Housing Benefit (Abolition of Social Sector Size Criteria)

Michael Connarty Excerpts

Wednesday 17th December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Harper]

I am very happy to confirm that I do not think that I said it, but if I did, then it is not what I meant to say. I was very clear that the hon. Lady was telling half a story and was not giving the House all the facts on which to make a balanced judgment.

[Michael Connarty (Linlithgow and East Falkirk) (Lab)]

rose—

[Barbara Keeley]

rose—

--- Later in debate ---

[Michael Connarty (Linlithgow and East Falkirk) (Lab)]

Can I just say to the Minister who led for the Government that his statements were very thin? They lacked any sense of compassion. He wanted to debate numbers and affordability, but that showed that he does not really care about the impact on the people affected. I think that probably comes from the Secretary of State, so I am sorry to say that about the Minister, because I think that he set out to do his job with compassion. However, this policy clearly has no compassion built into it, apart from those parts forced on the Government by Opposition attacks, because it was even worse when it started.

The policy is punitive, and it is clearly designed to be so. In the context of modern family structures, it is clear that families dissipate much earlier than they used to, and young people increasingly want their independence, leaving parents who are not yet 60 with extra rooms that they are expected to give up, which often means moving out of their community. That is the effect of this policy.

There is a housing problem, with public housing stock being too low. Governments have not built enough public housing stock. As far as I am concerned, this basically comes down to a deliberate attack on people in hardship. There has actually been a 27% increase in housing benefit applications in the two authorities I represent, and a lot of that is because people are in work—we have heard the great boast about the fall in the number of people on the claimant register—but they are not working in a way that allows them to pay all their bills without claiming tax credits and housing benefit. That is what I have seen in my constituency surgeries over the last period.

The solution is very simple: we need to build more public housing to rent. That is clearly the priority, and I hope it will be taken up by the next Labour Government. We need to build houses that people in the public sector can rent, and we need to build them in such a way that there are smaller houses they can go to if they wish to move, because at the moment that cannot happen. I tried to ask the Minister—he would not let me intervene—how many of the 820,000 spare rooms have in fact been given up. The answer, it turns out, is 4.5%. When it comes to effectiveness, this policy is a failure. It does not work. Around 25,000 fewer people now have spare bedrooms, according to the Government.

In addition, there is the allocation system. Most authorities now have priorities for the homeless, for movers and for first-time applicants. What is happening is that homeless single people are demanding to move into apartment blocks that were designed for the elderly, and social dissonance is growing because they cannot live side by side. That is another aspect of this policy being forced on people by the Government. Single people would have taken an extra bedroom, but now they do not have that option and have to live within their means. Therefore, my pensioners are coming to me to say that people are being inappropriately housed in buildings designed for single pensioners. It is a punitive system and it must end.