Housing Benefit (Under-occupancy Penalty)
Kris Hopkins Excerpts(11 years, 8 months ago)
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Kris Hopkins (Keighley) (Con)
I am grateful for the opportunity to speak on this important issue. As a former chairman of housing in Bradford and chair of the regional housing board for Yorkshire and Humber, I know the importance of social housing and housing benefit in meeting housing needs. My own extended family have used it and use it now.
In my district alone, tens of thousands of people are on waiting lists trying to gain access to social housing. The previous Government failed to build sufficient social housing and the former Prime Minister raided the regional housing boards’ funding allocation of tens and millions of pounds that could have been spent on addressing this housing shortage. I must say, however, that he gave some of it back, repackaged as new money, in the months leading up to the last general election. The reality is that the previous Labour Government robbed millions of pounds from the regional housing fund allocations that could have been spent on social housing and that was allocated for that purpose, and which could have addressed some of the issues we face today.
Merely sustaining the housing benefit bill of £23 billion costs each individual family £900. That is unsustainable. The Government are attempting to put fairness back into social housing, bringing the sector in line with the private rental sector.
I would like to facilitate the building of more social housing. It is really important, particularly in the current housing market, to get people on to the property ladder, if they have the opportunity, and to get them in stable housing. I encourage the Minister for Housing to make efforts to spend his limited money—some £300 million has been allocated for developing social housing—in areas such as Bradford’s canal corridor and on the excellent community scheme in Spring Bank in Keighley. The Government are delivering social housing where the previous Government failed.
Much has been said in the past hour or so about adapted accommodation for the disabled. I want to put on record what the Government have said they will do, as opposed to the somewhat misleading arguments that have been made by the Opposition. If someone lives in accommodation that has been significantly adapted for a disabled person, they will be entitled to a discretionary housing payment to address some of the shortfall. Some £30 million of the Government’s discretionary payment has been specifically aimed at foster carers and disabled people who have made changes to their homes, and when the disability means that the household needs an extra room, local authorities have been allocated a further £150 million to make discretionary payments.
Mr Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)
We need to publicise that more. A family came to see me recently in my surgery. The husband is profoundly deaf and his wife has an open permanent wound in her intestine, so they need separate bedrooms, but nobody told them the fund was available. They are therefore very worried. We need more education, so that disabled and vulnerable people are better informed about what is going on.
Kris Hopkins
What my hon. Friend says is true. We need to ensure that the facts about this legislation are put out there and that vulnerable people are not misled by some of the interesting conversations that are going on.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Which one does the hon. Gentleman want to give way to?
Hywel Williams
Recognition, at last!
The change is coming in in April. Is the hon. Gentleman satisfied with how the Government have publicised the very point to which he referred?
Kris Hopkins
Today’s debate gives us the opportunity to make that point. The Minister’s speech was excellent and clarified many of the issues, but it is appropriate that we should use all means to put the information into the public domain.
During my time as housing chair, I visited many homes in the district. The majority were in very poor condition and had been for many years. Some were built before the war. Some were sold for as little as £1; people could not live in them as they were in such a poor condition.
Mr Duncan Smith
My hon. Friend is right to raise the important matter of communications, as was my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Mr Leigh). We have been talking to councils for quite some time and we are urging them to talk to their social housing residents. They are doing that, but they are not helped when others go out and say things about the provisions that are completely untrue. There have been many scare stories about pensioners and we made it clear from the word go that pensioners were not involved, but some of the Opposition parties spent their time saying that pensioners would be affected. There is a barrier, but we are doing our level best to get the information across.
Kris Hopkins
I thank my right hon. Friend for that point. The truth is that as a Conservative, I care about the disabled. I want to champion the work and efforts of carers and we should not allow the Opposition to brand us as that nasty party. Many of our councillors are working really hard for the vulnerable people in our society, and I know that Government Members care about those people.
Kris Hopkins
No, I will not. I want to make progress on the point I was making earlier.
We wanted to transfer our housing stock into a not-for-profit trust. We renovated 30,000 of those decrepit houses into decent quality houses. We put forward a £1 billion package to transform them into quality houses and put in a 30-year maintenance scheme to sustain them through that stand-alone trust. It is successful. Our Labour councillors, local Labour leaders and trade unions voted against that package, however, and actively campaigned against it. [Interruption.] I hear the scorn coming from the Opposition, but Labour does not want to take real action. Labour councillors and representatives were prepared to allow people to live in slums, rather than intervene.
Nia Griffith
Does the hon. Gentleman accept that some local councils, such as Carmarthenshire county council, kept their whole housing stock in-house and have done an excellent job in renovating section after section of it? He should not be saying that the deciding factor is whether a council decides to keep provision in-house or to give it to another authority to look after. What matters is what is done with that stock.
Kris Hopkins
I do not know where the taxpayers of Bradford were to find £1 billion over 30 years to renovate those houses. That was the reality and the reason why the housing was put into a trust, which is delivering. The people of Bradford living in social housing were betrayed by the Labour party.
I want quality homes and I shall work to make sure we get them, but the fact is that the housing benefit budget has doubled in 10 years, on the back of the previous Government’s economic failure and mismanagement. We have to spend within our means. The public rightly expect us to get a grip on the benefits regime—a regime the Labour Government allowed to get out of control. Labour failed to build social housing, failed to manage the economy and therefore clearly failed those who are living in social housing and those who need access to it.
Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill
Kris Hopkins Excerpts(11 years, 10 months ago)
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Kris Hopkins (Keighley) (Con)
About 40 years ago, I used to walk through a really run-down council estate on my way to school. The estate was poor, the people living there were poor, the housing was poor, and life expectancy and opportunities were very low. It is still the same today: 40 years on, the people living on that estate have the same opportunities, or lack of them, that they had in the days when I was walking through it.
Successive Governments have failed to address the problems of people who live in poverty in some of our communities. This is not just about money; it is about a lack of aspiration and ambition, about a failure to understand the need to educate people, and about the need for people to develop skills. It is about a whole range of things, and the solution is not simply money. I say that because now, when I look at estates like the one that I mentioned, I see brand-new schools, and I see that all the houses have been done up, but the people are still poor, still unemployed, and still dependent on benefits. The fact is that, regardless of the 1.5% difference between inflation and the uprating, if you have not got the brass you cannot give it out. The purpose of the coalition must be to manage the deficit that we inherited from the last Government, and we must change the culture of dependency in those areas.
Phil Wilson (Sedgefield) (Lab)
The hon. Gentleman talks of dependency. Does he not realise that the Bill will create a food-bank dependency in our nation?
Kris Hopkins
I do not think that it will. I think that the 900,000 or 1 million new jobs created by the Government represent the solution to the problem. We need to face up to the drama in the welfare state. The hon. Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) says that this is not about a dependency culture, but I can take her to places where people are trapped in a way of life that gives them no incentive to go and look for jobs. That is the tragedy of the situation.
Mr Kevan Jones
I understand what the hon. Gentleman is saying about the dependency culture—he thinks that if he repeats it enough, people will start to believe him—but what would he say to two people whom I met in a local jobcentre last week? They were made unemployed by AEI Cables in Birtley a year ago. They have the work ethic. They are aged 51 and 52, they had worked for the company since they were 16, and they have applied for literally hundreds of jobs without success. Are those people part of the dependency culture?
Kris Hopkins
No, obviously not, because they are going out there to seek a job. That is the key thing. I thank the hon. Gentleman for the extra time.
We have put a benefit cap at £26,000, and that is net. The vast majority of my constituents would be delighted to take home or have access to that amount of money. Far from doing something outrageous by increasing the amount of money that people are going to get by 1% in this climate, it is an admirable move by those on the Front Bench to facilitate that, bearing in mind the crisis that the previous Government left.
We have made some choices about who we are going to protect and who we will not. There is a debate about disability, but I am pleased that we are protecting pensioners. It was a commitment by this Government to protect pensioners and we have continued with that. I am very concerned that the unemployed, those who are dependent, those who are uneducated and have no skills, those with limited opportunities to offer young people, are the families that are growing in my constituency. That is a tragedy for the future of towns such as mine. We must break that cycle. It cannot be right that it pays to live on the state.
The resentment and anger are real in people who are working hard. They have seen generations continue to claim benefit. Some of those are trapped, but some have no desire to go and work. People are making life choices based on the fact that they can get money from the Government. As was pointed out earlier, that is taxpayers’ money. That cannot be right. When families see no increase in their income after their hard work and they see people on benefits receiving twice the increase, as has been shown statistically, that promotes resentment in our communities. It is not just about strivers or skivers. Failure to address the issue promotes racism and tension in communities, because somebody sees or perceives that somebody else is getting something that they are not getting. After all their efforts they do not see the benefit of working so hard.
Kris Hopkins
No, I will not give way.
I have great sympathy for all the people who go out there, graft hard and pay their dues, and then look over next door where the curtains are closed or see estates where people are not ambitious, not aspirational, have failed in education and failed in skills. It is the responsibility of those on the Government Benches to address that, as much as it was with the previous Government. In another 30 or 40 years I do not want to see people living in poverty because they have been abandoned and people keep sustaining those estates. Society backfills sink estates in constituencies such as mine.
We do not take decisions about welfare lightly. We take them extremely seriously, as my hon. Friend the Member for Erewash (Jessica Lee) said, but we on the Government Benches are on the side of hard-working individuals. That is why I support the Bill.