Oral Answers to Questions

Heidi Alexander Excerpts

Monday 23rd April 2012 Commons Chamber

[Heidi Alexander (Lewisham East) (Lab)]

Last Friday I attended Lewisham jobcentre and was told that between 1,800 and 2,000 people visit it every day. What extra resources are being provided to jobcentres in areas of acute unemployment to help people access work?

[Chris Grayling]

Most recently, we have increased the number of youth advisers so that we have additional support in places such as Lewisham to enhance our work to help unemployed young people get into work. I hope that those advisers will make a difference to young people’s prospects.

Youth Unemployment

Heidi Alexander Excerpts

Wednesday 9th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

I do not accept that. I shall briefly set out some of the measures we are taking on the broader economic front that will make a difference to unemployment.

The regional growth fund is now delivering investment to parts of the economy where the private sector is too small, and where we want to see private sector growth, and the research and development and investment in infrastructure that creates jobs. The introduction of enterprise zones in parts of the country where the private sector is weak will encourage businesses to grow and develop. The cut in corporation tax will deliver the lowest headline rate in the developed world. Those are examples of measures that will help to make Britain a better place to do business.

[Heidi Alexander (Lewisham East) (Lab)]

The Minister talks about the regional growth fund and enterprise zones, but those words will mean little to young people in my constituency who have seen long-term youth unemployment rise by 192% over the past nine months. Can he tell me in plain English what he will do for those young people in Lewisham?

[Chris Grayling]

I can indeed, and I shall carefully go through the different measures we have taken to tackle the youth unemployment problem. It is also important to note that we are targeting investment and support on parts of the economy where we want private sector growth so that jobs can develop.

It is worth remembering that the previous Government fiddled the figures on youth unemployment; they claimed to have abolished it. When people moved on to the new deal, they had a period of work experience and were transferred to a training allowance, at which point they no longer showed up in the figures. By that mechanism people who remained out of work for long periods temporarily disappeared from the figures, so long-term youth unemployment was, according to the previous Government, “abolished.” That was absolute nonsense.

Oral Answers to Questions

Heidi Alexander Excerpts

Monday 24th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

What the hon. Lady does not understand is that we inherited a network of half-empty buildings. I am sure she would agree that it makes no sense to fund, for example, two or three jobcentres within a mile of each other in a city centre. Rather than cutting back—the hon. Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood) mentioned bus services—I would like to protect the services that we can possibly protect, and making our network of jobcentres and benefit delivery centres operate more efficiently and effectively seems a very good way of trying to ensure that we protect front-line services.

[Heidi Alexander (Lewisham East) (Lab)]

20. What estimate he has made of the potential number of tenants who could accrue rent arrears as a result of implementation of his proposals to restrict housing benefit for social tenants in accordance with household size.

[The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Steve Webb)]

We have made no estimates of the number of tenants who would get into rent arrears as a direct result of implementing our proposal, as it is not possible to predict exactly how people will respond to the change or what choices they might make in response to a potential shortfall.

[Heidi Alexander]

The Minister says he has made no such assessment, but the Housing Futures Network estimates that eight out of 10 tenants will struggle to make up the shortfall in lost benefits as a result of these proposed changes, with a third likely to go into rent arrears. That will increase the level of bad debt of housing providers and is likely to mean less investment in new affordable homes. Is the Minister concerned about that?

[Steve Webb]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for drawing our attention to the Housing Futures Network research. What she did not quote was the fact that a quarter of respondents said that they were likely to downsize, which presumably means making better use of the housing stock, while 29% said that they would be either quite likely or very likely to move into work or increase their hours, which is a positive response. There are real issues about rent arrears; we are working closely with social landlords to assist, but there will be positive impacts from these policies, which also need to be borne in mind.

Housing Benefit

Heidi Alexander Excerpts

Wednesday 13th October 2010 Westminster Hall

[Heidi Alexander (Lewisham East) (Lab)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Margaret Hodge) on securing the debate. She spoke convincingly about why the proposals are so misguided and I associate myself with all that she said.

I think that the Government’s announced shake-up of housing benefit is well intentioned; they talk about reducing the welfare bill, getting more people into work and forcing private sector landlords to lower their rents. What is there not to agree with about that? However, anyone who has looked at the proposals will recognise that they are likely to have a devastating impact on families and communities up and down the country. Put simply, many decent, responsible people will struggle to keep a roof over their heads and will have to leave their homes.

As has already been said, in parts of the country, such as London, some high-rent areas will simply become no-go zones for people in receipt of housing benefit. Although, as the hon. Member for Colchester (Bob Russell) said, much is made in the right-wing press about work-shy households living in Mayfair mansions, the vast majority of those who will be affected by the changes will be pensioners, people with disabilities, people caring for relatives and hard-working people on low incomes.

Only one in eight people receiving housing benefit does so because they are unemployed. In Lewisham, 9,600 people who rent flats on the private market are in receipt of housing benefit. The proposed changes to how the benefit is calculated will mean that those residents will lose on average £17 a week, or £884 a year, from next October. That represents an overall reduction in Lewisham of £8.6 million.

Furthermore, some of the largest families in the largest properties will also have their housing benefit reduced from next April due to the introduction of the weekly cap. Those are not people who have money left over at the end of the week; they often struggle to make ends meet. They already often experience shortfalls between the housing benefit that they receive and the rent that they pay. Last Friday, a gentleman came to my surgery and told me that because he had to pay for his mother’s funeral abroad, he could no longer keep up his rent payments. The Government’s proposals will make situations such as his worse, and the problems that many families currently face in tackling the shortfall between the benefit that they receive and what they have to pay in rent will become even worse.

I accept that one of the Government’s solutions for tackling that hardship is to increase the payments made to local councils for discretionary housing payments. I am seriously concerned, however, that the scale of that increase will not even touch the sides of the problem in my constituency. Will the Minister consider doubling the planned increase in DHP, and has any assessment been made of the amount of money that will come to London for that? I am aware that organisations such as London Councils believe that DHP should be increased by £19 million in the capital to address the unique complications of the private rented sector here.

The problem in London is complex. One of the major fears of my local authority relates to the knock-on effects of the introduction of weekly rent caps in expensive central London boroughs, which have already been mentioned. It has been estimated that nearly 10,000 households will have to move from the five most expensive areas in London to lower-cost areas as a result of the proposed changes, but if anyone in this Chamber thinks that areas such as Lewisham have spare flats with suitably low rent just lying around and waiting to be filled, they are sadly mistaken.

Only one third of rents in Lewisham’s private sector are set within local housing allowance limits, and one third are already occupied by housing benefit claimants. Lewisham has 17,000 people on the housing register and more than 1,000 homeless households in temporary accommodation. My corner of south-east London will simply be unable to absorb a further increase in housing demand because the supply of homes is already so short.

The sad reality of the proposals is that they will actually reduce the amount of housing available to people in need. Research undertaken in London has shown that landlords are likely to withdraw from the market for housing benefit tenants for fear that people will default on their rent payments and because anticipated rental income will no longer cover their costs. My right hon. Friend the Member for Barking referred to a study that indicated that 90% of landlords would not accept shortfalls in rent of more than £20 a week and that they would evict tenants or bring tenancies to an end as a result, and 60% of landlords have indicated that they would not accept any shortfall. However, I understand that landlords are saying that they would consider lowering their rents if housing benefit could be paid to them directly. Will the Minister consider reintroducing the direct payment of housing benefit to landlords?

Will the Minister outline what support he intends to provide to councils to deal with the problem of increased homelessness? Like many of my colleagues who have spoken this morning, I cannot see how the changes will not result in more and more people being priced out of their homes. Will he commit to maintaining and increasing the homelessness prevention grant, which will help local councils with the additional work that the proposed changes to housing benefit will undoubtedly create?

In conclusion, I urge the Government not to proceed with the proposals and to think hard about whether they fit with the claim that we are all in this together. Are they not, in effect, a vicious attack on some of the poorest and most vulnerable members of society? One of the solutions to reducing the housing benefit bill must be to build more social rented housing. I accept that more could have been done on that over the past 13 years, but as my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking has already said, the housing sector was facing huge challenges when the previous Government came to power in 1997.

What discussions has the Minister had with his colleagues in the Department for Communities and Local Government about the new supply of affordable homes? My concern is that some of the wider changes being made to the planning system, along with the reduction in capital grant available though the Homes and Communities Agency, will mean that those new homes simply will not be built.

Finally, the idea that the proposals will somehow miraculously get people into work is laughable, and the assumption that private sector rents will be lowered is deeply flawed. The proposals may well reduce the welfare bill, but at a huge cost to my constituents, who are already struggling hard to make ends meet.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—