Housing Benefit

Gerald Kaufman Excerpts

Wednesday 26th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Sir Gerald Kaufman (Manchester, Gorton) (Lab)]

The speeches we have heard from the Government Benches demonstrate very clearly that there is a Liberal Democrat-Tory world and there is the real world. The issue we are debating is the most blatant example of this Government’s total inability to understand how people live. To them, a spare bedroom is simply an unused sleeping space that must not receive housing benefit, but the many constituency cases that I have needed to deal with show that it is by no means so simple.

One reason why this cruel tax does disproportionate damage to the disabled is that the so-called spare bedroom is very often used by a non-resident carer. They might not sleep in it every night, but its use is indispensible to the welfare of the disabled person. Arrangements of this and related kinds cannot be categorised by the over-simplistic language of parliamentary draftsmen, let alone the policies of this Government. There are all kinds of other reasons for those rooms, depending on individual, family-by-family arrangements, that outsiders cannot begin to understand and that this Government do not wish to try to understand.

The Government’s simple cure is: “Move to a smaller house.” They must be living in a dream world. Have they never heard of the housing shortage, made much worse by their policies? My constituency has 75,000 electors. In the three or four years that this lot have held office, there have been 340 housing starts in my constituency, which is only 60% of the low national average. In Manchester, under a Labour Government, the council used to build 3,000 new houses a year. Because of Tory cuts—Manchester has been hit harder by this Government’s cuts than any other local authority—Manchester city council can now build none. There is no new social housing at all in my constituency, and private landlords are too often predatory.

I had a woman come to see me on Saturday who was totally frantic. She lives in a shorthold tenancy, but has been given notice to move at the beginning of April. Not only can she not find any accommodation for herself and her two children, but the freehold owners have sent her the ground rent bill, which is the liability of the landlord, who is evicting her. That is real life in the Gorton constituency. When somebody does manage to get rehoused—such as a constituent who was a victim of the bedroom tax who came to see me the week before—the consequences are so confusing or even catastrophic that they lead to potential eviction from the new home.

This is real life, not the theorising of the Liberal Democrats—we remember them in Manchester, which is why this year there will be no Liberal Democrats left on the city council—or the Tories. What they are doing—and they are doing it with great calculation, because of its political implications—is transferring tax liability from the better-off, who they hope will vote for them, to the disabled, who will not vote for them. This Government build castles in the air. They do not build houses and they make life hell by causing tragic difficulties for people who are in houses. The Government create misery wherever they go, and the sooner they go, the better.