Housing Benefit (Abolition of Social Sector Size Criteria)

Sheila Gilmore Excerpts

Wednesday 17th December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Harper]

No, I will not. I have barely started my speech, and I want to make sure that I finish in the 20 minutes or so that the occupant of the Chair indicated. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) says from a sedentary position that the shadow Secretary of State gave way. She gave way generously to Members on her own side of the House but not very generously to Members on our side. I am happy to give way when I have uttered more than one sentence.

Today of all days, Labour would rather talk about anything than the positive jobs figures that we are seeing. More people are in work than ever before—up by 590,000 on the year and up by 1.7 million since 2010. More women are in work than ever before— up by 300,000. More disabled people are in work—up by over a quarter of a million.

[Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)]

rose—

[Mr Harper]

Labour Members do not like to hear this, do they? Let me just finish this good news on today’s jobs figures and then I will be happy to give way to the hon. Lady. More people are in private sector jobs than ever before—up by nearly 2.2 million since 2010. At the same time, unemployment has fallen, youth unemployment has fallen, long-term unemployment has fallen, and the number of people on the main out-of-work benefits is at its lowest for 24 years.

[Sheila Gilmore]

Any suggestion that any Labour Member does not welcome the fall in unemployment is simply not the case. In relation to this debate, is the Minister not aware that people in work can be, and are, subject to the bedroom tax?

[Mr Harper]

I am very familiar with the way that the policy works, and that is why it is perfectly relevant for me to point out how many people are in work. I did not say that Opposition Members did not welcome the fall in unemployment; I simply pointed out that they do not like talking about it. It is not the only thing they do not like talking about.

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[Dr Eilidh Whiteford (Banff and Buchan) (SNP)]

Once again, we are debating the bedroom tax—the policy that I believe will come to define this Tory-Liberal Government and their four-year-long assault on people with low incomes who live with disabilities and health problems. The bedroom tax has caused real hardship for some of the most disadvantaged people. More than 70,000 households in Scotland are currently liable for the tax, 80% of which are home to a disabled adult. Those are the people who already have the least choice about where they live. They are already living in the cheapest housing available—housing that has been allocated on the basis of need, not of household size.

The bedroom tax is making those disabled and disadvantaged people the scapegoat for the systemic problems in the housing sector, as well as reducing their incomes. It is a policy that should never have happened, and I hope that people will remember, when the election comes round, that the Tories, backed up by their little helpers on the Lib-Dem Benches, were prepared to put disabled people on the front line of austerity cuts.

My colleagues and I will be pleased to support the Opposition motion today, but I have to ask those on the Labour Front Bench what took them so long. It was only in September 2013 that Labour announced that it would repeal this pernicious piece of legislation, and reports in The Guardian on 25 October suggest that the Scottish Labour leader was actively prevented from criticising the bedroom tax for a year prior to that while Labour made up its mind.

[Sheila Gilmore]

I understand why the hon. Lady wants to make those remarks, but I find it extraordinary that she should suggest that we did not speak out against the bedroom tax. We voted for various amendments in Committee and we voted against the Bill’s Third Reading, so it is not true to say that we did not vote against the bedroom tax.

[Dr Whiteford]

I did not say that Labour Members did not vote against the bedroom tax; I was talking about what was alleged in the report in The Guardian on 25 October. If that is true, it is a shocking indictment—[Interruption.] That is what I said.

I am pleased that the Scottish Government have taken action that has fully mitigated the effect of the bedroom tax for those affected this year and in the next financial year. I understand that, as of next week, the section 63 orders will be in force to allow local authorities to make discretionary payments—as they have been doing for some months on the basis of assurances—to ensure that no one in Scotland will lose out. I am relieved that tenants will no longer be experiencing hardship or accruing rent arrears due to the bedroom tax, but we should make no mistake that while it remains on the statute book, legal liability will remain with the tenants. Moreover, the £35 million that the Scottish Government have allocated to mitigate the bedroom tax this year has had to be found from other devolved budgets at a time when public spending is under pressure. So this is far from being an elegant or sustainable solution, and it is interesting to note that the Welsh Assembly has refused to go down a similar route.

The issues underlying the problems with the bedroom tax are the chronic shortage of social housing and the serious mismatch between our existing housing stock and the needs of present-day tenants. In Scotland, research by the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities has found that the implementation costs of the bedroom tax exceed the projected savings by around £10 million—money that could have been reinvested in social housing.

I recognise that the Government want to cut the housing benefit bill, but squeezing disabled tenants is a vicious way to do that. When we look closely at the increases in housing benefit over the past 10 years, we see that almost a third of the UK increase is attributable to London alone. By contrast, in Scotland the total cost of housing benefit has increased by 22% in inflation-adjusted terms over 10 years, but the increase has been much lower in the social rented sector, at only 6% over 10 years. Housing benefit inflation is being driven by out-of-control rent increases in the private sector, a problem that is most extreme in the London area.

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[Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)]

The first thing I want to address is the claim that all the Government are trying to do is make the situation in the social rented sector the same as that in the private rented sector. I have revisited the debates we had when the Bill was in Committee and found not a single mention of that argument, so it is not the case that I have forgotten. Strangely enough, it was not the prime motivation for the legislation. Rather, it is one of the arguments that were made after the Government realised that the other arguments were not holding up.

Of course those arguments are not the same. There is a big difference between someone taking up a new private rented sector tenancy and knowing what size property they are looking for, as in fact has been the case since 1989—it was not introduced by the Labour Government—and someone being told that the house they have lived in for 10, 15 or 20 years is now deemed to be too big for them and that they will have to start paying extra for it right away. If this argument was about people refusing to make a reasonable move, that might be a different matter. That would be more comparable to the private rented sector.

The hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George) included an amendment in his Bill which was initially proposed by the Opposition. Our earlier amendment went to the House of Lords and there was ping-pong on it. Unfortunately, the hon. Gentleman, who supported it at the time, could not get his colleagues to join him, or this would have been put right at the outset.

If we want to be fair to the private rented sector, perhaps we should look at other ways in which we could make the two sectors the same. However, the Government are not quite so enthusiastic about improving quality or security of tenure in the private rented sector, or looking at longer tenancy periods or limiting rent rises in the private rented sector. The Labour Government did that with things such as the decent homes standard, while in Scotland there was the Scottish housing quality standard. We want to equalise the sectors. There are many ways in which we could do that, but the bedroom tax is not the right one.

We are told that housing benefit is not rising and there has been some sort of saving. I know the Prime Minister no longer seems to be quite so keen on the Office for Budget Responsibility, but it has said that its forecasts for housing benefit spend have had to be revised on each occasion it has reported on this because of the rise in the number of people in the private rented sector, weak wage growth, and rent inflation that has been higher than expected.