Housing: Under-occupancy Charge

Lord Best Excerpts

Tuesday 16th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

There are a substantial number of homes available each year. There are about 1.4 million single-bedroom social housing homes and, on the HomeSwapper site, there are now 55,000 one-bedroom homes and 142,000 two-bedroom homes to swap into.

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, I congratulate those housing associations on keeping down their arrears through very heavy investment and a lot of hard work. I congratulate the Minister on producing and continuing to produce large sums of discretionary housing payments, which have been very important in alleviating some of the misery caused by the so-called bedroom tax. Will the Minister confirm that, although they obviously reduce the savings to the Treasury, the discretionary housing payments, which have saved a lot of people, will continue at their current levels or at higher levels in future?

[Lord Freud]

The current year figure is running at £125 million, which is very high and up substantially—by more than £100 million—on the figures that we were looking at in 2010. I obviously cannot make any commitment at this stage on its future levels—that will go into a spending review—but clearly this has been an important way of making sure that this policy goes in without the kind of impacts that some people were concerned about.