Housing: Discretionary Housing Payment

Lord Best Excerpts

Wednesday 9th April 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, has the Minister had a chance to see the Joseph Rowntree Foundation report released today, which provides a fairly definitive analysis of what has been going on with the so-called bedroom tax over the past six months? If he has, did he note that—sadly, from one perspective—savings were about £115 million less than had been hoped for during the course of this year? About 6% of people have moved home, but another 22% have been trying to move home but have not been able to downsize, because there is not accommodation for them. Although the Rowntree report from Professor Wilcox predicts that over £330 million will be saved this year, sadly, that is at a pretty great cost to both tenants and landlords.

[Lord Freud]

The savings that we are looking at—which are running on the Budget scoring at £490 million—are both observable and unobservable; in other words, from people moving or from people taking up jobs and coming off benefits. There are various figures around. The BBC last week talked of 6% of people moving in 11 months; the JRF report, which the noble Lord has just cited, talked about 6% in six months; a report a couple of months ago from Harry Phibbs, doing a similar job, found that 11% had come off benefits because they had gone into work. We will have proper returns on discretionary housing payments in May, and are working on getting a proper report on all of this.