Housing Benefit
Debate between Tony Lloyd and Andrew Bingham(14 years ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Tony Lloyd
The hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I have a limited amount of time and will lose some if I give way.
The speed of the changes raises real issues. Even if I believed that rents would adjust as the Secretary of State believes, they would not do so at the lightning speed required by his policies. People will not suddenly find their landlords voluntarily reducing their rents by £12, £13 or £14 a week. That will not happen for a number of reasons.
Tony Lloyd
No, I am sorry.
The first of those reasons is that there is no evidence that rents adjust at that speed. The second and more important reason is that in a city such as Manchester—a complicated city which is quite different from the London housing market, with different types of housing tenure and different types of housing cheek by jowl—the housing benefit system is not the primary driver of rental levels. Those are driven by other factors. If that thesis is right, the Secretary of State’s proposals are doomed not to succeed. If they do not succeed, rent levels will not adjust downwards and people will inevitably lose money. Even if rent levels were to adjust, they would not do that overnight. That is why, partly as a plea and partly as a demand on behalf of my constituents, I hope that the Secretary of State will think again about the speed with which the changes are implemented.
The Secretary of State’s argument about jobseeker’s allowance was rather confusing. He seemed to imply that no one would really lose 10% of JSA because nobody would find themselves in that position. Even in the relatively high employment times under the Labour Government, my constituency still had serious pockets of unemployment because it is one of those constituencies that are the repository of the longer-term unemployed. In those circumstances, it is fanciful to suggest that no one on JSA will be unemployed for more than 12 months and fanciful to say that nobody will be hit by that 10% penalty.
Ten per cent. of JSA is a huge amount of money for somebody in that situation to lose. I hope that the Secretary of State will look again at this issue, because, as my right hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State has said on many occasions, those whom we regard as blameless—those who have conformed to everything that the Government and society have asked of them, sought work and gone out of their way to upskill and everything else—simply should not be penalised in the way that the Government propose. I hope that the Secretary of State, almost mirroring what he said—if he believes it—will say that if all the other changes that he proposes to benefits are to be effective, he will withdraw the 10% cut. To follow his direction of travel, it is an unnecessary 10% cut, and it simply should not exist.
People in my constituency who are in work, looking for work or disabled are going to lose out under the proposals. When Manchester city council considered the measures, it discovered that the people most likely to be hurt were single parents and those seeking work. They are simply not the people whom we should penalise. If Government Members’ ambition is to penalise, they should support their Government and these proposals. If their real intention is to reform the system, they should say to their Secretary of State, “Please think again.”