Housing Benefit and Disabled People

Debate between John McDonnell and Jeremy Lefroy

Wednesday 23rd January 2013 Westminster Hall

[Jeremy Lefroy]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention and I agree with him. Certainty is vital, which is why I am asking for clarification, and hopefully clarification in the terms used by the then Minister for disabled people in the House of Commons last year.

[John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman on behalf of the whole House for pursuing this matter so consistently, and I congratulate him on having the benefit of having as a constituent John Turner, who I know is an assiduous campaigner on this matter.

Consistency across the country is also necessary. There needs to be monitoring by central Government of how the policy is being applied, because I think we will discover, as we are already discovering in some areas, inconsistency of approach by individual councils.

[Jeremy Lefroy]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. He is right: in the two cases that I have outlined of Stafford borough council and South Staffordshire district council, we can already see some differences. Those differences have arisen not for ideological reasons, but because each council takes a slightly different approach. I am all in favour of local councils making their own decisions, but if we end up with a situation wherein some councils’ conditions for DHPs are drastically different from those of other councils, there will be serious problems. Of course, there is also the question of the different profile of housing stocks in different parts of the country, which has an impact on what the hon. Gentleman has said.

To continue discussing space, the size of the rooms also needs to be considered, but the rules specifically rule that out. A typical tenancy agreement may describe the bedrooms as “two plus one plus one”—in other words, one double bedroom and two single bedrooms. The single bedrooms are described as single for a reason—they are often very, very small, as I have seen for myself. Yet a family comprising, for example, a couple and two boys under 16 would be considered as under-occupying that type of property. The rules encourage that family to move to a two-bedroom property, which may itself be described as “two plus one” and where they would effectively be in breach of the tenancy. Surely, size of rooms needs to be taken into account when determining whether there is under-occupancy. I ask the Minister to reconsider the rules.

Of course, the family that I have just spoken about might not be able to find a such a property. In many areas, there is a shortage of suitable housing into which tenants can downsize, which is a serious problem, and it is probably the most significant reason why disabled people are by far the most likely to be affected by the changes to the housing benefit rules, given that, as the impact assessment stated, disabled people will tend to be in smaller households. There is nothing that disabled people, or indeed anyone else who is affected, can do about that situation. They cannot move into properties that do not exist.