Housing benefit, coalfields and coalition cuts

By Lisa Nandy MP / @lisanandy

This week everyone has, quite rightly, been talking about the Coalition’s slash and burn approach to housing benefit and the consequences it will have for whole swathes of London and the South East. The outrage over Boris Johnson’s ‘Kosovo’ remarks has overshadowed the fact that this is genuinely, yet another attempt by the Conservatives at social engineering. I saw this happen firsthand when I was a councillor in Tory-run Hammersmith and Fulham and uncovered plans to knock down Council estates in key Labour wards. Our energetic opposition leader Stephen Cowan predicted a Tory Government would follow suit, and his prediction has sure-enough come to pass.

Neither David Cameron, nor the majority of his extraordinarily wealthy cabinet are in any position to tell hard-pressed families they are not trying hard enough. I have constituents who have been out of work for many months and have been forced into a position where they have to choose between food and heating. I do not imagine Mr Cameron or any of his family or friends have ever been in a position even remotely close to this. As John Major used to say about his own Cabinet, ‘he doesn’t know what it’s like to run out of money on a Thursday’. The same is, of course, true of some Labour MPs: the difference, it seems, is that we are not prepared to abandon people who do.

The Conservatives would have us believe that they are simply being realistic about the nature of the deficit. This makes it even more striking that they are not prepared to accept the reality of the economy. There are currently five unemployed people chasing each job available, which begs the question: if people are adhering to the conditions tied to their Jobseekers’ Allowance, how is cutting their housing benefit going to give them any greater ability or incentive to find work? On the contrary, the stress and threat of homelessness will make it all the more difficult and local authorities will face greater demands at a time when their budgets have been slashed by an astonishing 30%.

But as an MP in the North West I could not be more concerned about the housing benefit changes, or about the fact that the debate thus far has ignored the impact outside of London and the South.

On Tuesday, I secured a debate on the regeneration of the coalfield communities. It was packed with Labour MPs from across the North, Scotland, the Midlands and Wales, united in their concern for our communities that suffered unprecedented economic, social and physical destruction last time the Tories were in government and whose people do not know if they can survive it again.

The former mining regions, which make up a sizeable proportion of the UK, are at grave risk of being left to sink without trace. The proposed housing benefit changes for people under 35 is a prime example, as young adults will now only be eligible for the Shared Room Rate and not full housing benefit well into adulthood. In my Wigan constituency and across large sections of the North, young people don’t share houses in the way they do in London or big university cities – shared housing simply isn’t available in large numbers. These changes along with cuts to disability, council tax and child benefits will have an enormous impact on my constituents, who will be dealing with unprecedented unemployment, aging parents, a reduced safety net and now, possibly, homelessness.

The Labour Party has argued that this is a gamble with growth and with jobs but it is also a gamble with peoples’ lives. The coalition argues that it is a gamble worth taking in order to bring down the deficit but in the words of Aneurin Bevan:

“Not even the apparently enlightened principle of the ‘greatest good for the greatest number’ can excuse indifference to individual suffering”

This is a careless, thoughtless gamble with the lives of people who have little, by people who have a great deal. It is inexcusable and it is a gamble that will fail.