Housing Benefit

Sandra Osborne Excerpts

Wednesday 26th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Rachel Reeves]

I shall not give way to the Secretary of State, because he will have a chance to respond in a few minutes and I look forward to hearing what he has to say.

Let us take a moment to reflect on what this means. The Government have been telling local authorities to take housing benefit away from people who were in fact legally entitled to it all along. Most of these people were already in vulnerable positions and will have been pushed even further into severe hardship as a result of this Government’s errors.

Let us look at a few examples. A widower in Staffordshire suffering from mental health problems told of the sacrifices he had to make to find the extra £14 a week he needed to stay in his home. A 56-year-old woman from Rotherham, who receives support for health-related problems, has had to pay more than £700 in extra rent, which we now know was unlawful. In Greater Manchester, a grandmother who looks after her granddaughter, has been diagnosed with depression and anxiety and who paid £200 in additional rent as a result of the bedroom tax fell into arrears and was threatened with eviction from the home she has lived in for 26 years. These people and many like them are now due a rebate, but nothing will compensate for the distress they have been caused or the time and money that the council will have to spend sorting out the mess this Government have caused. And now the Government want to apply the bedroom tax again to these people and thousands of others like them.

[Sandra Osborne (Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock) (Lab)]

How does my hon. Friend think people will feel when they have the relief of finding out that they are exempt from the bedroom tax, only to then be told that the Government are breaking their necks to close the loophole?

[Rachel Reeves]

Today is our only opportunity to stop the Government closing the loophole, and to urge them to cancel the bedroom tax altogether. We have a chance this afternoon to walk through the Lobbies and either to stand up for our constituents or to stand against them, as this Government have done repeatedly.

Many of the people who have wrongly paid the bedroom tax have already been forced to move and have fallen into arrears with their rent. Because many local authorities do not have electronic records back to 1996 to allow them easily to identify cases that meet the relevant criteria, they have been forced to spend time and money on manual trawls through paper files to begin to sort out this huge mess. What a waste of time and money, and what a mess caused by this Government’s incompetence. Councils up and down this country have been put in an impossible position, and people in need have been put through needless anxiety and uncertainty. As I have said, money that could have been spent on building houses has been spent on having to sort out this mess. It beggars belief that like universal credit—another of the Government’s flagship welfare reforms—this policy has become mired in chaos, confusion and spiralling costs.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sandra Osborne (Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock) (Lab)]

I do not know quite how to follow the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (John Hemming), but I will do my best. I will try to be brief because others wish to speak.

Apparently the bedroom tax is officially known as the social sector size criterion. That says it all about this Government’s attitude to tenants in socially rented housing: they do not have the same right to a stable home environment as everyone else. I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman has, or has ever had, a spare room in his home, or stayed in one place for a length of time, regarded it as home, and then felt that he was being forced to move. It is not a pleasant feeling.

[John Hemming]

I have had spare rooms, and I have taken in refugees from Croatia and a refugee from Jersey.

[Sandra Osborne]

I am sure that is very kind. However, I am a mother and a grandmother. I love my family dearly, but I do not want them to live with me all the time.

As if by magic, the plan was that thousands of tenants throughout the land would move to mythical smaller properties—they do not exist—freeing up larger properties for overcrowded families, or find an average of £720 a year, which they do not possess. Not a cunning plan, but a cruel, uncaring and illusory plan that has seen more than 4,500 of my constituents suffer. Within months of the bedroom tax being introduced, 62% of my constituents in East Ayrshire council were in arrears, and the figures continue to rise.

[Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)]

I wonder whether social landlords in my hon. Friend’s constituency are trying to help people in the same way as One Vision Housing does in Sefton. It states that

“we are helping tenants to downsize in order to avoid the bedroom tax, however with limited availability of one-bedroom properties it is becoming simply unavoidable.”

As of November, 4,963 people wanted a one-bedroom property, but just 10 were available. Does my hon. Friend have a similar situation in her constituency, which shows just how unworkable the policy is?

[Sandra Osborne]

I do indeed, and the policy is putting more pressure on the housing service, not taking it away. I also fear for those who have struggled to pay the bedroom tax, because I know fine well they cannot afford it. I worry about where they are getting the money from, and whether it is pushing them in other directions such as food banks or very high-interest loans. It is not possible for me to over emphasise the fear, concern and anger that the bedroom tax has caused, together with the Atos debacle and the fact that people are being suspended from benefits at the drop of a hat.

[Katy Clark (North Ayrshire and Arran) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend’s constituency is similar to mine. Is it her experience that the people who come to see her about the bedroom tax are disproportionately the disabled and carers, and does she agree that it is particularly distressing for those groups?

[Sandra Osborne]

That is one thing that causes a great deal of anger among those affected, and also among the general public in my constituency, who happen to be very caring people. When she sums up the debate, will the Minister confirm whether the Government intend to retain the Scottish welfare fund?

We are here to talk about the sheer ineffectiveness and shambolic implementation of the bedroom tax. What kind of policy requires mitigation for more than half the people affected? Some 70% of applications have been approved for discretionary payment, with more applications all the time in one of my areas. The revised budget will be fully spent by the end of the year—there is no big surplus, as was inferred earlier.

[Mel Stride (Central Devon) (Con)]

What I am not clear about is this: what does the hon. Lady say to the 1.5 million people on the housing waiting list or to the 250,000 people living in overcrowded accommodation—perhaps having to sleep on the floor or on sofas—when her party is advocating a policy that uses taxpayers’ money to provide a surplus room for others?

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. Long interventions will not help us to get through this debate. There are too many interventions. People should not just come in and intervene; they should enter the debate.

[Sandra Osborne]

It is of course acceptable that where people wish to downsize they should be helped and incentivised to do so, but they should not be forced to do so. In any case, it is clear that the housing is not available, and that this policy is not working and is not practical.

It is of course very welcome that we in Scotland have benefited from the decision of the Scottish Government fully to mitigate the bedroom tax, in recognition that it is fundamentally unfair and that people, who are already finding it difficult to make ends meet, are struggling because of it. It will be important for Scottish Members to monitor the detail of how assistance will be given as the proposals in the Scottish Government’s budget are implemented. It is just a pity that it took so long to achieve, because many people have struggled and still are struggling. Some have already moved into private accommodation at exorbitant cost and have lost their long-term home. It is a good example of what devolution can achieve and I commend it to our friends in England.

Now that we have discovered this loophole, it has emerged that a number of people—those who had been in the same local authority house since January 1996 and been continuously entitled to housing benefit—should not have had their benefit reduced as a result of the bedroom tax. How could this have been allowed to happen with such a sensitive and controversial measure? I am currently in contact with the local authorities that cover my constituency to ensure that the people who qualify for this exemption from the bedroom tax are fully reimbursed. Sixty-eight cases have been identified so far in one council area, so that figure can be at least doubled when taking into account the whole of my constituency. The exemption will be backdated to 1 April 2013, but the Government will be taking steps to remedy the loophole “shortly”. The measure will be reinstated as soon as that happens—talk about raising hopes and then dashing them.

The whole policy is an absolute mess and a disgrace. It will do nothing to solve the housing problem and it should be abolished immediately.