Housing Benefit

Lilian Greenwood Excerpts

Wednesday 26th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Rachel Reeves]

Let us see where Bradford is by the end of the financial year, not just six months into it.

Many of those who are moving because of the bedroom tax are ending up in private rented accommodation which, though smaller, is more expensive. Analysis by the university of York suggests that this could mean the Government paying out £160 million more in housing benefit than had been budgeted for.

Ministers have also been forced to admit that 35,000 of the disabled people affected have had their homes specially adapted for them with, for example, wheelchair ramps, wider doors, stair lifts and accessible bathrooms. If they are forced to move, it has been estimated that the costs of repeating those adaptations in new properties could be as much as £234 million.

According to the latest numbers from the National Housing Federation, two thirds of the households hit by the bedroom tax have already fallen into arrears, hitting the finances of the very housing providers we need to be building more homes to deal with overcrowding, and a staggering one in seven of the tenants affected have already received eviction warning letters.

[Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend share my concern that in Nottingham more than 2,000 City Homes tenants are falling into arrears totalling more than £286,000—money that should be spent on refurbishing existing homes and building new ones? The fact that they are in arrears means that even if there were somewhere for them to downsize to, tenancy restrictions would prevent them from doing so.

[Rachel Reeves]

In my hon. Friend’s local authority area—Nottingham city council—200 people have been wrongly paying the bedroom tax because of this Government’s mistakes. She is absolutely right to mention the number of people in her area who are in arrears and the difficulties they will have in moving.

The eviction warning letters that have gone to so many people raise the threat of millions more being wasted in eviction proceedings and the emergency accommodation that will be needed for those who are made homeless. What a shambles.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)]

Today we are hearing Government Members defend a bad policy that just gets worse: a policy that is hitting thousands of disabled people, causing arrears and debt, and leaving vulnerable families in despair.

Nearly 5,000 households in Nottingham are affected by the bedroom tax, and the vast majority are tenants of the city’s arm’s length management organisation, Nottingham City Homes. Since the introduction of the tax in April 2013, over 2,000 of those tenants have fallen into arrears totalling more than £250,000, and our ALMO has been forced to spend an additional £300,000 on staff and resources to deal with the extra demands on rent arrears teams. That adds up to more than £500,000 that could and should have been spent on refurbishing or building new homes.

As we have heard, two thirds of the households affected by the bedroom tax simply cannot find the money to pay their rent, and are accumulating ever-increasing arrears. We have heard heartbreaking stories about how the policy is wrecking lives, contributing to a growing affordable housing crisis, and wasting millions. It must be scrapped.

The Government pretend that people can downsize, but in reality that is nonsense. People who are in arrears often face tenancy restrictions that bar them from applying for new, smaller properties, and in any case there simply are not the homes for them to move to. In my constituency there are just 16 one-bedroom social homes available, and not a single two-bedroom home—in a city where 1,161 tenants are waiting to move to one-bedroom properties, and 1,083 are waiting for two-bedroom properties.

Most tenants are loth to give up secure social tenancies and downsize to smaller properties in the private sector, and the Government’s projected savings rely on their not doing so. The average social rent for a two-bedroom property in Nottingham is £64.02, but the average private rent for a one-bedroom property is £88.85. Do the maths! If tenants did move, the housing benefit bill would rise substantially.

The truth is that the Government know that most people cannot afford to pay the bedroom tax. Trapped with nowhere to go and facing an increasing cost of living, more and more poor and vulnerable families in Nottingham are turning to food banks and payday lenders simply to pay for basic essentials such as food, children’s clothing and fuel bills.

My local homelessness charity, Framework, has been recording the experiences of some of its service users who are affected by the Government’s policy. One of them, who lives in a two-bedroom property, has become disabled and cannot use the stairs, but she cannot move to a one-bedroom, single-floor property because she has rent arrears as a result of the bedroom tax. Another is a 60-year-old man who suffers from agoraphobia and panic attacks and finds new places and changes stressful. He is lucky enough to have a support network of family and friends in his neighbourhood, and, understandably, he does not want to move. Now he has arrears of hundreds of pounds, and could not move even if he wanted to.

Do Ministers really think that this is the way to treat vulnerable people with complex needs? It is clearly not the best way to tackle the shortage of larger council homes, or the problem of overcrowding. The latest loophole will add to the burden borne by hard-pressed local authorities, and it could affect as many as 40,000 households, but Ministers continue to claim that it will affect only a few. Ministers ignored social housing providers when they warned that the bedroom tax would be a disaster. How bad do things have to become before they actually start to listen?

The Government are in utter denial about the impact of their cruel and iniquitous policy. Tory and Liberal Democrat Members arrogantly dismiss those who dare to highlight the damage that it is doing to the lives of our constituents. Well, if they will not do the right thing and scrap it, the next Labour Government will.