point. Just 4.5% of those affected by the bedroom tax moved within six months. In the areas with the fewest people affected, a higher percentage—some 16%—moved, but in some areas, the numbers were even lower. The Secretary of State seems to think that that represents a great success, but I disagree. It points to the real problem, which is that there simply are not enough suitable smaller properties to move into, and that the areas with the highest number of people affected have the fewest properties for them to move into. In other words, the poorest communities in this country are the worst hit, through absolutely no fault of their own. That means that, at a time of real financial hardship, money is being deliberately siphoned off from the poor at the rate of £14 or £22 a week.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Bryant]

That is true. Many people who are in that situation are in socially affordable housing, some of which is local authority or former local authority accommodation. However, I do not see how that militates against the fundamental problem that although there might be plenty of housing for people to move to in Conservative seats in some parts of the south-east, there simply is not enough in the areas where the greatest number of people are affected by the bedroom tax. So unless the hon. Lady wants to move thousands of people from the north of England into constituencies such as hers, there will continue to be a problem.

What are the wider effects of the policy? We already know that, notwithstanding the Prime Minister’s original announcement that the disabled would not be affected by it, two thirds of those affected have a disability of some kind. Nurses, members of the armed forces and families with sons or daughters in the armed forces have also been affected.

There is also clear evidence that countless families are cutting back on household essentials or running up debts. The Government’s own evaluation—not an evaluation made up by anyone else—states that 50% of claimants reported cutting back on what they deemed to be household essentials in order to pay the bedroom tax. More than a quarter of claimants—26%—said that they had borrowed money to pay it, mostly from family and friends, while 3% had borrowed money on a credit card, 3% had taken out payday loans, 10% had used savings and 9% had been given money from other members of their family. That is a devastating record. It shows the poverty into which the Government seem deliberately to be pushing people.

Six out of 10 households affected by the bedroom tax are now in arrears. At the moment, social landlords have decided to hold off from evicting such tenants, but there will come a point at which they will have to make the difficult decision whether to allow the situation to continue or to remove those people.

[Mr Ward]

There is also a knock-on effect, in that the increase in arrears leads to an increase in the cost of borrowing for social housing providers, and the composition of housing stock differs from area to area. In some areas where families were unwilling to move into blocks of flats, many of the flats remained empty. Single people were then encouraged to move into the empty flats, but following the introduction of this policy were told that they would have to pay extra money to stay there. They were encouraged to move into them, but then found themselves at a disadvantage.

[Chris Bryant]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. I do not need to reiterate it, except to say that that is why I find the retrospective element of the policy’s application to be one of its cruellest aspects.