Housing: Underoccupancy Charge

Lord Bishop of St Albans Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

Yes, the current plan is to publish the report before the end of the year. It does incorporate the regional effects, and I will take the noble Lord’s points about how thoroughly it does so when I go back and talk to the team. For very obvious reasons, I have not seen what is inside that report before it is published, but I will transmit those thoughts to the team.

[The Lord Bishop of St Albans]

My Lords, back in 2013 the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee urged that social housing in rural areas should be excluded from the underoccupancy charge, because of the near impossibility of finding alternative accommodation in many rural areas, where it simply is not available for people to downsize. Already people in rural areas have higher social and housing costs, and there is some evidence that the underoccupancy charge is pushing some families further into debt. Will the Minister tell the House whether Her Majesty’s Government would be willing to undertake a reconsideration of their policy and exclude social housing in rural areas from this measure?

[Lord Freud]

We are actually sympathetic to that point about rural communities, and we ramped up the amount of discretionary housing payments which were particularly targeted at the most remote rural areas, so that the policy could be dealt with by that route.