Housing Benefit (Abolition of Social Sector Size Criteria)

Robert Flello Excerpts

Wednesday 17th December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Jack Dromey (Birmingham, Erdington) (Lab)]

Eighteen months ago, on a brilliant spring morning, a Meriden grandmother, Stephanie Bottrill, got up, sat down at her kitchen table, wrote notes to her son, her daughter, the grandson she adored and her friends and neighbours, fed the cat, put the keys through a neighbour’s door and then walked three miles through the early dawn light to the M6, where she threw herself under a lorry and committed suicide. The last straw for Stephanie Bottrill was having to pay the bedroom tax.

What kind of Government causes such pain to decent men and women? Once in a generation there is a tax so bad that the next generation looks back and asks, “Why did they do it?” Such was the poll tax, and now we have the bedroom tax. To add insult to injury, on the very day the bedroom tax was introduced the Government gave millionaires a £100,000 tax cut. In Birmingham, more than 10,000 households have been hit hard, 1,529 in my constituency, with an average loss of £16.42 to the most vulnerable and with some losing as much as £1,400 a year. A quarter of them are disabled. Who benefits? The Chancellor, because as far as he is concerned we have seen a weekly reduction in housing benefit of £179,000, with him netting £9 million a year while 10,000 people lose out.

Let me give some brief examples from my constituency. Terry lives in a two-bedroom house with his wife, and he has to have a separate room because she needs specialist breathing apparatus at all times. They have had to pay the bedroom tax because they are in a two-bedroom home. Brian lives in a two-bedroom property and was desperate to move to a one-bedroom property to avoid paying the bedroom tax. He tried time and time again, but he could not do it because there were only 43 available in the whole of Birmingham for in excess of 10,000 households.

[Robert Flello (Stoke-on-Trent South) (Lab)]

On that point, in Stoke-on-Trent, there is nowhere for the 2,700 families affected by the bedroom tax to go. There are no other properties for them to take.

[Jack Dromey]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. They are trapped, having to pay the bedroom tax whether they like it or not.

A third constituent, Nicky, lives with her husband in a two-bedroom property. Her husband is a paraplegic and they are unable to share a bedroom, which is why they are in a two-bedroom house. They, too, have to pay the bedroom tax.

The Opposition are all in favour of reducing the housing benefits bill, but housing benefit is being pushed up by low wages and high rent. I met a young mother in the food bank in the Baptist church at the end of Erdington High street. She is in work, doing two jobs, but she is on poverty pay and is having to claim housing benefit as a consequence.

There are also not enough homes in our country. In government, we built 2 million homes and 500,000 affordable homes, but under this Government we have the lowest level of house building since the 1920s. Tens of thousands of people all over the country are trapped in homes in which they have often lived for decades, having to pay a retrospective tax and struggling as a consequence.

In conclusion, Government Members, particularly those on the Front Bench, just do not get it. They just do not understand the pain that has been felt as a consequence of their actions. The Secretary of State has often affected a damascene conversion on the road to a Glasgow housing estate, yet now he is presiding over pain on a grand scale to tens of thousands of decent men and women in this country. He has sat there throughout this debate with a Cheshire cat smirk on his face, oblivious to the consequences of his actions. This is a cruel, callous tax and one of our first acts as a Labour Government will be to confine it to where it richly deserves to be: the dustbin of history.