Universal Credit Roll-out

Siobhain McDonagh Excerpts

Wednesday 18th October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Harper]

Let me address part of that point now and I will also come on to it later in my remarks. We should not compare universal credit with some mystical world of perfection; we should compare it with the existing system. Under the existing system, housing benefit is not perfect. There are lots of issues with housing benefit and tax credits in the existing benefit system. I understand that the citizens advice bureau has about 600,000 ongoing cases under the existing benefit system, so we are not talking about comparing universal credit with perfection. The existing system is not very good, does not work very well, and does not support people very well. Universal credit is an improvement.

On housing and the direct payment of landlords, which I know is controversial, my own view is that it is better to assume that people can manage their rent themselves. In cases where they cannot, and it is shown that they cannot, my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green made it clear—as the Secretary of State did, with the roll-out of the housing portal—that we can deal with that. I do not think it is reasonable to assume that everybody on universal credit is incapable of managing their own money. That is what is assumed with the insistence on paying landlords directly. The other advantage of paying the person directly is that landlords cannot then discriminate against people who get housing benefit. If universal credit is paid directly to you and you make the payment, the landlord does not know that you are a benefit recipient and therefore cannot discriminate against you by having signs in the window saying, “I won’t take people on DSS,” which I know some landlords do.

[Siobhain McDonagh (Mitcham and Morden) (Lab)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

--- Later in debate ---

[Siobhain McDonagh (Mitcham and Morden) (Lab)]

My mum was 94 yesterday. When she came to London in 1947 as a young woman, the cards in the windows said, “No blacks, no Irish, no dogs.” There are no cards in the windows in London any longer, but there is an understanding among landlords that they do not take people on universal credit, and they are beginning to evict their tenants who are on housing benefit.

I do not say that one system is perfect and the other is imperfect. I congratulate the Government on the changes they have made today. Those have, in part, come about because of the force of the Opposition, as is our job. The House is doing its job today: however rancorous or angry it becomes, it is doing its job and making improvements.

More needs to be done, however, and that is why we need a delay. We must not be in a position where nearly a third of families with children in London live in private rented accommodation and will be on a benefit, even if they are in work, for the rest of their lives to meet their private rent, and where the application will take six to eight weeks to be determined. In that time, they will receive a section 21 notice from their landlord, who will start the eviction process, deciding that these families, who are perfectly good tenants in every other way, are simply not worth the trouble. Given that on top of that there are plenty of families in London who can pay the enormous rents, there will always be an alternative.

I assure the House that I am not trying to frighten people or talk about things that do not happen. I recently went to a private landlords forum in my borough and none of them said they were prepared to let to people on universal credit, because they simply did not want to wait for their rent.

We have talked about other people helping people to get advance payments. At present, local authorities have an officer responsible for preventing homelessness. If I see somebody at my surgery who is behind with their housing benefit, I get on the phone and say, “Steve, will you go down to housing benefit and get the staff there to sort it, or else the landlord will have them out,” and he does that. We do not have something identical to that in this system at present, and on behalf of London and all private tenants on benefit I say: please stop it, look at it and do something about it.