Housing Benefit

Thérèse Coffey Excerpts

Tuesday 12th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate, opposing the main motion but supporting the amendment in the name of my right hon. Friends. It is also a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg), the Chairman of the Work and Pensions Committee. We might disagree on elements of the policy, but I appreciate that she holds her opinions very strongly.

Government Members are keen to create a fair housing market. It is astonishing to hear Opposition Members talk of the criteria, given that they voted for them with the introduction of the local housing allowance. The hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Robert Flello) talked about divorced families, but that situation happened before and still happens now. Why should those in the private sector or people who own their own homes be treated differently? I recognise the point about the retrospective nature of the policy, but the Government are trying to fix problems left unfixed by the last Government, and although some of these necessary changes might seem difficult, overall fairness is what truly matters.

[Wayne David (Caerphilly) (Lab)]

What would the hon. Lady say to Mr and Mrs Goodwin of Caerphilly borough, both of whom are registered blind, yet have to pay the bedroom tax? Where is the fairness there?

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[Dr Coffey]

I do not know the details of the hon. Gentleman’s case, but I am sure that he is taking it up with his local council. Rather than responding to individual cases, however, I would prefer to stick to the principle of why we believe this to be fair and right. I will come to my reasons in a moment.

On social housing, as the Minister said, it would be wrong to expect thousands of homes to sit empty waiting for people to move in. I took up such a case in my own constituency recently. The local council said that it was not getting as much new homes bonus as it had expected, and I wondered whether that was because Suffolk, thought to be prosperous, was missing out. We looked into it and discovered that 120 of the homes sitting empty belonged to the local housing association. I found that extraordinary. So we brought the association in to find out what was being done to maximise the use of those houses—whether they were one, two or three-bedroom homes. Not only will Flagship have to pay more money council tax, if those homes are not used, because we have allowed councils to charge 100% for empty homes after a certain time, but maximising their use would help the council to keep more of its new homes bonus.

Of course, the market can operate in social housing, as has been eloquently explained, via house swapping. I understand that 392 house swaps have been arranged in north Kensington, compared to only nine in Doncaster. It is incumbent on Members to work with their councils to understand what they are doing to facilitate house swapping. From what I learned this morning, my own area is not doing enough, and I will pursue that matter in the future.

[Sheila Gilmore]

The problem is that the hon. Lady and her Front-Bench team do not seem to know what the policy is for. We hear that it might be about making savings, but if everyone slots into the right-sized house—according to the Government’s criteria, which I do not necessarily accept—there will be no saving. Is it about making savings or making better use of properties? If it is about making better use of properties, there are lots of better ways to do it.

[Dr Coffey]

The beauty of Government Members is that we think we can achieve both. We believe we can save the taxpayer money and put it towards the affordable homes programme. Our estimate—I appreciate that it is only an estimate and that we will have to wait and see—is that it will save £500 million a year. Meanwhile, we have set aside £4.5 billion for the affordable homes programme to build houses in this Parliament and are already arranging the programme for the next Parliament.

[Hywel Williams]

rose—

[Mr MacNeil]

rose—

[Dr Coffey]

I will not give way. I have given way already and lots of people want to speak.

With this policy, we are trying to achieve multiple aims, by making better use of the housing stock and working to get more housing built. It is worth noting that Labour voted against the Growth and Infrastructure Act 2013, which is one of the things that we introduced to unblock housing developments.

The hon. Member for Aberdeen South and the Minister mentioned adaptations for disabled people. More than a quarter of my constituents are over 65, so hon. Members will not be surprised to learn that my constituency has a fair number of adapted houses and flats. It is appropriate that local councils should make an assessment and decide whether it is better for someone to stay in their home, rather than having to redo the adaptation somewhere else. I understand the point that the Minister made about this. If a wet room needed to be recreated, for example, there might well be merit in deciding that instead of someone having a three-bedroom house with a wet room, they should move to a one or two-bedroom apartment, as appropriate. We are saying to councils and housing associations that, instead of Whitehall setting those criteria, they should look after their housing stock together and ensure that people’s needs are met.

Listening to the stories that have come out today—I appreciate that they are personal stories about what people are experiencing—anyone would think that we in government had done nothing about this. However, we have allowed councils to retain the underspend in discretionary housing payments from previous years, and we have put in extra money for those payments. It is not as though we are sitting on our hands and doing nothing.

The last sentence of the Labour motion talks about using

“the funding set aside for discretionary housing payments to deal with under-occupation by funding local authorities so that they are better able to help people with the cost of moving to suitable accommodation.”

In an answer to a parliamentary question, the Minister has told me that a £20 million fund was set aside for new ideas for councils working together. At that time, only five councils had applied for that funding, and I would encourage our colleagues to speak to their councillors about that.

The hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) talked about pensioners. There might be some people who can work an extra three hours to capture that extra £14 a week. [Hon. Members: “What?”] The Government are fixing the problems of the past. This debate reinforces the fact that we in government want to fix the problems, and that Labour remains the party of welfare.

[Mr David Crausby (Bolton North East) (Lab)]

I intend to use the term “bedroom tax” today and not “under-occupancy penalty” or “single room subsidy”. If that offends anyone, I can assure them they will not be anywhere near as offended as thousands of my constituents have been by this repulsive Government attack on disadvantaged and disabled people. The conflict surrounding the description of this despicable act reminds me of Margaret Thatcher’s attempt to force the term “community charge” down the throats of the British people. Not surprisingly, she failed, and history damned it as the poll tax. The same fate awaits the single room subsidy.

The policy itself will also fail because, like the poll tax, it is based on mean-mindedness and political dogma. It will be also rejected by Conservative and Liberal leaderships yet to come, and once it has gone—as it will do after the next election—it will be disowned. Even as Margaret Thatcher was being driven away from Downing street in tears, John Major was planning to ditch the poll tax. He had remembered what Mrs Thatcher had clearly forgotten: that, regardless of how big someone gets for their boots, if they want to win elections and stay in power they should keep in touch with public opinion. They should also bear in mind that our electorate are, I am proud to say, for the most part decent and fair-minded people who know a pig in a poke when they see one. John Major understood that, which is why he went on to win the next election in 1992.

Prime Ministers have their albatrosses, however: John Major’s was the exchange rate mechanism; Margaret Thatcher’s was the poll tax; Tony Blair’s was Iraq; and Jim Callaghan’s was the winter of discontent. The bedroom tax will belong to the present incumbent. As with the ancient mariner, it will hang round his neck in shame.

[Dr Coffey]

The hon. Gentleman might wish to check the recent opinion polls. We would appreciate it if he were more consistent about changing the rules for people on local housing allowance. If they were so bad for private sector rented flats, why is the situation so different for the public sector?

[Mr Crausby]

I do not think that my political principles have changed, to be perfectly honest. I would have put forward these same arguments prior to the election as well.

On a more serious point, nearly 2,500 people back home in Bolton have been affected, and more than 75% of them have fallen into arrears since April—so much for this being a money-saving measure.

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[Ms Buck]

My hon. Friend is right. We are already seeing some of the impacts of this and other housing and welfare policies impacting detrimentally on seaside towns, in the same way as happened in the 1980s and 1990s. But the fact is that this policy simply cannot achieve the objective of tackling overcrowding because the larger properties are in the wrong place, and the numbers demonstrate that. It will work only if people do something that they do not want to do, which is to leave their homes, communities, networks, grandchildren, and families—to leave the people for whom they provide care.

That is also why those Government Members who have repeatedly made the argument that the Labour Government introduced a local housing allowance that applied a restriction on bedrooms in the private sector are so fundamentally wrong. A third of all private tenants across the country have lived in their homes for less than a year. Whether we like it or not, and whatever changes we might want to make to it, the private rented sector is highly mobile. Some 40% of all social tenants have lived in their homes for 10 years or more.

People went into a social property believing that it was a home for life. They believed that they would be able to bring up children, look after elderly relatives, care for people, live in their communities and contribute to them because they had a home there. That has now been removed, and it has been removed—this is the absolute cruelty of the bedroom tax—retrospectively. The situation simply cannot be compared with the private rented sector, because people in that sector move around much more and they are not impacted retrospectively.

[Dr Coffey]

I agree with the hon. Lady that this is retrospective, unlike her point about local housing allowance, but the principle is the same, although it might not have been applied retrospectively when it was introduced by the previous Government. On her point about private mobility, it is we on the Government Benches who are trying to help people buy their homes.

[Ms Buck]

There is no attempt to do anything of the kind, otherwise people would be looking at longer-term tenancies and introducing that. The fact is that there is no principle in this. The principle of a tax being retrospective, as it is in this case, is the only principle that matters.

Even within the Conservative-led London borough of Westminster, which has a serious overcrowding problem, people are still unable to move. They are unable to move within the borough, let alone to Liverpool or Wales. Of the 405 families affected—it is a small number, because London is not the most affected by the bedroom tax—only 40 have been able to move. Half of them are in arrears and half of them are disabled.

I will conclude my remarks by referring to one of the many difficult cases that have been brought to my attention. A gentleman e-mailed me at the weekend. He wrote:

“I’m a 50-year-old single man living in a two-bedroom flat and have been hit by the so-called Bedroom Tax. I’m on employment support allowance and have been suffering from Chronic Depression and Anxiety for several years now and I’m now finding these latest attacks on the weakest and most vulnerable in society very difficult to deal with. I have little money and now find my rent arrears total nearly £800 as a result of the Bedroom Tax. I’m continuing to pay the previous level of rent, but the council have now sent me a letter saying that the next step will be to serve me with a Notice of Seeking Possession if I don’t pay the arrears in full. I simply can’t do this.

I’m loth to downsize for several reasons. My main reason is that I’ve lived at my present address for over 29 years and there is a lot of sentimentality connected with my home… because I lived here with my brother, who sadly passed away… This is my last link to him and I really couldn’t envisage living anywhere else. I’m feeling increasingly fatalistic and helpless and my thoughts are turning more and more to ending my life, which is something I’ve successfully avoided since my brother’s death. This latest setback just seems so insurmountable and there really doesn’t seem to be any sympathy or understanding… I no longer have anywhere to turn.”

He asked me to vote against the bedroom tax this afternoon, and I will be very proud to honour an obligation to him by doing so.