Housing Benefit

Debate between Emily Thornberry and Mark Field

Tuesday 13th July 2010 Westminster Hall

[Emily Thornberry]

Much more than I could possibly have hoped for, although I have to say that most of my speech will appear on my website.

[Mr Gary Streeter in the Chair]

In some areas of the country—my constituency is an obvious example—there is a serious mismatch between earnings and housing costs. The average worker in my constituency earns £20,000 a year and pays tax on that. The average rent for a two-bedroom flat in inner north London, which is not the most expensive part of my constituency, is more than £17,000 a year. That leaves an average working parent with less than £60 a week for food, clothes, travel and council tax. It is clear, therefore, that there has to be some form of intervention in areas where the rent is so high. Either we build more affordable housing—I am sure that everyone here knows and agrees that that is exactly what we should do with the money—or we intervene to subsidise rents and put people in the private market.

[Mr Mark Field]

This lack of building has been a problem not only over the past 13 years. Does the hon. Lady not recognise, however, that there has to be some sharing of the blame? During the past 13 years of the Labour Government, there was no substantial building, and that is the nub of the problem, particularly in central London.

[Emily Thornberry]

Many of us in the Chamber have been major campaigners on that issue, and I know that the hon. Gentleman is, too. I was completely outraged that the Lib Dem council in my area, which was in power for 10 years, built only one flat for social rented housing for every seven new flats that were built, which is completely inappropriate in a constituency such as mine, given the needs that it has.

Of the 850 Islington families in flats with two or more bedrooms who are claiming LHA, or housing benefit in the case of private landlords, more than half—more than 500 families—will lose benefits under the new capping rules, and some will lose more than £100 a week. Where will they go? Is there room for them in Thornbury and Yate? Will they move into cars? Where do the Government expect them to go when they lose all that money? They certainly will not be able to keep their flats.

To make an obvious point, expecting housing benefit claimants to live in the cheapest 30% of private rented flats will cause real hardship in areas such as London, where housing is already in short supply. The differential between the median and the 30th percentile might be small in some areas. For example, in central Lancashire—perhaps in Thornbury and Yate—there is less than £6 difference between a two-bedroom flat on the median and one on the 30th percentile, and people can get a family home for less than £120 a week. However, in my constituency, in Islington, the difference between the median and the 30th percentile for a two-bedroom flat is £40 a week—the difference between £330 and £290 a week. Where will people get that money? What will happen? It is fundamentally unfair to expect claimants in my constituency to make up a housing benefit gap of £40 a week when claimants elsewhere will be expected to find only £6 a week.

Housing Need (London)

Debate between Emily Thornberry and Mark Field

Tuesday 29th June 2010 Westminster Hall

[Mr Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con)]

Many of us present are old hands at speaking in Westminster Hall on the continued complexities and persistent demands of providing affordable, decent and plentiful homes in the capital. I fear that I have joined the hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) as one of the usual suspects in that regard, and perhaps in many other ways as well. The frequency of our presence in this Chamber testifies to the difficulty of striking the right balance when dealing with housing need in London.

As those who have heard me speak on this subject before will know, an ostensibly wealthy inner-city constituency such as mine is not in any way immune to these problems—quite the opposite. Housing has been, and continues to be, the single most important issue in my postbag, along with immigration. No doubt, the two things go hand in hand for Westminster, and for any of us with London seats, because this global capital city is a magnet for those seeking to make their fortunes—not only from across the world but from all corners of the British isles.

The pressure that the vast flow of people into and out of my constituency places on our housing stock is enormous. Rental values have shot up in recent years, and so too has the huge cost of providing for those in need, although the amount of money that landlords get from tenants on housing benefit has similarly driven up prices. It is, I fear, for that reason that some of the most shocking and high profile stories about housing benefit have come from my constituency; the £104,000 a year home was in Mayfair in the west end. There are individual families whose accommodation costs the taxpayer thousands of pounds each and every month.

I have a lot of sympathy with what the hon. Member for Islington North said on this subject. There is a risk that some of the proposed changes will drive some of the most vulnerable people out of London, and that will need to happen to a large extent.

[Emily Thornberry (Islington South and Finsbury) (Lab)]

I heard the hon. Gentleman say that some of the most vulnerable families will be driven out of central London, and I believe that he said that was necessarily so. Where does he think they should go?

[Mr Field]

I hope that the hon. Lady will allow me to continue with what I have to say; these issues affect all of us in the capital. In his Budget statement, the Chancellor said that we could no longer have a state of affairs where people who do not work are living in homes that ordinary working people simply could not afford for themselves. Putting aside that principle, housing benefit has also become an enormous trap, as the hon. Member for Islington North rightly said, for its recipients in London, and I agree. In the past few weeks, I have canvassed people in the Churchill Gardens estate, where the precise situation that the hon. Gentleman described is prevalent. In other words, people are living next door to one another, one in a council property paying rent that is very low by the standards of the vicinity, and another in a property that has been sold two or three times and is now in the hands of a housing association, effectively being passed on to nominations from the local authority at three or four times the rent of the property next door.