Welfare Reform Bill

Mike Gapes Excerpts

Wednesday 1st February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Slaughter]

This is how the benefit system works in high-rent areas. If someone with four children goes to Hammersmith council and asks to be placed, they will not be given a permanent home and will be told that they have no prospect of ever getting one, because Hammersmith council is demolishing, not building, social housing. They will not even get temporary accommodation. They will be put in a direct let property under the relationship that the council has with some of the seediest landlords going. They will be charged market rents, but will be living in appalling conditions.

Let us take a real example of a family with four children who live in an ex-council property—these slum landlords go around buying up such properties—on a council estate in the poorest ward in my constituency. They currently get £450 a week in housing benefit for a four-bedroom flat. That will of course be reduced to £400, so they will slowly but surely get to the point of being evicted.

On the day when they are evicted, those people will go back to the town hall with their children. They may then be accepted as non-intentionally homeless, and they might be put into accommodation in Croydon. However, Croydon council says that when the overall cap comes into effect, it will move its families to Hull. That family will therefore face the prospect of a double move.

[Mike Gapes (Ilford South) (Lab/Co-op)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Mr Slaughter]

I will not.

I end by asking the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood), who talked about how people should work, how much more likely it is that that family will be in work when they are in Hull. I mean no disrespect to Hull or its Members, but that family will have been taken away from the schools and community network in Shepherd’s Bush, where they have lived for generations and where there are employment opportunities.

This is about not just intolerance or inhumanity but incompetence. The Government are sundering communities and sending people away from their families and communities, and giving them no prospect of either a decent life or employment.