Housing Benefit Entitlement

Hugh Bayley Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd January 2013 Westminster Hall

[Phil Wilson]

My hon. Friend makes a valid point. As MPs, we are seeing a great increase in benefit casework. As we get closer to 1 April, the casework will get even harder.

The under-occupancy rules are the manifestation of the Government’s appalling manipulation of the welfare debate. The language is the same old narrative that we have had down the ages: to secure their own position, the Tories pit one section of the community against the other. Once, it was the deserving poor and the undeserving poor; now it is strivers versus shirkers.

This legislation is unbecoming of a civilised society: it is born of ignorance and raised by prejudice. What is deserving of a civilised society is a new house-building programme, decent jobs, a growing economy and one nation in which we truly are all in it together. The legislation is wrong and should be repealed at the earliest opportunity.

[Hugh Bayley (in the Chair)]

I intend to start the wind-ups at 3.40 pm, which gives us 53 minutes or so. Eleven Members are on my list as seeking to speak, so I will impose a time limit of five minutes to begin with. I warn Members that that might leave some of them at the end with slightly less than five minutes, and if there are interventions even less still.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ian Lucas]

She does not live with David, so I am not sure whether that is relevant.

The problem is that the proposal is causing uncertainty to the family now, and there is no certainty about whether discretionary housing payments will be for an extended period or affect them permanently. I will forward full details of the case to the Minister. I do not expect a specific answer now.

I have been contacted about another case of adult parents who share a house with an individual who suffers from spina bifida and hydrocephalus. An additional room in their house is used for the storage of oxygen and other disability aids, and a separate room is used as a living room by the individual concerned, who has specific and profound additional needs. Under these proposals, none of the particular circumstances for those individuals is taken into account, and they are some of the people who we all think—and I am sure the Minister thinks—should have our support, but they have no guarantee that they will continue to receive it. The fact is that this set of proposals is creating enormous worry for people who have huge burdens in caring for people whom they care profoundly about. They have contributed enormously to society by helping to look after those people for very many years, and we are letting them down badly.

I implore the Minister to look at the particular applications of the rules in those cases to ensure that those people can be looked after. When they came to me and said, “Look into these matters,” I could not believe for one moment that the system would not include discretion to cover individual cases such as those. The proposals are ill-conceived and are causing enormous distress up and down the country. The Government, and I am sure the Minister, did not intend to create such situations. He needs to look at the proposals again.

I heard the Minister’s response yesterday, and in it, he referred to the deficit, but the reality is that the Government, at the same time as they are letting those people down, have chosen to give a tax cut to the richest people in the country. That is the type of political choice that we all have to make, and the reality is that the Minister has supported that choice. He needs to get his act together to change his approach and support the people who need support, and not the people who have most.

[Hugh Bayley (in the Chair)]

All Members have been very disciplined in their speeches, so we are almost on time. It seems to me that in a debate of this kind it would be a shame, and wrong, to cut the time for the two remaining Back Benchers, so they will each have five minutes, and the Front Benchers therefore will have nine minutes each.

--- Later in debate ---

[Julie Hilling (Bolton West) (Lab)]

I start by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Sedgefield (Phil Wilson) on securing this most important debate. I, for one, am not surprised to see the Government Benches empty, because people cannot defend the indefensible.

I want to speak on behalf of the 2,400 tenants of Bolton at Home and more than 4,500 tenants of Wigan and Leigh Housing who will face unaffordable bills because the Government have decided that the poor should pay the price of the wrongs of the rich. The policy demonstrates an absolute lack of understanding of the nature of social housing and communities.

The majority of social housing in the north-west is three-bedroom, and families with two children have rightly been allocated three-bedroom houses so that each child can have their own room, and also, because that is the available housing stock. Please remember that many of those families have one or both parents in work, in low-paid jobs. Housing benefit is an in-work benefit.

What is going to happen now to constituents with a boy and a girl? They are currently nicely housed in a three-bedroom house. Is it the Minister’s expectation that they would move into a two-bedroom house until one of the children reaches the age of 10, when they would have to move into a three-bedroom house? What happens when one of the children moves out? Are they then expected to move back into a two-bedroom house, and then into a one-bedroom house when both the children move out? That is even if all the housing stock is available. Just imagine the monetary costs—how could people on low wages or benefits afford new carpets and curtains each time they have to move house, or does the Minister expect them to have bare floorboards and newspaper at the windows? What about the children’s schooling? Will they have to keep moving schools, or will the family have to find additional money for transport to school? Fundamentally, what about the community? Social housing is not only somewhere that you sleep; it is where you live and become part of a community—a community that will be fractured by this ridiculous, ignorant policy. The policy will also have a perverse effect. Already in Bolton, groups of three young men are applying for three-bedroom family houses, so that they can each claim shared-room rate.

Hon. Members have talked about many other aspects of this policy, so I will finish by talking about Isobel, who came to see me about her situation—I have changed her name. Isobel lives in a three-bedroom house. She has a daughter who has just moved out, into a fairly insecure relationship, and she has a 17-year old son with Down’s syndrome. Isobel is a full-time carer and she herself understandably suffers from stress and depression. Isobel’s son—I shall call him Carl—is severely affected by Down’s syndrome. He has what I can best describe as autism-like symptoms. He cannot cope with change to his routine or environment. He needs everything to be in its place and everything to be done in the same way at the same time every day. Indeed, while Isobel was visiting me in the surgery, she received two phone calls to come home as quickly as possible because Carl was becoming extremely agitated by her absence.

Isobel has told me that Carl could not cope with a move. Moreover, Isobel gets support from her community. Neighbours understand Carl’s behaviour and support her both physically and morally. What is she supposed to do? She cannot work; she cannot move. What is the Minister’s answer to that question? I hope he will not say that she could get a discretionary housing payment. Bolton at Home does not yet know how much it will get, but it has already worked out that it will not have enough money to support everyone in need.

The Government do not seem to understand that social housing is a positive choice for low-paid workers, for carers and for a number of others. It is not something that is transient. It is the home in which someone wants to live their life and to bring up their children until they move into their bungalow or sheltered housing. Surely the Minister cannot continue with this mean, ignorant and, frankly, incompetent policy.

[Hugh Bayley (in the Chair)]

We have made up a minute, so the Front Benchers now have nine and a half minutes each.

--- Later in debate ---

[Hugh Bayley (in the Chair)]

Order. May I ask Members not to make remarks from a sedentary position? The Minister has quite a lot of points to respond to, and he has made it clear that he does not want to give way.

[Steve Webb]

Thank you, Mr Bayley. The second unfairness that we must tackle is the needs of people who live in overcrowded accommodation. A quarter of a million of them need to have a voice in this debate, because all too often they do not, and we must tackle that.

People have rightly said that these are family homes. They are not just houses; people have lived their lives in them. I accept that, which is why we have exempted people over state pension credit age. Essentially, someone who is a pensioner is not affected by these changes; we are talking about people of working age.

How will people respond to the change? There are a range of responses. It has been mentioned that housing benefit is an in-work benefit in some cases. Nationally, the average loss from this policy is £14 a week. For someone who is in work on a minimum wage, that is the equivalent of about two and half hours of additional work; it is not quite that because of tapers and so on, but we are talking about a few hours of extra work as one option—

--- Later in debate ---

[Steve Webb]

I have just 60 seconds to go. When councils build houses of the right size to match housing need, they should be applauded and not condemned.

The hon. Member for Dudley North (Ian Austin) said that we need to manage over-occupation and under-occupation. We have had decades to do something about that, but nothing has happened. Some housing associations have welcomed the opportunity to look at the housing allocations to make better use of the precious resource of social housing. I fully accept that there will be disruption as a result of this measure, which is why we have a two-year programme looking at all this work, evaluating the impact and publishing the research. If we need to make changes to the system as we go because there are perhaps groups or impacts that we have not thought of, we will be in a position to do that. The matter will be thoroughly researched, and we will publish the results. At a time when we need to save money, being fairer to people in the social sector and the private sector and tackling overcrowding as well as under-occupation is a fair way to reduce the spending deficit that we were handed by the Opposition.

[Hugh Bayley (in the Chair)]

I congratulate all Members—Back Benchers and Front Benchers—on sticking to the time limits, so everyone was able to get in.