Housing Benefit

(asked on 16th January 2017) - View Source

Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the answer by Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth on 21 December 2016 (HL Deb, col 1656), what is their assessment of the impact of housing benefit cuts on homelessness; and what steps they are taking to ensure that low income people, in and out of work, have sufficient income to pay their rent.


This question was answered on 30th January 2017

There are many reasons for homelessness but there is no robust evidence which establishes any direct connection with welfare reform. Our welfare reforms are a central part of the Government's long-term economic plan to create jobs and make work pay.

Alongside welfare reform, we are ensuring working families earn more in the first place - through the National Living Wage - and keep more of what they earn - by cutting their taxes at the same time. The Government is committed to protecting the vulnerable, and following the £560 million in Discretionary Housing Payment funding provided in the last Parliament, we are providing a further £870 million funding in this Parliament.

We've also invested £500 million to tackle homelessness - including our £50 million Homelessness Prevention Programme - and we are supporting Bob Blackman's Homelessness Reduction Bill, to improve the support available for those facing a homelessness crisis and to ensure that people get help earlier to prevent a homelessness crisis in the first place.

Our efforts to tackle homelessness are supported by our investment in housing supply. We have already seen nearly 900,000 new homes delivered in England since 2010. We aim to deliver an additional one million new homes by 2020, and we will set out our proposals in our Housing White Paper.

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