Housing: Underoccupancy Charge

Lord Best Excerpts

Thursday 12th December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, my noble friend is absolutely right that personal debt in this country is a major problem. There has been a series of important reviews of that in recent weeks. I am looking at it very closely in the context in particular of the introduction of universal credit. That is one of the factors in the review that I mentioned in response to the last question and I will keep it very much in mind.

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, will the noble Lord join me in correcting a mistaken view that some have expressed that reducing support for people in council houses and housing association properties who are deemed to have a spare room is only repeating a measure already in place for private sector tenants? Does he agree that the arrangements for private sector tenants are quite different, in that people are given a sum of money—the maximum that they can spend—and are sent out to find a property on the private market, balancing the number of bedrooms against the location and other factors? In particular, a major difference between the two sectors is that in the private rented sector these measures apply only to new and future tenancies and have not been applied retrospectively to people in existing tenancies—namely, the 660,000 people who find themselves covered by a measure that relates to the past and not, as in the private sector, one that relates to future tenancies.

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, clearly there is a difference between the structures of the social and the private rented sector arrangements but the objective is the same. The taxpayer provides the appropriate amount of money to house that individual or family in the same way in the private rented sector as in the social rented sector.