Supported Housing: Benefit

Debate between Jess Phillips and Andrew Gwynne

Wednesday 20th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[Jess Phillips]

As we enter the summer recess, I would love a little trip to Cornwall. I hasten to add that police forces across the country are doing really quite good work, as are police and crime commissioners, but I am afraid to say that I have never seen an example of their funding supported accommodation.

It would be dishonest now for Ministers to undermine their own work—Ministers of this Government signed it off when they allocated the money; they are all happy to stand up and sing its praises—because every single plan had housing benefit within it.

It is complicated and difficult for people to understand what running a refuge actually looks like. The grants the Government give are what we use to pay for staff. They are used to pay for family support workers, who enable a child to re-engage with a mother who has lost all control over her children because a perpetrator has taken it from her. They allow key staff to give counselling and support to women who have been brutally raped, beaten, kept locked away and controlled to a degree that no one in this Chamber could ever imagine. That is what the grants from the Government pay for. What pays for the nuts and bolts, the beds, the buildings, the places where people live, their homes and their security is housing benefit.

[Andrew Gwynne]

My hon. Friend is making a compelling case. May I take her back to the letter I received from New Charter housing that I referred to in an intervention on our Front-Bench spokesman? It says to me:

“It is probable that the result of this reduction will be either; additional cost to the public purse where there individuals take up, for example, valuable and costly hospital space; or these individuals find themselves living in totally inappropriate accommodation that does not support their needs and puts them at high risk.”

Is that not exactly the case we are making today?

[Jess Phillips]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention, and that is exactly the case. As has been outlined, the reduction will result in people being left in the accommodation of unscrupulous housing providers where we do not want people to end up, and I am sure every single Member knows about these providers.

Housing benefit currently pays for things such as CCTV, security support and all the extra stuff that we perhaps take for granted because we do not have it in our homes— but then we have not been repeatedly raped for the past six months of our life. That is what housing benefit pays for. I cannot say this with any more dramatic effect: half of the bed spaces in the refuges where I worked would not be there without housing benefit. Already, 115 women and their children are turned away from refuges every single day in this country. Already this year, 50 women are dead.

There are also very real concerns about the mooted housing benefit changes for those aged 18 to 21. Perhaps the Minister could update the House on that, and the bearing it will have on a place like Birmingham, where 25% of the women living in refuges last year came from this age group. Ministers will be shutting off the route to safety for these women if the changes in housing benefit come in, and I am at a loss as to what is going on—whether that is part of this review or was just something floated around.

If the DWP does not want to play its part and the Treasury values its bottom line so much, the Government must look at a different approach to funding refuges and other supported accommodation. This review is not about sustainability; it is about cutting costs.

The decimation of local authority Supporting People budgets has already led to the closure of more than 30 refuges in the UK. I am not just shouting or shroud-waving or scaremongering against cuts; I am willing to engage with Ministers across Government to talk about other sustainability models for refuges. I have just a few suggestions for today. We could ring-fence national budgets, and make providing accommodation for victims a local authority statutory duty. At the moment local authorities have that duty only for adult services, children’s services and bins. I think providing a safe place for children who have been raped to live is more important than the bins.

The model of commissioning that the Home Office has used for accommodating victims of modern slavery completely eliminates the need for housing benefit, and I have set up refuges for victims of trafficking with this model. No housing benefit changes hands. We could only do that because this Government—the Government in front of me—recognise the importance of a national funding framework.

I am happy to work with the Government on any of those solutions, but to pull the rug from underneath refuges, homeless hostels and older people’s care services without first putting in place a system that will work and is sustainable and offers a future for these victims is both stupid and cruel.

So let me go back to the words of the Prime Minister. She said that “awareness of” and “response to” violence against women and girls was “everyone’s business”. Will the Minister promise to make it hers?